Xero to Excel: How to Export Reports, Pull Data With the Xero API and Post Back From Excel

Guide · 16 September 2026 · ~13 min read

Getting Xero to Excel is easy for one report and fiddly for almost everything else. Invoice exports stop at 500 transactions, the Xero API has daily call limits and new paid tiers, and since 2026 the full journal stream is a premium endpoint. Here are the main routes, free ones first, with the limits that decide between them.

Last checked: 16 September 2026. We make one of the routes, HISAB 360, so it comes near the end with its limits spelt out.

How do I connect Xero to Excel? The short answer

Excel has no built-in Xero connector, so you export from Xero, use an app or connector, call the Xero API, or use a two-way add-in. The free routes are Xero's own exports and CSV imports, plus the API on Xero's no-fee Starter tier.

How do I export from Xero to Excel?

In the Reporting menu select All reports, open the report, click Export and choose Microsoft Excel, per Xero Central's export and print article.

• Role: you need administrator, standard + reports or viewer.
• Amounts showing 0.00: a report containing a formula can show some zeros until you click Enable Editing in Excel.
• Layout: the file keeps headings, subtotals and blank rows. Fine for filing, awkward as a source for pivots and lookups.

Which Xero reports should you export for a backup or at year end?

Xero's guide to exporting data says you are responsible for your own backups and recommends these reports:

• Balance Sheet and Profit and Loss for each year
• Trial Balance, including past periods
• Account Transactions (if you use multicurrency, with all columns including FX)
• Receivable Invoice Detail and Payable Invoice Detail
• Tax returns for each filed period
• Fixed Asset Reconciliation
• Inventory Item List
• Bank Reconciliation

How do I extract transactional data from Xero?

Export each list from its own screen, and use the Account Transactions report or the general ledger export for everything posted.

• Invoices and bills. Sales > Invoices > Export, or Purchases > Bills > menu beside New Bill > Export bills. Per Xero's export article, the CSV includes credit notes, prepayments and overpayments, with one row per line item. Each export stops at 500 transactions, so batch larger histories by status or date. Repeating templates cannot be exported.
• Chart of accounts, contacts, fixed assets, inventory items: CSV or XLS exports from each area.
• General ledger. Accounting > Accounting settings > Export accounting data, administrator role only. You pick a target product (CaseWare, IRIS and others, each with its own format) and a date range, per Xero's ledger export article.
• Bank transactions and statement lines. Run Account Transactions for the bank account, or export the Bank Reconciliation report. For imported statement lines not yet reconciled, go to Bank accounts, open the menu and choose Uncoded statement lines, then export to PDF or CSV (administrator role), per Xero's uncoded statement lines article. To match lines against a statement, see our bank reconciliation template.

Xero Excel integrations on the Xero App Store

The Xero App Store's Excel integrations collection includes reporting add-ins such as Scott's Add-ins and XPNA, and data feeds such as OdataLink and SyncHub. We have not tested them, so ask each one: does it write back or only read, does it refresh on a schedule, does it run on Mac and the web, and how is it priced per organisation?

Outside that collection, CData sells a Xero add-in for Excel that it describes as two-way and available for Excel on Windows, Mac and the web.

Xero's Microsoft 365 route. On 1 July 2026 Xero announced a Microsoft 365 integration that puts its JAX agent inside Microsoft 365 Copilot at launch. Live Xero data in Excel tables for forecasting is something Xero says the integration builds towards, not a launch feature, and no plan or licence requirements are given. For AI chat routes, see our MCP options comparison, which covers Xero.

Can you connect Xero to Excel with the Xero API and Power Query?

Yes, but you build it yourself. Microsoft's Power Query connector list has no Xero connector, so you call the Xero Accounting API with Web.Contents. New to Power Query? Start with our beginner's guide.

1. Create a developer app. There is no simple Xero API key: you register an app at developer.xero.com and follow the Xero API documentation for OAuth 2.0, using a client secret or PKCE for desktop apps. Test against Xero's demo company, as its getting started guide suggests.
2. Choose scopes. Request accounting.invoices.read (new apps use granular scopes) plus offline_access for a refresh token.
3. Get your first token outside Excel. Power Query cannot run Xero's sign-in, so use Xero's Postman collection, which walks you through getting an access token and your tenant ID from GET https://api.xero.com/connections. Access tokens expire after 30 minutes; refresh tokens last 60 days, and each refresh returns a new one to save.
4. Send three headers on each call: Authorization: Bearer plus the token, xero-tenant-id, and Accept: application/json.

This query pulls every invoice and bill into a table. Paste it into Data > Get Data > From Other Sources > Blank Query > Advanced Editor and replace the two placeholders. If Excel asks how to connect, choose Anonymous: the token travels in the header.

let
    AccessToken = "PASTE-ACCESS-TOKEN",
    TenantId = "PASTE-TENANT-ID",
    GetPage = (pageNumber as number) as list =>
        let
            Response = Json.Document(
                Web.Contents(
                    "https://api.xero.com/api.xro/2.0/",
                    [
                        RelativePath = "Invoices",
                        Query = [page = Number.ToText(pageNumber)],
                        Headers = [
                            Authorization = "Bearer " & AccessToken,
                            #"xero-tenant-id" = TenantId,
                            Accept = "application/json"
                        ]
                    ]
                )
            )
        in
            Response[Invoices],
    Pages = List.Generate(
        () => [PageNumber = 1, Rows = GetPage(1)],
        each List.Count([Rows]) > 0,
        each [PageNumber = [PageNumber] + 1, Rows = GetPage([PageNumber] + 1)],
        each [Rows]
    ),
    AllInvoices = List.Combine(Pages),
    ColumnNames = List.Distinct(List.Combine(List.Transform(AllInvoices, Record.FieldNames))),
    Invoices = Table.FromRecords(AllInvoices, ColumnNames, MissingField.UseNull)
in
    Invoices

It requests page after page until one comes back empty, and collects column names from every invoice because Xero leaves empty fields out. The Invoices endpoint returns 100 per page with line items included (pageSize changes that). Sales invoices and bills share the endpoint and are told apart by the Type column (ACCREC or ACCPAY); expand LineItems and Contact in the editor. For dates, set DateString and DueDateString to type Date: Date and DueDate arrive as /Date(...)/ text.

Treat it as a one-off pull. Power Query cannot store Xero's rotating refresh token, so next month you fetch and paste a fresh token. Never save a live token in a shared workbook.

VBA instead of Power Query. A macro can call the same API, but you write the sign-in, token refresh, JSON parsing and paging yourself, and VBA does not run in Excel for the web; see VBA vs Office Scripts vs Python.

Reports through the API. The Reports endpoints cover Profit and Loss, Balance Sheet, Trial Balance, aged reports by contact and a few summaries, but no General Ledger or Account Transactions report.

Xero API limits and pricing tiers in 2026

Xero limits calls per organisation and per app. Figures from its API limits page and developer pricing page:

Hitting a limit returns HTTP 429 with an X-Rate-Limit-Problem header, plus Retry-After (in seconds) for the minute and daily limits.

Tiers. The tier model took effect on 2 March 2026. New apps start on Starter, with no fee. Monthly fees are listed in Australian dollars, tax exclusive: Core A$35, Plus A$245, Advanced A$1,445, Enterprise on application. Paid tiers need a payment method and include a monthly allowance of data downloaded through the API (10 GB on Core), with extra usage charged per GB; some tiers also need app certification.

For Excel users: pulling one organisation's data fits within Starter, but a practice connecting more than five client organisations to one app needs Core. Filter large pulls by date to stay under 60 calls a minute.

The Xero Journals change: what happened in 2026

The Journals endpoint returns every journal Xero posts, including those created from invoices, bills and payments. It is the API's closest thing to a general ledger feed, and it is now hard to reach. Manual journals have their own scopes and are not affected.

• Premium only. It needs a security assessment (initial and annual), use-case approval and the Advanced tier.
• Granular scopes. Apps created on or after 2 March 2026 use granular scopes; existing broad-scope apps and connections keep working until September 2027, per the granular scopes FAQ.
• 29 April 2026. Xero's Custom Connections page says new custom connections no longer get the accounting.journals.read scope.

How do I import invoices, bills and bank statements into Xero from Excel?

Fill in Xero's CSV template, save it as CSV and import it on the matching screen.

Import invoices into Xero

Download the template from the Import screen and keep its column headings. Each row is one line; repeat the invoice number for multi-line invoices, and numbers already in Xero are skipped. Dates follow your region's template: DD/MM/YYYY in Xero's Australian invoice import article and MM/DD/YYYY in the US one. Account codes and tax rate names must match Xero exactly, and amounts must be all tax-inclusive or all tax-exclusive.

Import bills and credit notes into Xero

Xero's bills import article says to enter credit notes as negative unit amounts and give each bill its own Invoice Number reference: rows sharing a reference are combined into one bill, even across contacts. You can drag and drop the file onto the import screen.

Import manual journals into Xero

Debits are positive and credits negative, and a row with blank date and narration joins the journal above. Tax rates can be left blank on import but are needed to post. With multicurrency, manual journals are base currency only, per Xero's manual journals article.

Import a bank statement into Xero

Go to Bank accounts, open the account's menu and choose Import a Statement (administrator or standard + bank accounts role). Xero's CSV statement article prefers OFX, QFX or QuickBooks files where your bank offers them. In a CSV, put income as positive and spending as negative in one Amount column, and delete balance columns, the account number and empty rows. Transactions matching ones already in Xero are skipped as duplicates.

One Excel trap: open the saved CSV in a text editor before importing, because Excel can rewrite dates in your PC's regional format when it saves.

How HISAB 360 handles Xero and Excel

HISAB 360 is an AI assistant add-in for Windows desktop Excel. For Xero it pulls data into worksheet cells and posts records from a staging sheet in your workbook, writing Xero's result back to each row.

Connecting. You create your own Xero developer app, add HISAB's localhost callback address as its redirect URI, enter the app's client ID (with a client secret, or PKCE without one) and authorise in your browser. Connections are read-only until you switch them to Read + Write. See the ERP connectors docs.

Reading. The AI fetches invoices, bills, credit notes, payments, bank transactions, contacts, items, accounts, manual journals, budgets and more, paging through Xero's 100-row responses. Reports include Profit and Loss, Balance Sheet, Trial Balance, Bank Summary and Executive Summary; aged reports come per contact, as the API provides them. Data lands as values, with no scheduled refresh: you re-run a saved automation, or make a total drillable so a double-click re-queries Xero.

Writing. Staging rows are validated, then submitted; the Xero ID, status and message come back to each row, and re-runs skip rows already posted. Duplicate submits are suppressed, a record type stops accepting writes after three failures in a row (a rate-limit error counts), and each write attempt is logged locally as a hash of the request and response, not the data itself. It creates invoices, bills, credit notes, manual journals, bank transactions, payments, contacts and more, and can update, void, delete, authorise or approve existing records and attach files.

What needs a click on a confirmation card:

• Card required: a posted (live) submit, which payments and bank transactions must use, and every update, void, delete, authorise or approve action.
• No card: drafts; master data such as contacts, items and accounts; expense claims, which post even from a draft submit. Bank transfers, currencies and linked transactions may go through without one too.
• Your approval setting decides: attaching files runs without a prompt when HISAB's approvals are set to Auto.

You can limit each connection to the record types it may write.

The limits, plainly:

• No Journals on new connections. Xero removed journal-stream access from granular grants and HISAB no longer requests accounting.journals.read, so HISAB connections created on or after 29 April 2026 cannot read Xero's Journals and have no general-ledger-detail route. Manual journals are still readable.
• Xero's limits apply to your app: a new app starts on Starter, and HISAB does not automatically back off and retry after a rate-limit error. Split very large pulls.
• No bank statement lines from Xero's bank feeds, and no automatic rollback: reverse with a void, delete or counter-entry.
• Windows desktop Excel only: not Mac, Excel for the web or Google Sheets.

Good for: accountants who prepare invoice, bill or journal batches in Excel and want row-by-row results, or who pull Xero data into reconciliations. Not for: Mac or browser users, hands-off scheduled reporting, or anyone needing Xero's full journal stream. For wider context, see ERP and Excel integration and connecting QuickBooks to Excel and writing data back.

Which Xero to Excel route should you pick?

• A report, backup or migration: Xero's exports.
• Refreshing management reports: an App Store reporting app.
• A one-off analyst pull: the API with Power Query.
• Occasional import batches: Xero's free CSV templates.
• Regular two-way work with results per row: a two-way add-in or connector (HISAB 360 if you work in Windows desktop Excel).

Xero is a trademark of Xero Limited. HISAB 360 is not affiliated with or endorsed by Xero.

Frequently asked questions

Try HISAB 360 on your own workbook

HISAB 360 is an AI assistant inside Windows desktop Excel for accountants and finance teams. It connects two-way to QuickBooks, Xero, Zoho Books, Odoo and FreshBooks. The 15-day trial is the full product, no card required.