Connect Xero to Rig

    Sync your Xero accounting data into Rig, so your AI tools can answer finance questions about invoices, payments and cash alongside the rest of your data. Xero connects through a Xero Custom Connection: a machine-to-machine link that keeps syncing in the background without anyone needing to log in again.

    Before you start

    • A Xero login that can authorise the organisation you want to connect (a Standard or Adviser user on that organisation).
    • Access to Xero's developer portal at developer.xero.com to create the Custom Connection. Custom Connections are a paid Xero add-on, billed per connection, and each one is tied to a single organisation.
    • By the end you'll have two values to paste into Rig: a Client ID and a Client Secret.

    Step 1: Create a Xero Custom Connection

    1. Sign in at developer.xero.com, open My Apps and click New app.
    2. Choose Custom Connection as the integration type and give it a name such as "Rig".
    3. Enter the authorising user: the email of the person in your Xero organisation who will approve the connection.
    4. Select the read scopes Rig needs. For a read-only sync, choose accounting.transactions.read, accounting.contacts.read, accounting.settings.read and accounting.journals.read.
    5. Create the connection. The authorising user receives an email from Xero and approves it for one organisation.
    6. Open the connection's Configuration tab. Copy the Client ID, then generate a Client Secret and copy it straight away. Xero only shows the secret once.

    Your scopes set the ceiling
    Rig can only request scopes you granted when creating the Custom Connection. If Rig later asks for a scope the connection wasn't created with, Xero rejects the token. Pick all the read scopes you might want up front.

    Step 2: Connect it in Rig

    1. In Rig, open Connections in the left sidebar and go to the Sources step.
    2. Search for Xero (it's under Finance) and click its card.
    3. Custom Connection client ID: paste the Client ID.
    4. Custom Connection client secret: paste the Client Secret.
    5. Scopes (optional): leave blank to use Rig's read-only default, or paste a space-separated subset of the scopes you granted.
    6. Xero tenant ID (optional): leave blank. Rig discovers it automatically, since a Custom Connection has exactly one organisation.
    7. Click Continue, then Test to pull a small sample, then Sync to run the full pipeline.

    What Rig pulls in

    Xero lands in its own xero schema in your warehouse, covering your core accounting records from the Accounting API:

    • Invoices, contacts, payments, bank transactions and credit notes
    • Manual journals, purchase orders, overpayments and prepayments
    • Accounts (chart of accounts), items, tax rates and tracking categories
    • Organisation details and the full journals feed

    Good to know

    • A Custom Connection uses machine-to-machine authentication, so the nightly sync never needs anyone to sign in again. There's no token to refresh by hand.
    • Each connection covers one Xero organisation. To sync more than one, create a separate Custom Connection and Rig source per organisation.
    • Treat the Client Secret like a password. If it leaks, generate a new one on the connection's Configuration tab in Xero and update it in Rig.
    • You can disconnect at any time from Connections → Sources in Rig, and remove the connection in Xero under My Apps.

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