What connects to Xero

Xero keeps contacts, invoices, payments and the bank feed for many small and mid-sized companies. Sales and collections happen in other tools, and the bank feed is where every collected payment eventually has to reconcile.

The connections split into two kinds. A CRM passes won deals into Xero as invoices and receives payment status back, as in Xero and HubSpot. Payment providers deliver the money side: card payments, refunds and disputes from Stripe, or Direct Debit collections, late failures and payouts from GoCardless. For those, the job is applying each payment to the right invoice, booking fees as expense, and running every net payout through a clearing account so the bank feed matches what was actually collected.

Where Xero integrations break

The API budget is small. Xero allows roughly 60 calls per minute and 5,000 per day per organisation, with a low concurrency ceiling, and OAuth tokens expire on a schedule. Delta reads via If-Modified-Since and batched writes keep a sync inside it.
Contact names must be unique. Xero rejects a second contact with the same name in one organisation. CRM companies and payment customers that share a name need a matching rule before anything posts.
Tax types are not tax rates. Xero uses organisation- and region-specific TaxType codes chosen by the customer’s country and VAT registration, and every invoice is Exclusive, Inclusive or NoTax. Get either wrong and invoices are off by the VAT amount.
Payouts are net. Stripe and GoCardless pay out net of fees, days later, across many payments and sometimes several currencies. Booking the payout as income leaves nothing to reconcile against.
Authorised invoices are not edited. An issued Xero invoice needs a credit note to reverse it. Reopened deals, refunds and late Direct Debit failures have to create the right reversal rather than rewrite history.