What Invio's Xero connector can see, and what it can never touch
Handing an AI assistant access to your general ledger is not a small decision.
If you run the books for a group, it is the kind of thing you have to be able to explain to a partner, an auditor or a board - so this page is the plain-English version: exactly what Xero asks you to approve, what happens when your assistant tries to change something, and what Invio keeps.
What Xero's own consent screen asks for
You authorise all of this on Xero's own screen, at login.xero.com, not inside Invio. Before Xero even asks, you choose which of these permissions to grant on Invio's own picker - Xero then only ever asks for exactly what you ticked. Five are on by default; three are off until you turn them on, and payroll write access additionally requires payroll read to be on first.
If you do not grant an off-by-default permission, its tools do not appear at all - your assistant cannot ask for them later without a fresh consent screen.
Reads are live. Writes wait for you.
Your assistant drafts
It reads your live Xero data directly. When it wants to create or change an invoice, a contact, a credit note or a journal, that becomes a draft - not a change to your books.
Invio holds it
The draft sits in your approval queue, showing the exact organisation and the exact payload Invio would send. Left untouched, it expires after 24 hours and nothing happens.
You approve
Approve or reject it - in Invio, or by telling your assistant to go ahead. Nothing reaches Xero until you do, and every approval records who made it.
Approving in Settings is a click from your own signed-in session. Telling your assistant to go ahead relies on it correctly relaying what you actually said - the tool it calls only fires on an explicit yes, and it is built to ask first rather than infer consent. Either way, the same queue in Settings shows you exactly what happened, so you can always check it there too.
Who on your team can approve
Roles exist because the person who asks and the person who may commit it are rarely the same person in a group.
Owner is always the account holder. Approver and Viewer roles are available on Pro and Growth.
On Growth you can also restrict a team member to specific organisations - so someone who works on three entities cannot see the rest of your account - and see a named audit trail of who approved each change, not just that someone did.
What Invio stores
Your Xero refresh token, encrypted, so you are not asked to sign in again every session. The list of organisations you have authorised. Call metadata for your audit trail - which tool ran, when, and against which organisation.
A drafted change - the exact amounts and contact details your assistant proposed - for as long as it is waiting on you: until you approve or reject it, or for up to 24 hours if you do neither.
Once a drafted change is resolved, or that window passes, its financial detail is cleared from our records within 90 days, whether or not it was ever approved. We do not keep a copy of your ledger: reports and balances are read from Xero when a question is asked, answered, and not stored afterwards.
See the Subprocessors page for the governing wording on Xero as a subprocessor, including how long any of this is kept.
How to disconnect
Neither touches your Invio invoicing data, and neither changes anything inside Xero beyond what you asked it to do.
Questions we get asked
Can the assistant read data without asking me?
Can I limit what it reaches?
What if I revoke access while my assistant is mid-conversation?
Who is responsible for what gets posted?
Is my financial data used to train AI models?
Check your next step
New to this category, or comparing it against Xero's own options? Read what an MCP connector actually is, or go straight to setup.
Invio is an independent connector built on Xero's official API. Invio is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or certified by Xero. Xero is a trademark of Xero Limited. Claude, ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot are trademarks of their respective owners, and we are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or certified by any of them. You remain responsible for reviewing and approving any changes made to your Xero organisations.