There used to be a one-click way to do this. Microsoft shipped a native Xero content pack for Power BI that gave you a pre-built dashboard the moment you authenticated, but it was pulled from the platform back in 2019 as part of a broader shift in how Power BI handled third-party connectors, and it's never been brought back. Anyone searching for it in Power BI's Get Data menu today simply won't find it.
That gap is real, but it's also fully solvable. This guide is organized around the three questions that actually matter once you've accepted the native option is gone: what does the resulting data look like, what does it take to set up, and is it actually worth doing for your situation.
First: What You're Actually Working With
Before deciding whether this is worth building, it helps to know what you'd actually get. Xero's API organizes financial data into a set of distinct tables, and a handful of them cover almost every reporting need.
| Table | What It Contains |
|---|---|
| JournalLines | One row per transaction, with net and gross amounts, account grouping, and a transaction description. This is the table most reports are built from. |
| TrackingCategory | The tracking category attached to each transaction, useful for any business segmenting revenue or costs by department, location, or service line. |
| Journal | Maps transactions into the specific accounts that feed financial statements. |
| Contacts | Running balances showing what's owed to you and what you owe, by contact. |
| BankTransaction | Currency code, exchange rate, and reconciliation status for every banking transaction. |
Picture a multi-location veterinary clinic group running a separate Xero file for each of its six clinics. JournalLines alone would carry the bulk of what's needed for a consolidated P&L across all six, while TrackingCategory, if each clinic tags transactions by service line, surgery, boarding, retail, would let that same report break revenue down by service as well as by location.
Second: Who This Is Actually Worth Building For
- Organizations running more than one Xero account: accounting firms managing client books, multi-location businesses like that veterinary group with one Xero file per clinic, property portfolios with a file per building, or owners running several separate companies. The payoff here is a single consolidated view instead of switching between separate Xero logins.
- Anyone currently building management reports by manually exporting Xero data, a process that's slow and easy to get wrong, when it could instead feed directly and automatically into Power BI.
- Anyone needing to blend Xero financials with data from elsewhere, a common need when assembling investor or board reporting that draws on more than just the accounting platform.
Third: How to Actually Build the Connection
Xero offers an API, an interface that lets a program request data from your Xero organization programmatically and receive structured results back. There are two realistic paths to using it.
Option A: Write the Integration Yourself
This means writing code, often Python, that authenticates against Xero's API and pulls each table you need individually, since each table generally requires its own request. It's a legitimate path if you have the engineering capacity, but it's worth treating as an ongoing commitment rather than a one-time build, since API changes on Xero's end will occasionally require updates to keep things running.
Option B: Use an Already-Built Connector
A pre-built script that extracts Xero data into a database you control, Azure SQL is a common choice, sidesteps writing that integration from scratch. The general setup follows a consistent pattern:
- Coordinate access: whoever sets this up will need permission on both your Xero account and your chosen database, typically granted through a guided approval process.
- Install the extraction script, which pulls your Xero data into the database on a defined schedule.
- Set the refresh schedule so the database stays current automatically going forward.
Once data is landing in the database, Power BI connects to it using its native Azure SQL Server connector, the same way it would connect to any other SQL database, no custom connector required on the Power BI side.
Note: For organizations managing several Xero accounts under one umbrella, accounting practices and multi-location businesses alike, a connector built for this can typically pull every connected account into a single dataset, and pick up newly added accounts automatically going forward without separate reconfiguration.
Where This Leaves Things
The lack of a native connector is a genuine inconvenience, not a dead end. Knowing the shape of the data upfront, JournalLines and TrackingCategory carrying most of the weight for typical reporting, makes it much easier to scope what a connection actually needs to deliver before investing time building or buying one. From there, the choice is mostly about engineering appetite: build and maintain the integration yourself, or use an existing connector and skip straight to the reporting.
