XPM Claude Connector: Build Your Own Dashboards, No More Exports

Trent McLaren: Hello, you wonderful humans. I can see hundreds of you streaming into this session right now. We're going to kick off one of the most requested sessions on the summit. When I say most requested, I mean that when you went and picked the sessions you wanted to attend, this was one of the ones you all wanted, which is how to get Xero and XPM data into Claude and/or your AI tools. And we came across a wonderful gentleman named Kevin. Kevin, lovely to welcome you to our stage today, mate. How are you going?

Kevin Garber: Very good, Trent. It's a beautiful day in Sydney town, and I'm excited to join you all. I was sitting in a lot of the sessions yesterday, chatting away, and yeah, lots to learn.

Trent McLaren: Yeah, now you're on the other side of the fence. You were in the chat, now you're on the screen, and it's probably a surreal, different version of it.

Kevin Garber: Definitely. Being a tech person, not an accounting person, it's a little bit unusual for me, but everything's tech these days, everything's AI, just different flavours.

Trent McLaren: Yes, yeah, I agree. Now, good to see you all in the chat. Jack, I'm going to guess that you are the Round Banana. I haven't seen you all day, but I knew you'd pop up at some point, so I'm assuming that's you. Good to see you here, pal.

Trent McLaren: If this is your first session, welcome! We've been doing this yesterday and today, and it's been a lot of bloody good fun, if I'm honest. I'm not in Crescent Head, sorry pal, but I will be up there soon. If it's your first time joining us, we've had a lot of good speakers with a lot of good content, and today has been no different. The first couple of sessions today have been awesome. We went from setting up your infrastructure, getting it ready for AI, having to change how your service blueprints work. We talked about pricing and onboarding with AI; Ben and Ethan did a killer job. And then we just had Niamh, Kelly and Glenn on the last session talking about AI-assisted bookkeeping. Now here we are, talking about XPM and Xero into Claude, and we're going to break all that down today with Kevin, who I'll introduce formally in a sec.

Trent McLaren: The main event for today. Kev, this is on me, I need to get a much better picture of you. The XPM Claude Connector: Build Your Own Dashboards, No More Exports, with Kevin Garber. Kevin, welcome. We're so happy to have you here, mate.

Kevin Garber: Thanks so much, Trent. Awesome to be here. Great time to be in AI, great time to be in tech, great time to, dare I say it, even be in accounting, even though I'm not an accountant, I'm the tech blow-in. I'm going to share my screen and get going. So, thanks, everyone. I actually do have a team member in the chat, Josephine Pinto. If you want to get me a message, she's in touch with me. I'm not going to monitor the chat, so we can focus. We've got a lot to get through in this 45 minutes, so let's kick it off from there. Let me get my Keynote going. Okay.

Trent McLaren: All good, mate, we can see it all nice and clearly.

Kevin Garber: Awesome. Okay, so I created LogicGlue a couple of years back. We've built some connectors that are Xero approved. We've been working on this for a couple of years, and we've got a superstellar team there. And we focused on providing this to XPM, even though, as you'll see, it actually works with Xero, and I'll explain how we work with Xero. That's quite different to Xero's own native connectors. But let's get into it.

Kevin Garber: As mentioned, I'm not an accountant, but on the weekend I was with my mate Steve. Steve is an accountant, he was having a barbecue for his birthday, and I said to him, 'Steve, I'm working with a lot of accountants, they seem exhausted, stressed, it's kind of a stressful time.' And Steve's response to me, he said, 'Kev, who said accounting is stressful? Do I look stressed?' So I just shrugged, and then we partied on, and we enjoyed Steve's 31st birthday party.

Kevin Garber: So, just a little bit of fun, acknowledging that accounting... I've learned a lot the last few months, and it is a very interesting time, and hopefully our solution helps bring everything to life, or helps take a little bit of the monkey off your back. So let's get into it.

Kevin Garber: What's LogicGlue? LogicGlue is a set of MCP connectors that interface with your Xero account and with your XPM account, and then in Claude, ChatGPT, Copilot, Grok, Gemini, you can do all the magic. Now, importantly, our connectors have both read and write access. They read by default, and you can toggle on write access. I will get into some of that. And importantly, we honour all the Xero credential permissions. If someone accesses XPM and they've only got certain permissions, those permissions flow through to Claude via our connector. And I'll talk a little bit more about security as well.

Kevin Garber: Just welcoming some of our existing clients who I know are in the session. Mandy Watts from M&M Group Accounting has been using it for quite some time, so you can read that. Thanks, Mandy, for joining us. Jack, who I know is also in the session... unfortunately the audio is not working, but Jack's saying that he really wanted to bring XPM data into AI, and he's been able to do that with LogicGlue.

Kevin Garber: So let's, for a second, talk about MCPs. I know we've been speaking about it in all these sessions, and you can't go anywhere these days without hearing about MCPs. If you're not technical, don't worry about it. MCP is just a way to connect AI applications to external services. That's all you really need to know. But the other thing that you do need to know is that not all MCP connectors are created equal. This is one thing that I think is a misunderstanding. People think, oh, there's a connector for X product, there's another connector for X product, they're the same. They're not, right? You can see here that there's a connector and a connector, and what that connector connects into is very different to that one over here.

Kevin Garber: So that's important to realise, that MCP connectors are not equal. They can be the same, but they can also be quite different. For instance, our Xero MCP connector is different to the native Xero MCP connectors. And of course that differs according to the tools, what they can do, the data they can access, different controls, those aspects. Again, not all MCP connectors are created equal. Let's have a quick overview of the Xero MCP connector versus the LogicGlue MCP connector. Now, again, this is a moving feast. Xero are changing things, we change things, etc. So always test, always double check. You can email me at any time. I'll highlight the differences, mostly. Obviously XPM: we give access into XPM. We've also got write access, when you toggle it on.

Kevin Garber: You can create invoices, which I'll go through. You can create journal entries, which I'll go through, and contacts. You can also do an interesting multi-entity analysis with your XPM, so your own Xero file against your practice, which is super useful. And again, because I'm not an accountant, if I say something that is a little bit awkward or doesn't make sense in the real world, forgive me, but hopefully most of it does.

Kevin Garber: Security: super, super important. This is a message from our CTO. Unfortunately we can't hear it, but he talks about how we prevent hallucinations, and all the guardrails. He talks about how one of the ways we prevent hallucinations is that the deterministic part of the query, the one-plus-one-equals-two part of your query, actually doesn't get handled by AI. It gets handled by a deterministic system. So that's one way we prevent hallucinations. And he mentions that we've got hundreds of checks in place for other guardrails, etc. If anyone wants a copy of this video, I'm happy to send it to you.

Kevin Garber: Obviously, security is number one. It's something we spend a lot of time and effort on, getting Xero accreditation. They audit us once a year, and it's something that we regularly review. We realise that from a client's perspective, that is everything. In general it's everything, and when it comes to financial data, it's even more important. So, Joe Logan, who has a PhD in AI, is responsible for all of that. Anyway, if anyone wants that, Josephine can pass it on to you.

Kevin Garber: Okay, so the fun times, the live demo time, let's get into it. This is the LogicGlue interface. How am I going for time? Okay, we've got about half an hour or so left. You can see it's got a familiar gen AI interface, which you can use, but these days most people prefer to use Claude or ChatGPT. I've connected in three Xero demo accounts that I've created. All the information you see today is just demo sample data. It's all fictitious, so nothing is real: no real companies, no real staff, etc. And then you can see I've got XPM in there as well. You can see there's a toggle on all of these organisations. Now, these toggles flow right through to Claude or to ChatGPT.

Kevin Garber: Now, I've pre-connected these entities. I know a lot of you use third-party products. I'm not going to go through the process, but you would be quite familiar with it. But let's check that everything is there. 'Are you connected to XPM via the Claude connector?' Now, I've pre-prepared a lot of work, because obviously the queries do take time. It comes through. Yeah, okay, that's correct. You just check that it's real. Live demos, crossing fingers. It should work. And then I'll get into some bits and pieces that I've pre-created.

Trent McLaren: Kev, you might want to try and zoom in a bit if you can as well. If you just plus, like, do the zoom.

Kevin Garber: Zoom.

Trent McLaren: Just make it all a little bit bigger for everyone, yeah, that'd be great. Good job. Nice work, yep. And then we'll see how the reports turn out. You might want to zoom out for that part, but that's a good start.

Kevin Garber: Okay, so there you go. There you can see those are our jobs in progress. This is pulled live from XPM, so we're live and working. But what I would like to do is show some of the pre-preparation and the cross-entity analysis that we've done. So let's just go to... Okay, so I ran a query comparing Sydney Accounting Services, which is the Xero entity attached to our XPM. I ran a cross-entity analysis, in a way, of XPM versus Sydney Accounting Services. There you can see the hours that we bill per month and what we invoice per month, XPM versus Xero, right? So a nice analysis marrying the two. What I also did is... I will show you.

Kevin Garber: Let's go back here. Okay, so one thing that I encourage people to do is to ask Claude to help you with the prompt. Last night, when I was preparing, I wanted to create an impressive dashboard for you folks, so I actually asked Claude, 'Give me a prompt to create a dashboard', etc. Good use of colour, not overly complex, etc. It gives me this long prompt, right? You don't need to understand it, you don't need to know. And I gave it to Claude, and it did its thing. The good thing with building these dashboards, or building anything in AI or in Claude, is you can iterate very, very easily on it. So I iterated, and I asked it to make some changes, some animations. And this was the nice piece that it did.

Kevin Garber: I'm just going to refresh this. Now, this is pulling the data live from XPM. And again, you can change any elements, you can keep it dynamic, you can get it emailed to you, you can do a lot. This is just the basis of it. So whatever's useful to you, whatever you need, just iterate on it.

Kevin Garber: So I also went and did a ton of more elaborate visualisations with XPM. For example, I asked it to show me the practice in 60 seconds. It's... oops, no, sorry, it's down over... what is it called? Sorry, let's go down here. Okay, there we go. The practice in 60 seconds summarises all the bits and pieces, and again, you can get it to spit this out to you once a day, or once a week, with whatever elements are useful to you. And you can even get it to do it in a nice video format and send it to your team. Some of our clients use it for bench depth, staff usage. Let's just find the bench depth. Key person concentration.

Kevin Garber: Alright? The sky's the limit in terms of visualisations. I'm sure a lot of you have used Claude for some of these visualisations, but you can push it really, really hard. Now, if you have a look at the prompts, the prompts are long and complex. You don't need to understand the prompts. You can ask it to give you that prompt, and away you go. So that's a couple of... you can all access the visuals at that URL. Here we go. Here's another visualisation where I actually built different flavours of it into the same dashboard: bench depth. I also put in a 3D one where you can visualise the peaks and troughs of the work based on your deadlines to submit BAS statements, etc.

Kevin Garber: Some nice stuff from 3D visualisations, timesheet visualisations, etc. And of course, at any stage, you can just toggle entities off or on, you can add your client entities, you can cross-check, etc. So what I'd like to do now is show you how we can write into XPM and Xero. So let's go back. Okay, let's start with the timesheet. 'Show me timesheet entries for this week for XPM entries.'

Trent McLaren: Kev, while we're doing this, I might just help a little bit, because there's a lot of good questions and interest coming in while it's loading. A lot of the questions are just, how deep does it go? Are there particular endpoints that you're going for? There are questions around multi-entity and all those sorts of things as well. Are you able to just speak broadly to some of that as you're going through this? Just, like, yeah, how many... and all that sort of stuff.

Kevin Garber: Sure, sure. So in terms of APIs, obviously we're bound by Xero's endpoints. Xero expose a lot, but they don't expose everything. For example, there's a few endpoints in XPM, like I think pay rate per person, some reconciliation endpoints, etc., that we can't get directly. Sometimes we can triangulate things with other data. We do work with clients that sometimes discover missing pieces that we can't actually fill in, because there's a lot of capability in terms of the API. Always contact us, always ask us. In terms of entities, at the moment we have caps: you can bring 20 entities into LogicGlue, and you can do cross-entity analysis. So just over here, you can bring in 20 entities. The cross-entity analysis is limited to five at the moment. We're just checking that everything works nice and predictably on five entities.

Kevin Garber: We have had requests from some customers, so we will test further cross-entity analysis on that basis. But obviously we work within Xero's limitations, and five entities works lovely, and you can do all sorts of slicing and dicing. I'll do some of that very quickly, because I think that can be quite useful in certain circumstances.

Trent McLaren: Yeah, awesome. And then there's a few other questions here, people saying, can you generate a report from XPM using LogicGlue? A lot of people won't be familiar with what an artifact is, but Claude gives you the ability to create an artifact, if you're trying to follow along. You can then ask Claude to build the artifact based on the connection to, in this case, XPM or Xero, and it can actually maintain it on a real, live basis, so you don't need to recreate the artifact each time. You can create an artifact that's pinned. When we say artifact, we mean a visual component that the AI creates for you.

Trent McLaren: So, Abdul, that was me answering your question there around generating reports. And I think the other part here is, you know, Round Banana slash Jack said this in the chat as well: this does really depend on how good the data is inside your XPMs and your Xero files and all of that sort of stuff. If your data sucks, then your reports aren't going to be that much better.

Trent McLaren: And if anyone's heard the other chats I've had, think about all the schedules that you might want to run. If you normally ask your team to apply timesheets, or check who's not done their timesheets, or whatever it may be, you don't need to hassle your staff anymore. This could actually be a schedule that happens on a regular basis, 8am every morning: tell me which timesheets haven't been applied, or where we're sitting at for WIP.

Trent McLaren: I was in another session yesterday where we talked about WIP Wednesdays and that idea of a team stand-up, looking at the data to determine which outputs and drivers we should be pushing on. And if anyone was in my talk this morning at 9, I was saying the AI does the crunch work of fetching, analysing, and then providing you the outcome, the output, on the other side of it. That's where I see a lot of this awesome data flowing into AI coming from. And Kev, sorry, I don't mean to labour on, mate, I'm trying to help translate.

Kevin Garber: Oh, good. All good. I see there's a question as well: does it go down to the general ledger level in Xero Blue? I'll actually show you how we can create a journal entry using LogicGlue. There's a setting, and I'll just show you very quickly. So there's a setting over here, enable write access to Xero. That defaults to off, but you toggle it on. And there we go. It's not a particularly good example, I apologise, because the reference points for both of these organisations, our demo companies, are different. I ran a quick cross-entity analysis between Tamabond and Frog, pulling the data from both, and it's giving the gross profit differences over there. But let's create a journal entry. 'Journal entry in Frog for depreciation, for a computer, $500.'

Kevin Garber: Let's see what it does. It should guide us through. Another thing which is very useful, that some clients are using it for, is onboarding clients into XPM. I'll show you how Claude actually guides you through that, which is quite nice. It just asks you some questions, you put in the info, and it onboards into XPM. You could just show it a work in progress. Yeah, GL... so with some of these questions, please feel free just to contact me. So there it's created a draft journal entry. Let's post this journal entry.

Trent McLaren: One of the other things I'll just give everyone when they're doing this: some people will look at this and say, 'Trent, I could do this myself manually and faster.' But you're missing the point of what you should be getting your AI to do. The whole point of AI is not to post it, watch it, read it, and then go and do something. The idea is that you're actually using four, five, six, seven agents at a time.

Trent McLaren: So when I go and ask this agent to do something, I've moved on to my next agent to do the next thing, to the next agent to do the next thing. But if you're that person that's posting and going, 'But it took 10, 20, 30 seconds, I could have just...', you're missing the point of what you should be doing and how you should be using AI. It's not do it, wait, watch. It's do it, move on, do it, move on, do it, move on, and eventually you're going to come back and you're going to have a list of agents waiting for your review, waiting for your contribution to do the next thing. And that's the point you should all try and take from this as well.

Kevin Garber: I'll just show you: we created a simple journal entry, a depreciation, and then we can even click on the link and go to the journal entry. And it should be there. There's Frog... there we go, there's the journal entry. So, a lot of versatility in what you can do. What I want to also show you, let's try the onboarding. Let's onboard a new client into XPM. Hang on, let me make it a bit more specific. 'Onboard a new client into XPM. Guide me through all the info you need.' And you'll see how it actually gives you nice pop-up screens, or it did last night. Being a non-deterministic AI system, it might decide to approach something differently today. Let's give it a second.

Kevin Garber: Okay, it's not... I should have actually saved the way I did it last night as a skill, or something like that. Okay, so it's got 12 steps there. I'm not going to go through them all, but if you go through those steps, boom, it pushes it into XPM. Now, the exciting thing as well, what I really wanted to show you, is that you can do all of this not only on mobile, but in voice mode. Conversation mode: walking the dog, sitting as a passenger in the car. So what I'm going to do is add a timesheet entry into XPM on my phone, via voice mode. Hopefully this mic should pick it up. Let me just check this one.

Kevin Garber: Hi, Claude, are you there?

Claude (voice mode): Hi, Kev. Yes, I'm here. What do you need?

Kevin Garber: Are you connected to XPM via the LogicGlue connector?

Claude (voice mode): Yes, it's connected. A moment ago, I used it to log Joe Tottenham's time on the Aquatec job, and I can see the LogicGlue XPM tools on this call too. What's next?

Kevin Garber: Log another timesheet entry for Joe Tottenham for today, 10am to 11am, for Aquatec, for Xero cleanup, for one hour, billable.

Claude (voice mode): That's in. Joe's entry for today runs from 10 to 11am, one hour on the Aquatec bookkeeping job, under bookkeeping and payroll, with the note 'Xero cleanup'. I couldn't mark it billable myself, because the connector hasn't...

Kevin Garber: Okay, there we go. And if we go, 'Show timesheet entries for today, for this week.' And we can actually link into XPM, which I'll show you, to confirm that it's gone in. You can always confirm that everything's gone in. Let's give it a second. There we go. Just one of those I added. 'Give me a link for the most recent one.' Just to prove that it is all going where it is supposed to go. Okay, there we go. There we go, Aquatec Solutions. If I click on Timesheet, there's the ones that I added by voice today.

Kevin Garber: What I'll also show you, which I think will be very useful and interesting for people: we've created a journal in Xero Blue, and we can also just create an invoice and even prepare it for an email. 'Frog Industries, most recent invoice.'

Trent McLaren: While that's loading, Kev, I'll give you a few other questions as well. How does it work with row-level security? So if you've got team members with different permissions, or they only have access to certain clients, or if you didn't want them to have write access and all that sort of stuff, do you have that built into the MCP to help prevent who can do what?

Kevin Garber: We do. We've got our team account, I'll show you over here, where you can invite team members in and remove them. The permission structure is on the way, so you'll be able to calibrate it, if you only want certain team members to do writes and others just reads. We've also had requests for approvals on jobs, so that the jobs are submitted but not actually pushed through, and then someone else... so some workflow embedded in there. But the first version of the team settings is in there, and obviously all the settings from Xero and XPM flow through to the MCP. So there's nothing you can do in the MCP and in Claude that you can't do in your own accounts. That's really important. That is rock solid. It's not like you'll be able to access payroll in the MCP when in your login you can't access that. So that's all taken care of.

Trent McLaren: And some of the other queries coming through are around things in the database, like which clients you've completed rental properties for last year, and then other client queries on XPM. So you're trying to look at XPM, look at the Xero file the client's associated to, and then match that data together?

Kevin Garber: Yeah, for sure, you can. That's what I did over here, where I was analysing XPM with Sydney Accounting Services, which was our own Xero Blue for XPM. So you can do that with another client that you're working with as well. You just hook in that client, you tell it you want to look at the work compared to your billings, and what they turned over, and what was going on there, and you can bring it all together.

Trent McLaren: Yeah, awesome. And I assume the answer's yes here, but you can also draft your invoices into XPM as a result of this, right?

Kevin Garber: Correct, correct. You can draft invoices. Whatever you can do in XPM, you can draft it here, and you can leave it in drafts, you can submit it, etc.

Kevin Garber: So what I'm going to do is just duplicate an invoice. I'm in Frog Industries, a Xero Blue demo account, and I'll say, 'Duplicate this invoice. Change details to extra two pieces of... supplies, and change amount to 360.' Right, that's it. Draft first. Details the same. So it'll show us the invoice, we can then post it, and then we can prepare the email. We're still working on the email connector piece. Believe it or not, the Google connector has got a little bug in it, which is a bit frustrating, but we are working on a workaround for that. Of course, you can use any of your other connectors in Claude in conjunction with your LogicGlue connectors. So if you're bringing in other data from HubSpot, or Microsoft, or anything, you can make that all come together in your Claude environment. Just give it a second... there we go. Okay, so you can see it's changed.

Trent McLaren: A question around your security certifications: can you run everyone through where you are with that at the moment?

Kevin Garber: Sure. Xero has got two levels of certification. We're on the second level, where we actually got audited by Xero, and we get audited every year by Xero. Everything that we use is encrypted. We don't track anything. We use Stripe for billing. All the authentication goes through the Xero connectors. We don't have some of the ISOs yet. We're waiting to get a little bit further down the track; they are quite hefty in price. But we do have the tick from Xero. In Joe Logan's video, my CTO's video, he does talk a little bit more about that, so if someone does want a bit more specifics, please do give that to us. Obviously, data does not get retained, does not get trained on. We haven't even built a history into queries by default. We didn't want to hang on to histories, we didn't want to hang on to prompts; we don't want to hang on to anything we don't need to hang on to. But I'm happy to give more details.

Trent McLaren: Yeah, it was funny. Well, I'm... we're into our last sort of five minutes or so, but I want to give you space to think through how you want to start to wrap the session, if there's any other key things you really want to get across to everyone today, mate.

Kevin Garber: Yeah, sure. I think, look, experiment, play with it, don't be too fearful. And I think it's all, as Jack mentioned, really about your data. I think the advantage for people using Xero and XPM is you've got an incredible foundation to take everything to the next level, get incredible insights, do things quite differently and more efficiently, and really revisit the way you do things.

Kevin Garber: In the last second, I'd just like to... which I unfortunately never got the chance to show you, but I actually rebuilt the whole XPM entry dashboard to enter timesheets, and I can give everyone the prompt for that. You really can do a lot of things with the basic tools. So yeah, that's it, but please contact me with any questions. We've also built out custom bits and pieces for clients. If you have unique technology requirements or different integrations, we do custom work and even some consults. But please drop me a line, give it a go, and we hope to work with many more of you in the new year.

Trent McLaren: Yeah, and there's good feedback in the chat. Matthew and Jack have both been pretty positive through the chat all the way through. A lot of the questions coming in are very unique edge cases, and what I would suggest all of you do... and other Trent, I'm just seeing your question in there as well. Don't get too many Trents. Trent, it's good to see another Trent. If you connect and do your trial, you can always ask Claude or your AI, 'Hey, can you tell me what's possible in the MCP? Can you tell me what data points there are?' And then as you experiment and play, you'll start to get a feel and figure it out. You should be able to do that within 20 minutes of connecting this MCP and figuring out exactly how you want it to work. You'll need to use your imagination a little bit, or you can use the resources on the LogicGlue website as well.

Trent McLaren: Yeah, mate, this was awesome. I know a lot of people have a lot of fun with this if they get a chance to get stuck in, so thanks for coming and hanging out with us, and thanks for showing us through. You mentioned before about getting in touch: is there a good way for people to get in touch with you and reach out?

Kevin Garber: Yeah, if you just scan this QR code, you can schedule a quick chat with me. Or drop us a line through the website contact form; that's probably going to be the easiest, you don't have to remember an email address. And please, I saw some people want more complicated examples, etc. Happy to. I've been deep in this for quite a long time, so please just drop me a line, I'll get in touch, and we can Zoom. I've got a lot to learn about the accounting world, I've learned rapidly, but on the AI integration side we really look across it, so let's see if we can help you. Whatever you need, whatever we can do to make your life simpler and less stressful. And Steve says thank you very much, too.

Trent McLaren: Yeah. Hey, Kev, thank you so much. It is not easy trying to bring this all together, so...

Kevin Garber: There's a lot there.

Trent McLaren: We appreciate the effort there, mate, so thank you for doing that.

Kevin Garber: Thanks, Trent, thanks everyone.

Trent McLaren: A lot of good lessons in this one, not just around connections, but how you should be delegating to your AI in the first place.

Trent McLaren: Thank you, Kev, we appreciate your time. Thank you, audience.

Kevin Garber: Thanks, Trent. Thanks, everyone. See you in the next session.