AI-powered email-to-Xero expense pipeline

The Challenge

Expense filing is the most predictable productivity loss in any accounting firm's workflow. Staff log into each client's mailbox weekly, dig out invoices and receipts, download attachments, and upload them to Xero one by one. Existing tools either require log-in access to every client mailbox (a compliance headache) or push the work back to the SME owner, where it gets ignored.

Our Approach

We solved it with a forwarding model: clients forward their mailboxes to one central address the firm controls, so the compliance footprint is one inbox instead of N. From there, vision-language AI reads each attachment, scores it for filing-worthiness, and pushes the high-confidence ones to Xero with vendor and category data filled in. Anything ambiguous lands on a dashboard for one-click review.

Where AI does the work

• Vision-language extraction pulls vendor, line items, totals, dates, and taxes from any attachment, including poor scans and non-English receipts.
• Confidence rating scores every document Low, Medium, or High before it reaches a human, so the firm tunes the auto-upload threshold to its own risk appetite.
• Per-client learning recognizes recurring vendors and auto-applies the right Xero category from the firm's own historical decisions.
• Duplicate detection matches against prior submissions to catch double-entries before they hit Xero.