Xero integration for Atlas
The Xero integration is available in Atlas today, joining your placement and contractor records to your cloud accounting. Fees agreed on a deal and approved contractor hours become invoices in Xero without anyone rekeying them. Finance and delivery read from one set of numbers. The month end reconciliation between the CRM and the accounts package goes away. Both perm fees and contract hours run through the same connection.
Live · Reviewed September 2026
What Xero does
Xero is cloud accounting software for small and growing businesses. It connects a company to its bank feeds, its accountant or bookkeeper, and over a thousand other business apps. Invoices, quotes and purchase orders are raised and sent from inside it. Expenses are tracked, online payments are accepted, and the ledger stays current instead of being caught up once a quarter. Accountants and bookkeepers run their practices on it. That is why most agency finance functions already have a login. Xero sits under Accounting in the Atlas integrations directory.
What changes in your day
A perm placement gets confirmed late on a Friday, and the fee is already sitting on the record. The agreed percentage and the salary are there, along with the client contact who signs off purchase orders. That fee raises an invoice in Xero from the deal as it stands in Atlas. Nobody types the number a second time. Nobody types it slightly wrong either, which is the more expensive version of the same mistake.
Contractor invoicing is the version of this that hurts. Hours land for the week and a manager approves them. The invoice is built from the approved hours. The spreadsheet that used to sit between approval and payment has nothing left to do. Timesheet queries stop being archaeology, because the hours on the invoice are the hours that were approved.
Finance asks delivery what a client has actually been billed this quarter. A week later delivery asks finance the same question from the other direction. Both sides are working from one set of numbers, so the question stops needing a meeting. Consultants can see what has been invoiced against their placements without opening a ticket with accounts.
Month end is where this shows up most clearly. There is no reconciliation pass between the CRM and the accounts package. The invoices in Xero came out of the placements and hours in Atlas, not out of somebody's rekeying. What used to be an exercise in matching lines becomes a check. When the accountant comes back with a query, the answer is on the ledger already. Nobody reopens the CRM to work out where a figure came from.
A director pulls revenue for the quarter the night before a board call. The figure matches what the accountant sees. Both were built from the same placement and contractor data. There is no variance to explain that exists only because two systems were keyed separately by hand.
How to turn it on
Two things need to be in place on your side. You need a Xero account with permission to raise invoices, and admin rights in your Atlas workspace. With both, the connection can be switched on for your agency. The quickest route is a message to Atlas customer support. They will confirm what your setup needs before anything is connected. If your agency invoices from more than one entity, decide which one you are starting with first. That decision is easier before the connection exists than after.
OneUp Sales and idibu are covered the same way on their own pages, if either is already on the desk.
Xero FAQ
Does the Xero integration cost extra on top of Atlas?
Commercial terms are agreed per agency rather than per connection, so the answer depends on your plan. The Atlas team will confirm what your setup includes before you commit to anything. A demo is the fastest way to get that confirmed.
Do we still need a Xero subscription?
Yes. Atlas connects to your Xero account rather than replacing it. Your accounts, your bank feeds and your accountant's access stay where they are. What changes is where the invoice data comes from, and who has to type it.
Can contractor timesheets be invoiced through the integration?
Yes. Approved hours in Atlas are what the contractor invoice is built from. Nobody rekeys hours into the accounts package to get a contractor billed. The invoice reflects what was approved, which makes a client query easier to answer.
Does it handle perm fees as well as contract billing?
Both. A placement fee agreed on a deal in Atlas raises an invoice in Xero. The same connection carries contractor hours. A mixed perm and temp desk does not need a separate billing process for each side.
Will finance and the recruitment team be looking at the same numbers?
That is the point of connecting the two systems. The invoices in Xero are raised from placement and contractor data in Atlas. Revenue reporting for directors therefore matches what the accountant sees. Neither side has to defend its own version of the figure.
Who needs to be involved to set it up?
Someone with admin rights in Atlas, and someone who can authorize invoicing in Xero. In smaller agencies that is often the same person. Atlas customer support handles the connection once those permissions are confirmed, so nothing has to be built on your side.
