Can you sell Xero accounting data to AI companies?
A small business can, if the customers and suppliers are removed and the owner approves each field. Xero is cloud accounting, so the data is already structured: invoices, bills, credit notes, bank reconciliations and reports. Xero lets a user with the right role export invoices and bills as CSV and reports as PDF, Excel or Google Sheets, and a developer can pull larger volumes through the API under published limits.
What a Xero organisation holds
| Sales invoices and credit notes | Line items, tax treatment, due dates and payment status for each sale. |
| Bills and spend | Supplier bills with coding to accounts, showing what a business buys and how it is categorized. |
| Bank reconciliation | Statement lines matched to transactions, which shows how a bookkeeper decides what something is. |
| Reports | Profit and loss, balance sheet and aged balances for chosen periods. |
| History and notes | Notes on transactions and a record of changes. Xero limits the History and notes report to administrators. |
How data leaves Xero, route by route
| Tool | What an export gives you | What is missing or needs an admin |
|---|---|---|
| Invoice and bill export | Invoices, bills, credit notes, prepayments and overpayments as CSV, with each line item on its own row. | Exports above 500 transactions have to be split into batches, per Xero Central. We could not open the full article, so confirm the limit in Xero. |
| Report export | Reports can be exported as a printable file, an Excel spreadsheet or a Google Sheets spreadsheet. Administrator, Standard plus reports and read-only roles can access, export and print them. | Invoice-only users cannot export reports. A report holds figures for a period, not the transactions behind them. |
| Accounting API | Invoices, contacts, bank transactions and manual journals can be paged, 100 records at a time. | Xero publishes per-organisation limits of 5 concurrent calls, 60 calls a minute and 5,000 calls a day, and says they cannot be increased. Over the limit returns HTTP 429. |
| General ledger and other exports | Xero Central has separate articles on exporting accounting data, the cheque register and inventory items. | We could not open those articles in full, so the steps and limits are unconfirmed. |
Tool names belong to their owners and are used only to say where records usually live. Export features change by plan and version, so check the current rules for your account.
What the API limits mean in practice
At 100 invoices a page, 60 calls a minute and 5,000 calls a day, a business with 200,000 invoices needs at least two thousand calls for invoices alone, before line-item detail or contacts. Daily limits stretch a large pull over several days, so a developer should plan for it.
Each response carries headers showing the remaining capacity, and a 429 comes with a Retry-After value in seconds.
Who can run it
The roles that can export reports are Administrator, Standard plus reports and read-only, according to Xero Central's role summary. Advisers can have wider report access. If the business works through an accountant, the practice may hold the relevant role, so ask them.
An API pull needs a connected app authorized for the organisation, normally set up by a developer with an administrator's consent.
Counting and cleaning
Count invoices and bills separately, by financial year, and say how many carry line-item descriptions. Descriptions are the part with the most value, since they say what was sold or bought in plain words.
Customer and supplier names appear in the contact field, the reference and often in the description itself. Replace names with codes everywhere, and drop bank details, tax numbers and contact addresses.
What stays out of a Xero set
| Contact details of customers and suppliers | Names, emails, phone numbers and addresses, replaced with codes. |
| Bank account and tax identifiers | Taken out of every record. |
| Payroll and employee pay | Not part of any accounting set. |
| Notes with personal remarks | Left out when they cannot be cleaned with confidence. |
More on this: how personal details are removed, who carries the risk and how you get paid.
An example, invented for illustration
A small landscaping business has used Xero for six years. Its bookkeeper, who holds an advisor role, exports three years of bills as CSV in batches to see how expenses are coded. The owner then asks a developer to page invoices through the API over several days. Customer names become codes, bank data is removed, and the owner reads a sample of line descriptions before deciding what to describe.
Questions owners ask about this
Is there a limit on how many invoices export at once?
Xero Central's invoice and bill export article says exports above 500 transactions have to be split into batches.
Who is allowed to export reports in Xero?
Per Xero Central, the Administrator, Standard plus reports and read-only roles can access, export and print reports. Invoice-only users cannot.
How many API calls can we make?
Xero's developer FAQ lists 5 concurrent calls, 60 a minute and 5,000 a day for each organisation, with 10,000 a minute for the whole app, and says limits cannot be raised.
Will a report export include the transactions behind it?
No. It exports the figures the report shows for the period. For transactions, use the invoice and bill export, or the API.
Didn't find your question? Ask us directly.
Sources
The vendor's own pages this guide draws on. Some help centers did not open for us, and where a step rests on a summary and not the page itself, the guide says so. Menus and limits change by plan and version, so check the current pages for your account.
Keep reading
Related kinds of records
- Accounting and ERP records: Invoices, approvals and memos from QuickBooks, Xero, Sage, NetSuite, SAP and Odoo; payroll and bank details never.
- QuickBooks data export: What to take from QuickBooks, which routes miss the memos and attachments, and what never leaves.
- NetSuite data export: How saved searches, Workbook, SuiteQL and the REST service return NetSuite data, with Oracle's documented limits and permissions.
Industries that keep these records
- Accounting firms: Review notes and adjusting-entry explanations; client financials never enter the set.