Connect HoursEasy to Xero

This is how to connect HoursEasy to your Xero, what the screen tells you about the connection afterwards, and how to reconnect or disconnect it. It is available on the Site plan and above, and you need to be an administrator of your HoursEasy organisation to use it.

What connecting does

Connecting lets HoursEasy raise draft invoices and payroll timesheets in your Xero from an export you have already approved. It creates nothing else there: every document arrives as a DRAFT for you to check, and HoursEasy never approves, sends or pays anything. Once you are connected, you match your clients, projects, staff, roles and items to the records that already exist in Xero — see matching your records to Xero.

On the Crew plan this screen has no Connect to Xero button. It tells you to change plan on Billing and come back, because Xero is a Site-and-above feature.

Connecting

You land back on this screen, which now shows any existing mappings alongside suggested matches for what is still unmapped — a suggestion is a guess, not a saved match. Go to matching your records to Xero next to review every suggestion, save, then confirm.

Reading the connection's health

A working connection shows your Xero organisation's name and when it was connected, with your matching tables underneath. Three other things can show instead:

A connection made before HoursEasy started attaching each invoice's works summary shows a panel titled Works summaries are not attached. Press Reconnect to Xero there to grant the extra permission; invoices already in Xero keep what they have, and your mappings are untouched.

A disconnected or refused connection says so directly — disconnected on a given date, or that Xero last refused it and why — and offers Reconnect to Xero.

If Xero cannot be read when the screen loads, it says so instead of showing empty tables — a connection Xero has revoked, or one that has sat unused for sixty days, looks exactly like this — with Reconnect to Xero to try again.

Reconnecting

Wherever you see it, Reconnect to Xero is the same sign-in as connecting the first time. Your mappings are kept, because they are stored against your own clients, projects, staff, roles and items rather than against the connection itself.

A healthy connection has no Reconnect to Xero button to grant payroll access with — the button only appears when something needs fixing. To add payroll access to a connection that is otherwise working, press Disconnect (at the top of the screen — see below), then Connect to Xero and sign in again, leaving the payroll permissions ticked, and select the same Xero organisation you were already connected to.

Reconnecting always lets you pick a different Xero organisation, but your mappings do not travel with the switch — they stay pointed at records in the old one, which is not where a push would land. Item codes are the sharpest risk: they match by the code itself rather than by checking the record still exists, so a stale code that happens to match a different item in the new organisation would mismap silently rather than show as unmapped. Select the same organisation you were connected to, and check its name on this screen once you land back. Contact support before deliberately switching to a different one.

Disconnecting

Press Disconnect, at the top of the screen. It takes effect immediately, with no confirmation step. Nothing further can be pushed to Xero until you connect again, and reconnecting restores your existing mappings rather than asking you to redo them.