Small businesses don't run on a single application or tool. Every day, teams move between email, documents, meetings, spreadsheets, customer records, and financial systems – which means that the information you need is often spread across all those tools, making it harder to find answers, make decisions, and take action quickly.
That's why we're excited to highlight how Microsoft 365 Copilot is working with trusted partners to bring business data, expertise, and workflows directly into the flow of work, powered by AI. Copilot is built into the apps your team uses every day and extends to the systems that run your business through integrations and partner agents – to help you spend less time searching, switching between apps, and manually stitching information together, and more time growing your business. Today, we're starting with Xero.
Bring up-to-date financial data into the flow of work with Xero
Financial information is some of the most important data a small business owns, but it’s often trapped in a separate system. Answering a quick question or checking on an invoice can mean stopping what you're doing, opening another app, and searching for the numbers you need before you can get back to work. Xero's new integration with Microsoft 365 Copilot brings financial context into the tools teams already use.
Using Xero's financial agent, JAX, Microsoft 365 Copilot can surface financial insights from Xero right where you already work – from Copilot Chat to the everyday apps you use to create and collaborate – while Xero stays the system of record.
Moving from information to action
Say you're planning your next quarter, reviewing recent performance, or just trying to understand what needs attention this week. Instead of digging through reports, you can ask questions in natural language like:
- What was my profit this quarter?
- How much am I owed?
- What is my current cash position?
Copilot works with JAX to surface answers, insights, and recommended next steps – all within your workflow. When it’s time to take deeper action, you can move directly into Xero, where the records and business processes live.
Why this matters for small businesses
Small businesses rarely have a dedicated team for every function. Owners, finance leaders, and employees often wear multiple hats, and every minute spent hunting for information or rebuilding a report is a minute not spent serving customers or growing the business.
Xero’s Chief Product and Technology Officer, Diya Jolly, put the customer benefit simply:
“Whether you’re forecasting in Excel or building a pitch in PowerPoint, Copilot can surface the insights behind your business’s financial health, with a clear, seamless path back to Xero as the source of truth and destination for deeper work.”
For the millions of small businesses and accountants who can’t afford to lose context between tools, that’s the real promise of the agentic era.
Built on trust
Microsoft 365 Copilot is built on Microsoft's enterprise-grade approach and commitments to security, privacy, and compliance. With the Xero integration, you stay in control of your data, Xero remains the source of truth for your financial records, and the financial data you see in Copilot is never used to train Microsoft’s AI models. For a small business, that means you can have confidence in how your information is accessed and protected while you get the benefits of AI.
Connecting more tools that power your business
Across every industry, small businesses rely on specialized tools that hold critical information – and Microsoft 365 Copilot is where those tools connect, without asking your team to learn a new way of working. Whether you’re analyzing finances, preparing customer communications, or making a big decision, Copilot brings the right information to the right person, when it’s most useful. Through partners like Xero, that value keeps growing.
Stay tuned for more in this series and learn more about Microsoft 365 Business with Copilot.
About Xero
Xero is a global small business platform that helps customers supercharge their business by bringing together the most important small business tools, including accounting, payroll and payments — on one platform. Xero’s powerful platform helps customers automate routine tasks, get timely insights, and connects them with their data, their apps, and their accountant or bookkeeper so they can focus on what really matters. Trusted by millions of small businesses and accountants and bookkeepers globally, Xero makes life better for people in small business, their advisors, and communities around the world. For further information, please visit xero.com
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