Allwis and Xero
Your books in Allwis.Or keep them in Xero.
Allwis has its own complete general ledger, with bank reconciliation, GST and BAS, invoicing and bills, payroll and reporting, so it can run your books outright. If your accountant already works in Xero, keep it: Allwis syncs each Xero organisation in overnight, read-only, and adds everything around it. You choose, one company at a time.
TWO WAYS TO RUN IT
We do the ledger. You can still use Xero.
Allwis as your ledger
A full double-entry ledger with bank reconciliation, GST/BAS, invoicing, bills, payroll and financial reporting, on the same records as your pipeline, jobs and helpdesk. Coming from Xero, the migration wizard brings each company across.
What moving a company involves →Xero as your ledger, Allwis around it
Keep the books in Xero, where your accountant already works. Allwis reads each organisation every night, never writes to it, and adds consolidation, revenue and ARR, CRM, jobs and the team's work around it.
Both, in one group
Each company decides for itself. One can keep its books in Xero while another runs its ledger in Allwis, and the group still consolidates in one place.
IF YOU KEEP XERO
What Allwis adds around Xero
One view of the whole group
Each Xero organisation syncs into its own company. Consolidate them on a group chart of accounts with intercompany paired and eliminated, and set a group budget against actuals.
Revenue and ARR
Xero invoices matched to the contracts behind them and spread across the months they're earned, with ARR reconciled against recognised revenue.
Sales, jobs and the team
CRM and pipeline, proposals, jobs and timesheets, helpdesk, tasks and team chat, beside the group's numbers instead of in five more apps.
How the Xero sync works
Connect Xero once and choose which organisations to bring in; each becomes its own company in Allwis. Every night Allwis reads each organisation's trial balance and records every completed month, account by account, so the P&L, balance sheet, budgets and consolidation here match Xero. The month in progress shows as a provisional figure until it closes.
If a past month changes in Xero, Allwis notices and records it again: the last two years are re-checked every night. When you want transaction detail and tracking for a month, upload Xero's Account Transactions export, and Allwis uses it only if it ties to Xero's own totals.
Allwis only reads. It asks Xero for read-only access and never creates, changes or deletes anything in your Xero file. Your accountant, your bank feeds and your returns stay exactly where they are.
Consolidating a group, with the books still in Xero
Xero has no native consolidation, and its published position on years of requests for it is that it is not currently planned. Every QuickBooks Online subscription is a separate island. Zoho Books has no native mechanism for group financial statements. Odoo is a full ERP and still sends you elsewhere for this.
All four answer a group with two companies the same way: another subscription, another login, another export that is out of date by the time anyone reads it.
In Allwis the second company is a setting, and its books can stay in Xero. Inter-company elimination, FX translation and non-controlling interests sit in the ledger you already have.
Moving a company's books from Xero
Nothing about the sync commits you to moving. When a company is ready for its ledger to live in Allwis, you move that one company; every other company stays on Xero, synced, for as long as you like.
Allwis imports directly from Xero — chart of accounts, contacts, invoices, bills and account transactions, with opening balances preserved. The importer recognises transactions it has already brought in, so a re-run does not double-post, and a go-live reconciliation report ties the imported ledger back to what you left behind before you trust it. You can run both in parallel for a period.
Allwis's ledger and Xero, side by side
| Allwis | Xero | |
|---|---|---|
| Double-entry ledger, bank reconciliation, GST/BAS | Yes | Yes |
| Bank feeds from major AU/NZ banks | Statement import with AU and NZ bank formats detected, and a direct Wise connection | Broad, long-established — their strength. Check your own bank against ours before switching. |
| CRM with a sales pipeline | Yes | Marketplace apps |
| Quotes and proposals | Templates, public approval links, e-signature, Word and PDF export, deposit on acceptance | Quotes |
| Jobs, time and WIP | Included | Projects at higher tiers; WorkflowMax retired in 2024 |
| Payroll — AU and NZ | PAYG/PAYE, super, KiwiSaver, ABA; STP Phase 2 files you lodge through a gateway | Yes |
| Helpdesk and customer portal | Yes | No |
| Marketing — forms, landing pages, sequences, automation | Yes | No |
| Multi-entity consolidation | Native, with FX, inter-company elimination and NCI | Not native; third-party reporting layer |
| AML/CTF — KYC, PEP and sanctions, AUSTRAC and DIA reporting | Yes | Integrated third-party apps |
| Director penalty exposure (AU) | Yes | No |
| Live reports in Excel | First-party add-in, every plan | Third-party App Store add-ins |
| Run the interface in another language | English, Spanish, French or German — chosen per person. Your language and your tax settings are separate: an Australian business can work in German and still report in AUD. | English; an open request on Xero’s own ideas forum |
| Choose your AI model, or self-host it | Nine providers, or any OpenAI-compatible endpoint on your own network | JAX, included for subscribers; no model choice published |
| AI spend budgets, per-task controls, decision log | Yes | No |
Every claim about Xero is sourced at the foot of this page.
Where Xero should stay your ledger
No product is the right answer for everyone, and a comparison that pretends otherwise is not worth reading. Here is where we would tell you to keep your books in Xero — and still add Allwis around them.
Your accountant already lives in it
The number of AU and NZ accountants fluent in Xero is a real asset, and “my bookkeeper already knows this” is a legitimate reason to stay. In fairness: Allwis exports every report, and our practice view is built for advisors holding many clients at once.
Bank feed coverage
Xero’s feed relationships are broad and long-established. If your bank feed matters most, keep the ledger in Xero and sync it in — that is what the sync is for.
You only want accounting, and always will
If the front office genuinely never needs to touch finance, a focused ledger is a reasonable answer and paying for more would be waste.
Your model, your infrastructure
The assistant is table stakes. Where it runs is not. Every system here has an AI assistant now. None of them will tell you which model just read your payroll file.
Allwis is model-agnostic by design. Point it at OpenAI, Claude, Gemini, Grok, DeepSeek, Kimi, Mistral, GLM or Meta — your key, your account, your bill. Route different jobs to different models: a cheap one for categorising bank lines, a strong one for auditing a bill. Or do not send it out at all.
Run the model on your own hardware — Ollama, LM Studio, vLLM, anything speaking OpenAI’s chat-completions format. A small connector beside your model dials out to us over HTTPS. No inbound port, no firewall change, works behind NAT. Your model never becomes something on the internet.
Then switch on self-hosted-only mode, and turn off the shared fallback so a request fails rather than leaves your network. Benchmark your own model against the cloud providers on the same tasks first, so it is a measured decision rather than a leap.
And govern it: a monthly AI budget with a hard stop, individual AI tasks switched off, PII masking forced per task, token caps, and a log of every call with the model that made it, its reasoning and what it cost.
Excel & Google Sheets
Accountants live in Excel. We stopped fighting it.
Allwis for Excel puts your live statements in your own workbook — profit & loss, balance sheet, trial balance, cash flow, aged receivables, aged payables and any custom report you have built, with comparison periods, multiple entities and your budget as a column beside actuals. Press refresh and the figures are current. Build your own schedules around them; they survive the refresh.
Install it from the Microsoft 365 admin centre for the whole firm, or sideload it yourself in a minute. On every plan — not the top tier.
And spreadsheets inside Allwis too — depreciation schedules, workpapers, the calculations behind a journal — attached to the record they support, versioned, and frozen once attached, so the workpaper behind a posted entry cannot quietly change.
QUESTIONS
Allwis and Xero
Do we need Xero to use Allwis?
No. Allwis has its own complete ledger and can run your books outright. The Xero sync is there for businesses that would rather keep their books in Xero.
Does Allwis change anything in Xero?
No. It asks for read-only access and only reads: organisation settings, accounts, contacts, invoices, payments, trial balances and attachments. Nothing is written back.
Where do we raise invoices?
Wherever that company keeps its books. If it runs its ledger in Allwis, raise them in Allwis. If its books stay in Xero, raise them in Xero: Allwis reads those invoices back every night for revenue recognition and ARR, and raising the same invoice in both would count it twice.
How current are the figures?
A month arrives the night after it ends. The month in progress shows on each company's P&L as a provisional figure, as at the day before.
Does our accountant need to do anything?
No. They keep working in Xero exactly as they do now. Someone with access to each Xero organisation connects it once.
Can we connect several Xero organisations?
Yes. Connect them in one sign-in and choose which to bring in. Each becomes its own company in Allwis, starting from the beginning of a financial year, and the group is consolidated here.
You do not have to switch at all
Keep Xero and sync it in. Take the ledger and keep your CRM. Take the CRM and keep your accountant’s system. Take the helpdesk on its own. The rest is there when — and if — you want it.
Sources
Every claim we make about another product is based on publicly available information, linked below with the date we checked it. Product names are trademarks of their respective owners; we are not affiliated with any of them. If we have got something wrong, tell us and we will correct it.
- Xero’s CRM story is marketplace integration; the native app is invoicing plus contact sync — hubspot.com (checked 2026-08-23)
- Xero retired WorkflowMax on 26 June 2024; brand acquired by BlueRock — devblog.xero.com (checked 2026-08-23)
- Xero has no native multi-entity consolidation — getcheetah.io (checked 2026-08-23)
- Xero’s AML/CTF guidance directs firms to integrated third-party apps — xero.com (checked 2026-08-23)
- Live Xero data in Excel is supplied by third-party App Store add-ins — apps.xero.com (checked 2026-08-23)
- Running Xero’s interface in another language is an open request on Xero’s own ideas forum, with no commitment given — productideas.xero.com (checked 2026-08-23)
- Just Ask Xero (JAX), included for Xero subscribers — xero.com (checked 2026-08-23)
Last reviewed 23 August 2026.