Where control turns projects into profit

You’ve reached the end of a high-pressure month. Your team has delivered the work, the variations are approved, and the invoices are ready in AtomicSam. But now comes the friction: manually re-keying those figures into your accounting software, chasing payment statuses, and praying that no typos creep in during the transfer. This "manual bridge" is exactly where commercial leakage hides and where your confidence in the numbers starts to slip.

Connecting AtomicSam to Xero removes the guesswork. By creating a direct link between your delivery engine and your financial ledger, you ensure that the work you sold and delivered is exactly what gets billed. No more "month-end heroics" to reconcile disconnected tools; just a clean, automated flow of data that protects your margin and keeps your cash flow visible.

Why Commercial Sync Matters

In a growing firm, the gap between a project manager's "job done" and a finance manager's "invoice sent" is often a black hole of spreadsheets and Slack messages. When your systems don't talk, you lose sight of which invoices are actually paid and which projects are stalling. The Xero integration provides commercial integrity by ensuring your Chart of Accounts, Tax Rates, and Tracking Categories are mirrored perfectly. This means when you report on project profitability in AtomicSam, you are looking at the same reality your accountant sees in Xero.

💡 Tip: Before you trigger your first sync, ensure your Contacts in AtomicSam have email addresses that match your Xero records. AtomicSam uses bidirectional sync to keep these aligned, but a clean start prevents duplicate contact records.

How the Integration Works

The integration uses OAuth 2.0, providing a secure, persistent connection that doesn't requires you to log in every time you want to send an invoice. Once connected, AtomicSam acts as the source of truth for your billable work, while Xero handles the final accounting and reconciliation.

What Can You Sync?

Use the following table to decide how to map your data between the two platforms:

Capability	Use this when...	Commercial Impact
Invoice Export	You have finalized a billing cycle and are ready to request payment.	Eliminates manual entry errors and ensures quoted totals match the ledger.
Credit Notes	A client needs a reversal or credit due to a change in scope or error.	Keeps your revenue recognition accurate without manual financial adjustments.
Supplier Bills	You have external costs or contractor invoices that need to be recharged.	Prevents "forgotten" costs from eroding your project margin.
Payment Tracking	You need to see if an invoice is paid directly within the project view.	Provides real-time visibility into cash flow without bothering the finance team.
Tracking Categories	You want to report on department or branch performance in Xero.	Connects high-level financial reporting to granular project delivery data.

📸 [Screenshot: The Xero mapping screen showing Chart of Accounts and Tax Rate drop-downs]

The Export Workflow

Pre-export validation: AtomicSam automatically checks that all client and supplier IDs still exist in Xero. If a contact was deleted in your accounting software, the system will flag it before the export fails.
Posting the Invoice: You can choose to post invoices as **Draft** (if your finance team needs to review them) or **Approved** (if you want them sent to the client immediately).
Real-time Webhooks: Once the invoice is in Xero, any payment made by the client is pushed back to AtomicSam instantly. The status on your project dashboard will flip to **Paid** without you lifting a finger.
Maintenance: Voiding an invoice or issuing a credit note in either system will trigger a sync to keep the other side updated, maintaining the commercial truth across both platforms.

⚠️ Heads up: Ensure your tax rates in AtomicSam are mapped specifically to your Xero tax types. If you try to export an invoice with a "Custom 10%" rate that doesn't exist in Xero's settings, the sync will be blocked to prevent accounting errors.

Pro Tips & Common Gotchas

The "Draft" Safety Net: If you are new to the integration, set your export status to **Draft**. This allows your bookkeeper to perform a final sanity check in Xero before the invoice becomes an official financial record.
Mind the Tracking Categories: Xero limits you to two active Tracking Categories. Make sure your most important AtomicSam dimensions (like "Department" or "Work Type") are the ones mapped to these categories to get the best reporting value.
Handle Voiding Carefully: If you void an invoice in Xero, AtomicSam will see this via the webhook and update the job record. However, always check your project budget after a void to ensure that the unbilled time or expenses have been "released" back to a billable state.

✅ Did you know: You can map specific AtomicSam service items to different Xero Revenue Accounts. This allows you to automatically split a single invoice between "Consulting Revenue" and "Software Pass-through" in your General Ledger.

By removing the manual gaps between your delivery and your accounting, you’re not just saving time—you’re installing a system of record that protects your business from the "quiet" revenue loss that plagues disconnected firms. You can now trust your numbers with total confidence.