Of all the business accounting software in the market, Xero is one of the most popular cloud based business accounting software known today. Apart from features like invoicing, accounts payable, expense claims, fixed asset depreciation, purchase orders, comprehensive business reporting and automatic import of bank and credit card statements, Xero also offers a free API that allows it to be integrated with external applications. This means that Salesforce users can integrate their Salesforce with Xero to streamline and automate their business accounting process.
In other words, such integration not only saves time and effort but also provides secure and complete control over the transmission of sensitive accounting information.
At AppShark we provide comprehensive and customized integration services. One of our clients requested us to integrate their existing Xero with Salesforce in a way that would allow seamless transfer of data (invoices) from Salesforce to Xero. The requirement was to replicate Salesforce accounts and invoices in Xero.
After analyzing their requirements, we decided to integrate Xero with Salesforce via Web services where the data collected in Salesforce was exported in XML format to Xero. Representational state transfer (REST) API calls, already set up, were used to poll the server and listen for updates and comments while the AppShark development team wrote the Apex code to send back a response which was replicated in Salesforce.
The final solution synchronized the following data/information between Salesforce and Xero:
Since confidential data had to be transferred, OAuth 1.0 (Open Authentication) was used as a security protocol and the integration was successfully executed.