How to Connect a Self-Hosted OpenClaw to Xero Safely

I run an OpenClaw on a Mini PC at home. I wanted it to do the repetitive parts of bookkeeping: collect receipts, prepare draft bills, find missing documents, inspect uncategorized transactions, and keep the books moving between the moments when human judgment is required.

The obvious solution is to connect OpenClaw directly to Xero. The safer solution is to separate the agent from Xero’s OAuth credentials. That distinction matters because a proactive agent runs continuously, accepts natural-language instructions, and touches financial records. Its integration boundary should assume that prompts can be wrong, tools can fail, and secrets eventually leak if they are copied into enough places.

I built the Xero connection into 8Examples so a self-hosted OpenClaw can use one narrowly scoped gateway key. Xero access and refresh tokens remain on the server. The local claw never sees them.

The architecture

The owner authorizes Xero once in a browser. Xero returns the authorization code to 8Examples, which validates the OAuth state, exchanges the code, discovers the approved organization, and stores the resulting credentials encrypted. OpenClaw receives only a revocable gateway key.

Owner → Xero OAuth consent → 8Examples callback
                              ↓
                    encrypted token storage
                              ↓
Self-hosted OpenClaw → gateway key → 8Examples → Xero API

The key identifies the connection by itself. The claw does not need a Xero client secret, refresh token, tenant ID, or an 8Examples machine identifier. This removes several configuration values that could disagree with each other.

The home machine also needs no inbound port, public hostname, or router change. Its requests go outbound over HTTPS, like any other API client.

Why not store the Xero refresh token on the claw?

A refresh token is durable authority. Anyone who obtains it may be able to mint new access tokens after the current access token expires. Putting it in a prompt, plugin configuration, shell history, log, or chat transcript widens the number of places that must remain perfectly private.

Xero’s authorization-code flow is designed for a server that can protect a client secret. Its OAuth scope documentation also requires offline_access when an integration needs a refresh token. Keeping that flow at the gateway means the local agent deals with neither secret.

The gateway refreshes short-lived access tokens, persists Xero’s replacement refresh token atomically, and prevents simultaneous requests from racing the same rotation. Those are infrastructure details, not bookkeeping skills, and OpenClaw should not have to solve them.

Connecting your own OpenClaw

From the 8Examples account page, choose Bring your own OpenClaw, give the installation a recognizable name, and continue to Xero. Sign in, select the correct organization, review the requested permissions, and approve the connection.

After the callback succeeds, copy the one-time gateway key into the secret configuration used by your OpenClaw:

XERO_GATEWAY_KEY=xero_...

That is the only Xero-specific environment value the claw needs. Do not paste it into a prompt or commit it to a repository. If it is exposed, authorize the connection again to replace it.

The integration is self-describing. OpenClaw can read the discovery document to learn the supported paths and request format:

curl --fail --silent --show-error   https://8examples.com/api/openclaw/xero

A basic connection check uses the gateway key without putting a claw ID in the URL:

curl --fail --silent --show-error   -H "Authorization: Bearer $XERO_GATEWAY_KEY"   https://8examples.com/openclaw/xero/status

What an OpenClaw Xero bookkeeping agent can do

Connecting an API is the easy part. A trustworthy bookkeeping workflow reads context before it writes anything. For a receipt or supplier invoice, my preferred sequence is:

1. Extract the supplier, date, currency, totals, tax, reference, and useful line-item descriptions.
2. Search Xero for a likely duplicate using the reference, contact, date, and amount.
3. Resolve the contact, account code, tax rate, and tracking category from the organization’s real data.
4. Create an accounts-payable invoice as a draft.
5. Attach the original PDF or image to that Xero record.
6. Read the saved record back and verify its totals, status, coding, and attachment.
7. Report what changed and include the Xero record ID.

Xero’s own Smart Document Capture follows a related pattern: extract fields, look for an existing transaction, then either match or create a record. The important idea is that extraction is not the same as posting. Evidence, duplicate checks, accounting context, and verification still matter.

Proactive does not mean unsupervised

An agent can safely do a great deal without pausing: read records, collect missing receipts, identify likely duplicates, prepare drafts, attach evidence, and surface exceptions. The approval line should sit in front of actions that are hard to reverse or move money.

I require explicit confirmation immediately before the agent:

• creates or reverses a payment;
• initiates a bank transfer;
• approves, voids, deletes, or materially changes a posted transaction;
• sends an invoice or credit note;
• posts a manual journal; or
• changes bank details, tax rates, currencies, or the chart of accounts.

A general instruction such as “handle my books” is not approval for a specific payment. At the decision point, the claw should state the organization, counterparty, amount, currency, affected record, intended action, and reason, then wait.

Every action needs an audit event

The gateway appends every authorization outcome, token refresh, successful read or write, rejected request, and failed request to the 8Examples events table. That creates a durable operational history even when the interaction began as a casual chat message.

The audit event records routing and outcome metadata: the internal claw identity, tenant ID when known, HTTP method, Xero path, upstream status, and elapsed time. It deliberately excludes gateway keys, OAuth tokens, request bodies, response bodies, and financial records.

This is an important balance. An audit trail should answer who attempted what, where, and whether it worked. It should not become a second database full of secrets and accounting data.

Failure handling is part of bookkeeping correctness

Retries are dangerous when a request may have succeeded before the response was lost. Before repeating a write after a timeout or server error, the claw should search Xero for the expected record. Where Xero supports an idempotency header, the gateway passes it through.

A 401 from the gateway means the local key is missing, stale, or invalid. A Xero permission error means the connection lacks the required scope or the authorizing user lacks access. A 429 means stop and obey Retry-After. None of those errors should trigger a fast loop of blind retries.

There is a reliability lesson here too. I originally built this integration after encountering a Xero developer flow that appeared healthy but could not complete its redirect. That experience became a separate article about testing complete user journeys and monitoring them in production.

A small interface is easier to trust

The final local configuration is intentionally boring: one secret key and one discovery URL. Everything sensitive and stateful—OAuth state, token exchange, refresh rotation, tenant selection, connection ownership, revocation, and auditing—stays behind 8examples.com.

That does not make an AI bookkeeper infallible. It makes the failure modes smaller and clearer. The agent can do useful work proactively, the owner retains control over consequential actions, and a leaked local credential can be replaced without exposing the underlying Xero OAuth credentials.