How to connect your Third-Party Applications into Copilot

Stop Hunting Through Xero Reports. Just Ask Copilot.

This week we connected our Xero account to Microsoft Copilot, and it has completely changed the way we access financial information.

Like many small business owners, we've spent years learning where reports live, which menu to click, and how to customise reports to find the information we need. While Xero is a fantastic accounting platform, sometimes you just want a quick answer without having to remember where everything is located.

That's where Microsoft Copilot comes in. Instead of navigating through screens and searching for reports, we can now simply ask a question in plain English and Copilot retrieves the information directly from Xero. The experience feels much more like having a conversation with someone who knows your business rather than working through a software menu.

From Searching to Asking

Traditional software requires you to know where information lives.

You need to remember:

• Which report contains the information

• Where to find that report

• How to apply the right filters

• How to interpret the results

For many business owners, that's not the most valuable use of their time. When you're running a business, you're focused on serving customers, managing people, growing revenue, and keeping projects moving. Stopping to work out where a particular report sits can interrupt your flow and slow down decision-making.

With Copilot connected to Xero, the process becomes much simpler.

You can ask questions such as:

• What invoices are currently overdue?

• How much cash do we have available?

• Who are our top customers this month?

• What were our sales last month compared with this month?

• Which customers haven't paid yet?

• What is our current profit position?

Within seconds, Copilot provides an answer without requiring you to navigate through multiple screens.

Why This Matters

One of the biggest challenges for many small and medium-sized businesses is that important information often sits inside business systems that people don't access regularly. The data is there, but getting to it can take time. As a result, owners sometimes delay checking financial information because they're busy or because they know it will take a few minutes to remember where everything is. The problem isn't the information. The problem is friction. Every extra click, menu, report, and filter creates another barrier between you and the insight you need. Copilot helps remove that barrier. Instead of needing to understand the software, you simply need to understand the question you want answered. That's a significant shift because most business owners know what they want to know. They just don't always know where to find it.

Faster Answers Lead to Better Decisions

The real value isn't that Copilot saves a few clicks. The value is that faster answers often lead to faster decisions. Imagine you're reviewing your business at the end of the week and want to know:

• Which invoices should be followed up?

• Whether your cash position is healthy

• Which customers are contributing the most revenue

• Whether sales are moving in the right direction

Rather than jumping between systems or generating multiple reports, you can ask Copilot directly.

If the process is so easy, you're more likely to check your numbers regularly. And when business owners check their numbers more often, they tend to make more informed decisions. Small improvements in visibility can have a big impact on business performance over time.

Bringing Financial Information Into Your Daily Workflow

One of the features we particularly like is that the information comes back inside Copilot. Rather than logging into multiple systems throughout the day, you're working from a single experience. This means you can move naturally between different business questions. For example, you might ask Copilot: "Summarise my upcoming meetings.", then ask: "What invoices are overdue in Xero?" and then "Draft a follow-up email to those customers."

Instead of switching between applications, you're working through tasks in a single conversation.

It's Not Just About Finance

What makes this even more exciting is that Xero is only one example. Microsoft Copilot can connect to a growing range of business tools, allowing you to bring information from different systems into one place. Think about how much time many people spend jumping between applications every day:

• Accounting systems

• CRM platforms

• Project management tools

• Documents

• Emails

• Meetings

• Notes

Every time you switch systems, you lose a little focus. The ability to ask questions across connected tools has the potential to make business information much more accessible. Instead of learning every system in detail, people can focus on asking better questions and making better decisions.

Is This Right for Everyone?

As with any technology, it's important to assess whether it suits your business, your processes, and your security requirements.

You'll need:

• An appropriate Microsoft Copilot licence

• Access to the relevant connected applications

• Suitable permissions and security settings

• Your Xero login credentials

Businesses should also consider who has access to financial information and ensure any connections are configured appropriately. For larger organisations with more complex reporting requirements, there may be additional governance or approval processes to consider. However, for many small and medium-sized businesses, the opportunity is significant.

If you're the owner, manager, or decision-maker who regularly needs quick access to financial information, being able to ask a question and receive an answer in seconds can be incredibly valuable.

The Bigger Opportunity

Most people think of AI as something that writes emails or summarises documents. Those capabilities are useful, but they're only part of the story. The bigger opportunity is using AI as a bridge between you and the systems that run your business. Information already exists inside your accounting software. Information already exists inside your CRM. Information already exists inside your email and documents. The challenge is accessing it quickly and turning it into action. That's where we believe Copilot becomes particularly powerful. It's not about replacing your existing systems. It's about making them easier to use.

Connecting Xero to Microsoft Copilot has given us a glimpse into what the future of business software could look like. Instead of spending time searching for information, we spend more time working with information. Instead of hunting through reports, we simply ask questions.

For small business owners, that shift may seem simple, but it has the potential to save time, reduce frustration, and help people make faster, more informed decisions.

Technology should make running a business easier, not more complicated. Being able to ask, "How is my business performing?" and getting an answer in seconds feels like a step in the right direction.

Get in touch to discuss how to make these connections between Copilot and third-party applications.

#Copilot #Xero #Hubspot