Services
Monthly bookkeeping run entirely in Xero — closed, reviewed and proven every period by the team that does the work.
Bookkeeping packages
The short version
What Changed in 2026
Xero describes the plan as a 3x3 strategy: accounting, payments and payroll, built for the three jobs a small business cannot avoid. In the US, 2026 is the year the second and third arrived.
- Xero Payroll, powered by Gusto, launched in August, built directly into Xero rather than sitting beside it.
- Xero Bill Payments, so bills are paid from inside the ledger instead of being exported to a third party and the result imported back.
- Melio Expense Management, tracking and categorising card spending in real time, without switching cards.
- JAX, Xero’s agentic platform, repositioned from something that answers questions to something that performs work, with scenario planning that models price rises, cost increases and hiring against your real data.
- Assistant connections for Microsoft 365 Copilot, Claude and ChatGPT, bringing live ledger data into the tools people already work in.
Taken together these are not feature additions. They are the pieces that used to make a US business choose something else.
The big one
Payroll, Powered by Gusto
Launched 12 August 2026. Payroll now sits inside Xero for US small businesses and their advisors, with Gusto supplying the engine.
What it covers, per Xero’s own announcement:
- Unlimited payroll runs
- Automated federal, state and local tax calculations and filings
- Direct deposit
- Employee and contractor payments
- Benefits calculations
- Employee self-service
The practical difference is not the feature list, which Gusto already had. It is that payroll no longer sits in a separate tool that the ledger reconciles against. Pay runs, the journals they produce and the cash leaving the account are in one place, which removes a whole category of month-end work: chasing why the payroll clearing account does not agree, and finding a run that posted to the wrong period.
For anyone comparing platforms, this is the line that most published comparisons have not caught up with. A great deal of writing still says Xero has no US payroll. That was true, and it stopped being true in August.
Money movement
Payments and Expenses
Following Xero’s acquisition of Melio, the aim is to keep money movement inside the ledger rather than exporting it and importing the result.
Bill payments
Bills can now be paid from inside Xero. For anyone running a payables cycle, that removes the export, the separate approval in another tool, and the reimport of what happened. It also means the payment and the bill it settles are recorded together rather than matched afterwards.
Our position on approval and release does not change with the feature: the person preparing a payment run should not be the person releasing it. Payment inside the ledger makes that separation easier to configure, not less necessary.
Expense management
Card spending is tracked and categorised in real time, and Xero was explicit that it does not require switching credit cards or adopting a new card programme. For businesses where card spend arrives as a monthly statement to be reconstructed, this moves the work to the moment of spending.
Localisation
The US-Specific Pieces
Several things a US business needs are on every Xero plan rather than reserved for higher tiers.
- W-9 and 1099 management. Collecting W-9s, tracking which contractors need a 1099, and producing the filing data. For any business using contractors, this is the January work that otherwise happens in a spreadsheet.
- Sales tax. Included on every plan, with the caveat that multi-state nexus is a question for your CPA rather than a setting.
- Bank reconciliation and Hubdoc document capture. On every plan, which matters because document capture is usually what makes bills arrive in the file on time.
- Unlimited users on every plan. Adding a bookkeeper, an office manager or your accountant costs nothing.
That last one is a structural difference rather than a feature, and for a business where several people touch the books it is usually the largest cost difference between platforms.
The AI layer
What JAX Actually Does
Xero’s agentic platform was repositioned in 2026 from a system of record into a system of action, meaning it performs work rather than only answering questions about it.
- Scenario planning that models price rises, cost increases and hiring decisions against your actual Xero data rather than a spreadsheet built beside it.
- XeroForce, a natural language tool for building custom agents, which Xero has said reaches general availability later in the year. It includes a pre-built month-end agent that works from document and reconciliation status through to prepayment and amortisation journals, and hands back its working for review.
- Assistant connections for Microsoft 365 Copilot, Claude and ChatGPT, so ledger data can be queried from the tools people already have open.
The phrase to hold onto in that XeroForce description is “hands back its working for review”. An agent that posts prepayment journals and shows you how it reached them is useful. The same agent posting silently would be a control problem. The review step is what makes automation at this level safe, and it is the part worth checking on any tool that offers it.
Which brings up the constant: none of this changes whether the numbers underneath are right. An agent reading an unreconciled ledger produces confident answers from data that does not agree with the bank. We wrote about where that leads in integrations and optimization.
Plan structure
What Sits on Which Plan
The US plan structure, as published. Check current pricing on Xero’s site, since it moved during 2026.
| Level | What it adds |
|---|---|
| Every plan | Bank reconciliation, Hubdoc document capture, real-time reports, W-9 and 1099 management, sales tax, unlimited users |
| Growing | Auto-reconcile bank transactions, performance dashboards, financial health scorecards, 60-day cash flow forecast, tracked inventory |
| Established | 180-day cash flow forecast, KPI and ratio analysis, multi-currency, project tracking, expense claims, industry benchmarking |
The tier that trips people up is Growing, because tracked inventory and the cash flow forecast both live there. A product business on the entry plan will find itself upgrading, and it is cheaper to know that before the migration than after.
What to do with this
If You Are Deciding Now
If you evaluated Xero before 2026
Re-evaluate the payroll question specifically, because it is the one that has changed. If native US payroll was the reason you chose otherwise, that reason no longer holds.
If you are already on Xero with separate payroll
Moving payroll into Xero is worth pricing, though not urgently. The saving is in reconciliation time and in errors that stop happening, rather than in the subscription. Mid-year payroll migrations also carry their own complexity around year-to-date figures, so the tidy moment is a quarter or year boundary.
If you are on QuickBooks and content
Stay. A platform that reconciles cleanly and that your team and CPA are productive in is not a problem to be solved. We wrote a fuller comparison in Xero vs QuickBooks, and it reaches the same conclusion more slowly.
If your books are behind
The platform is not the issue. A migration carries an unreconciled file into a new system and adds a conversion date to the problem. Fix the file, then decide.
Questions
Commonly Asked
Does Xero have payroll in the US now?
Yes. Xero Payroll, powered by Gusto, launched on 12 August 2026 and is built directly into Xero rather than sitting alongside it. It covers unlimited payroll runs, automated federal, state and local tax calculations and filings, direct deposit, employee and contractor payments, benefits calculations and employee self-service. A lot of published comparison writing still says Xero has no US payroll, which was true until August 2026.
Can I pay bills from inside Xero?
Yes. Xero Bill Payments lets bills be paid from within the ledger, following Xero's acquisition of Melio. The intent is to keep money movement in the accounting system rather than exporting a payment file to another tool and importing the result. The approval and release separation still matters: whoever prepares the payment run should not be the person releasing it.
Does Xero handle 1099s?
W-9 and 1099 management is included on every Xero plan in the US, covering W-9 collection, tracking which contractors require a 1099, and producing the filing data. Your CPA still handles the filing itself and any questions about contractor classification.
What is JAX in Xero?
JAX is Xero's agentic AI platform. During 2026 it was repositioned from answering questions about your data to performing work with it, including scenario planning that models price rises, cost increases and hiring against real ledger data. XeroForce, a natural language tool for building custom agents, includes a pre-built month-end agent that works through document and reconciliation status to prepayment and amortisation journals and hands back its working for review.
Which Xero plan do I need for inventory?
Tracked inventory sits on the Growing plan and above, alongside auto-reconcile, performance dashboards and the 60-day cash flow forecast. Multi-currency, project tracking and the longer cash flow forecast sit on Established. A product business starting on the entry plan will usually need to upgrade, which is worth knowing before a migration rather than after.
Is it worth switching to Xero in 2026?
Only if a specific problem you have today goes away. The 2026 changes remove the payroll objection that kept many US businesses on other platforms, so a business that ruled Xero out for that reason has cause to look again. A business whose current platform reconciles cleanly and whose CPA is productive in it does not. And a business whose books are behind should fix the file before changing anything, because a migration carries the same problem into a new system.