Why Xero has no screens of its own
Every other part of BMS has a place you go to: Service has jobs, Stock has warehouses, Sales has deals. Xero has nothing. There is no Xero menu, no Xero list, no Xero page — the whole integration is administered from two places in Admin that are really about something else.
That is deliberate, and it is the right shape for what an integration is.
An integration is not a place you work
Nobody's job is "doing Xero". People raise invoices in Billing, receive goods in Stock, and complete jobs in Service — and the accounting consequences of those actions should follow without anyone visiting a second screen to make them happen.
A Xero section would be a screen whose only purpose is to compensate for the integration not working invisibly. Building one would have made the sync feel optional, and turned "did it reach the books?" into a question someone has to remember to ask.
So the sync runs in the background, and the only things surfaced are the two that genuinely need a human: authorising the connection, and agreeing the reference data.
Why those two, and only those two
Authorisation cannot be automated, because it is a person granting access to an accounting system on the business's behalf. It has to be an explicit act, by a named user, recorded — which is exactly what the Organisations list shows.
Reference data has to be agreed, not assumed. A chart of accounts and a set of tax rates are decisions the finance team has already made in Xero. BMS cannot invent them and should not overwrite them, so it offers a comparison and an import: see the difference, take what you want. Pushing an invoice against an account code the books do not recognise is the failure this prevents.
Everything else — which invoices, which contacts, when — is mechanical, and mechanical things belong in the background.
The cost of invisibility
The honest trade-off is that a background sync is a background failure. When the authorisation expires or is removed, invoices simply stop arriving in Xero, and nothing in the day-to-day screens says so.
That is why the Organisations list shows Xero Authenticated? as a column rather than burying it, and why it is the first thing to check when something has not appeared in the books. The integration has one health indicator, and it is there.