Connecting your events to Xero
At the end of every event, someone on the finance team has to reconcile the numbers. Registration revenue from the event platform. Exhibitor invoices from a spreadsheet. Sponsorship payments from email confirmations. All of it needs to end up in the accounting system, and all of it usually gets there through manual entry.
If your finance team uses Xero, ema can skip that step entirely.
The double entry problem
Event finances are messy because they live in multiple systems. Your event platform knows who registered and what they paid. Your invoicing system (or spreadsheet) tracks exhibitor and sponsor payments. Your accounting system is where the finance team actually works.
Between these systems sits a person — or more likely several people — copying numbers from one screen to another. That's where errors happen. An invoice gets entered twice. A payment status doesn't get updated. A refund processes in the event system but never makes it to the books.
The fix isn't better spreadsheets. It's making the systems talk to each other.
What syncs between ema and Xero
Exhibitor invoices. When you create an exhibitor invoice in ema — booth fees, add-ons, sponsorship components — it syncs to Xero automatically. The invoice appears in Xero with the correct contact, line items, and amounts. No re-keying, no CSV exports, no "I'll update Xero later" that turns into next month.
Payment status. When an exhibitor pays an invoice, the status updates in both systems. Pay in ema, it's reflected in Xero. Record a payment in Xero, ema knows about it. Two-way sync means neither system is out of date.
Registration revenue. Attendee payments processed through your event flow into Xero as revenue entries. Your accounting system has a complete picture of event income without anyone manually tallying registration reports.
Credit notes and adjustments. Refunds, discounts, and adjustments created in ema sync to Xero as credit notes. The books stay accurate even when things change — which, in events, they always do.
Why this matters more than it sounds
If you've worked in event finance, you know the quarterly reconciliation pain. Someone pulls a report from the event platform, someone pulls a report from Xero, and then they spend a day (or a week) figuring out why the numbers don't match.
They don't match because they were entered separately, at different times, by different people, sometimes using different category names. It's not a people problem — it's a systems problem.
When ema and Xero share the same data, reconciliation isn't a project. The numbers match because they came from the same single source of truth. Your event data and your accounting data aren't two versions of the truth — they're one version, in two places.
For teams whose finance department lives in Xero
This integration exists because we kept hearing the same thing from event teams: "Our finance team uses Xero and we spend hours getting event data into it."
If your organisation has standardised on Xero — and plenty of event companies, associations, and agencies in Australia, New Zealand, and the UK have — then your event platform needs to speak Xero's language. Not through an export function or a third-party connector, but natively.
ema's Xero integration connects to your existing Xero organisation. You map your accounts, set your sync preferences, and from that point forward, your event financial data flows into your books automatically.
The practical outcome
No more double entry. No more reconciling spreadsheets at the end of a quarter. No more "the event team says we collected $X but Xero shows $Y." Your event data and your accounting data agree because they're connected, not because someone spent a weekend making them agree.
For event teams, that means less time on admin and more confidence that the numbers are right. For finance teams, it means event revenue shows up in the system they actually use, in the format they expect, without chasing anyone for it.