Earlier today at Xerocon London, James and Sid from the Xero Developer Relations team shared a sneak preview of our new Files API which has officially just launched.
We’re delighted to have launched another API that we know will seed more innovation in the ecosystem. But first a little recap on Files in Xero.
Files is a feature we built not to compete with industry titans such as Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Drive and Box, but in recognition of the fact that storing final copies of receipts, invoices and other files against your accounting documents is handy for everyone; business owners, staff, bookkeepers, accountants and Add-on partners.
Since the launch of Files, users have embraced this feature fully, with a mind-boggling amount of data already stored in Xero:
So the Xero Files API really isn’t another files API or files storage service – it is much more than that.
The Files API allows developers to create and retrieve not just files, but the accounting data associated with it, seeing the bits and bytes in a unique financial context that only Xero can offer.
The opportunities our developer community will pick up on are hard to predict. The one thing we are certain of whenever we launch a new API is that developers and customers will innovate on it in ways we never imagined possible – that is the beauty of APIs.
But because we love this stuff, here’s a few ideas to get the ball rolling:
- Users add directly, or have files emailed into the files inbox: Add-ons can poll the inbox for changes, take the file data, and process them into fully coded financial documents.
- Add-ons use folders to store documents not associated with financial documents in Xero: insurance certs, scans of company documents, copies of annual accounts.
- Use the Files API to sync your files in Xero with another document storage provider
- Showing before and after shots for insurance work
- Sync customer files to your CRM
- Existing use cases we see a lot of that can be expanded on include – associating contracts with customers, uploading HR files with employees, including customer and supplier sales collateral and proposals
The Files API documentation is available in our developer center, and in addition, API SDKs for .NET, Python & PHP have been updated to support the Files API.
Let us know if you have any ideas for the Files API to get developers going!
Please add the ability to add receipts from the mobile app to specific transactions and NOT make me have to make it an expense claim. Most of our spending is done on company cards and we would just like the receipts stored with the transaction.
@Steve have you seen this blog post on receipts for iOS? https://www.xero.com/blog/2015/01/introducing-ios-receipts/ – if that isn’t what you are after, feel free to ask a question on that blog post and our product manager Luke will chip in 🙂
Does the new files API have the same throughput restrictions of 60 calls/minute, 1000 per day?
@Ruairi – it does for now, but the impetus for us to tweak this as people start using the Files API (which is designed to be a bit more chatty) is there 🙂