Isaac from mobsta.co shows how to connect Claude AI to QuickBooks Online or Xero using Zapier or Make as a middleman. You grant Claude access to accounting actions like creating invoices and managing customers, then set which ones need approval. He demos Claude creating an invoice for a customer named Jacob, showing how it handles missing data and errors.
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Hey, this is Isaac from mobsta.co, and in this video I want to show you the easiest and quickest way to connect, uh, QuickBooks and Xero with a lot more capability to your Claude instance. We have a saying internally that AI is as useful as what you've connected to it, but I did a video recently where the QuickBooks connector in Claude actually sucks and there's no Xero connector. So what do you do in that instance? And here's what I would recommend. At least right now, this for us is the easiest way to connect QuickBooks and Xero and add a lot more capability. And it's using automation tools as the middle layer. Just to showcase how simple it is, I want to go ahead and visit ncp.zapier.com and ensure that I create a new Claude server for the Claude— for your AI tool of choice. Of many that are here available, we're using Claude. You notice that I already have Claude here, but I can add tools to it. I can come here and just like I would in an automation, I can add QuickBooks Online, sign in, select the tools. Now I will give Claude the capability to use any of these tools as needed. Find invoices, create bills, create deposits, create employees, create customers, create estimates, create expenses. Create journal entries, and so on and so forth. And it even has access to the API in case it needs to do anything that's not here. So I click on Contact, Connect, and I'll just go ahead and put our dummy data account and add these 47 tools. So here, if you've got it, now I have access to all those tools. Of course, I can get more granular around like what I want or don't want this to have. But now if I go to Claude and as if as an administrator, I'm able to connect this and give this tool to my team. And as you'll see, I can get more granular here as well to allow them or not allow them to do certain things. So just as an example, I've now here connected Zapier and you'll see that now I have all of these QuickBooks online options available. And as I mentioned here, I can make sure that my team, if they use this, they have to ask for approval. Or in some cases, I might say, you know what, if you're creating a customer, if you're creating an employee, I'm just going to allow AI to do that on its own. But perhaps there's things that, hey, I don't want them to create purchase orders or payments or journal entries. If there's something you don't want your people to do through AI at all, you have that flexibility as well. And just as an example, if I say here, could you please create an invoice for our customer called Jacob for a pallet of $100? Let's just say that that's what we've got. Then the Claude should be smart enough to think and look at the tools it has available and determine that, hey, I do happen to have an invoice tool within this new Zapier connection that would allow me to create it. Similarly, for those of you that are more fake Make.com lovers, you can do the exact same for Make as well. And if you are using Make.com and you simply connect something like, say, Xero to it, By default, your Claude instance will be able to use the Claude connection to access all the connections you have within it and all the actions and triggers you have with it. Uh, let's just say I'm gonna use my account. I can run scenarios, I can do all of this stuff. Again, this is for demonstration purposes. You might want to look into this a little bit more detail and perhaps be more granular about what you can or not want to allow. But by simply creating this, I should be able to— let's here go here. For the sake of this particular example, I'm just going to say that this is always allowed. I wouldn't recommend that in production, but I'm going to say, hey, could you please create an invoice for Jacob for $100? Uh, for a pallet of $100 within our Xero account. If you need to confirm which account, let us know. And one of the benefits as well is I know that for accounting firms that they might have this for dozens, perhaps hundreds of clients, you can make sure you can— you could connect all of them and then be able to have a reference. For example, here determine, hey, you have these 2 accounts. Which of them do you want that in? And if you have a list of your clients, you can start to say create the symbols for this particular client, just as an example. So I'm just going to say, hey, do it on Ops 2026. This is a new account I use for demonstration purposes, and we're going to go ahead and verify if it indeed did it. So it's going to tell me, hey, I want to do this API call on zero through that account. It's gonna think. It might fail, but one of the benefits of AI is if it doesn't, it will figure it out. Like, it will find a way. Um, so you'll see that it's getting an error, but after some time here, we'll probably try to— uh, well, it escalated in this case. Is Jacob's full name or company name as it appears in zero? I don't think we have that name right now, so So I'll just say to create the contact, assume it doesn't exist. I'll let it run there, but this is really the demonstration I wanted to, uh, propose to people that if you were already using a tool like Zapier Make and you're finding the connectors you have not only to QuickBooks and Xero but potentially from any other tool in your toolbox that you use those tools as additional layer to give AI more tools that's capable of using after that. So that's a quick video for me, um, to showcase how that can be done. I'll see you in the next one.
