Many HFB clients run on Xero, so the updates unveiled at Xerocon Brisbane (3 Sept 2025) are worth a look—especially around JAX (Just Ask Xero) and Analytics powered by Syft.
1) JAX becomes a more proactive “financial superagent” — but it’s rolling out in phases
Xero is evolving JAX from a simple chat assistant into an AI agent that can learn your rhythms, surface insights and complete certain routine tasks. The rollout starts from September 2025.
What JAX can do now: conversational access to key figures with charts/tables; guidance to support decisions (e.g., improving cash flow, comparing loan rates).
What’s coming soon: high‑confidence auto‑reconciliation with advisor oversight; more task automations to be phased in over the coming months.
2) Analytics powered by Syft — advanced insights tied to your plan
Analytics powered by Syft brings forecasting, business‑health scoring and consolidation to qualifying Xero business plans. This is available now, however we understand that ongoing feature expansion will continue to improve the value that can be generated from this product.
Customising the dashboard with widgets that show the data that is key to your business and the decisions that you are making is important to be able to get the most out of this additional insight.
Data quality is the key to better JAX & analytics results
The insights provided by tools such as JAX and Analytics will only be as good as the data that they are reading from.
Below are a few suggestions / processes that you should review to ensure that you are best place to get the most out of these new tools.
- Bank feeds & rules
- Make sure bank feeds are connected for all your business bank accounts, credit cards and debt facilities
- Manage bank rules to simplify your reconciliation process
- Ensure bank feeds are reconciled as frequently as possible
- Chart of accounts discipline
- Simplify and standardise coding so P&L lines reflect reality
- Avoid having multiple accounts for the same expense
- Ensure your coding is accurate and consistent
- Contacts & items hygiene
- Remove any duplicate contacts
- Add supplier ABN’s and set default default tax codes/terms
- Tracking categories
- Define 1–2 meaningful categories (e.g., locations or divisions) and enforce usage
- Source‑document capture
- Standardise invoice/receipt capture into Xero
- Clear suspense accounts routinely
- Close cadence & lock dates
- Run a monthly ‘end of month closure’ checklist
- Lock prior periods
- Reconcile GST, payroll and clearing accounts.
How HFB can help
- Xero health check
- Check status of your bank feeds
- Review the rules you have in place to ensure that they are in working order
- Review user access
- Discuss a lock‑date policy
- Set some key control reconciliations
- Data‑quality Improvement
- Clean your chart of accounts
- Review and set up tracking categories
- Review contacts/items and remove duplications
- Implement capture & approvals processes for your invoices and receipts
- Document a month‑end process tailored to your business
- Analytics
- Assist you to configure your Analytics dashboard so that the information reported is tailored to your business and is meaningful to you as the key decision maker
- JAX‑ready setup
- Enable relevant features
- Define approval/oversight boundaries
- Pilot high‑confidence automations on low‑risk accounts first.
If you want JAX and Syft to produce useful, trustworthy answers, the work starts with tidy books. We’ll clean the data, turn on the right features for your current plan, and phase in automations with guardrails — so you see benefits quickly, safely, and sustainably.