Every job of the week. Plain English.
You'll never call a tool by name — you just ask Claude, ChatGPT or whichever AI you use, and it picks the right ones. The areas below run across both halves of the week: your clients' books, and how your own practice is tracking — jobs, WIP, capacity and workload, for firms on Xero Practice Manager. Each area is a job you already do; the prompts are the words that get it done.
One question, four moves.
- 01
Find.
Name the client — or the staff member, or the job — and the assistant locates it across your whole portal. - 02
Sum up.
Totals first. “How much is overdue?” “How many WIP hours are we carrying?” - 03
Drill in.
Then the exact records behind the total, line by line. - 04
Act — with your review.
Anything that changes the books is flagged for your approval first. You approve, amend or bin it.
Here's the shape in the wild: “Who owes us the most across the practice?” gets a summary. “Show me Harbour Landscaping's overdue invoices” gets the records. “Draft a chase task and assign it to Priya” gets an action flagged for your approval — which you approve, amend or bin. The same four moves answer “how many WIP hours are we carrying?” and “who's over next week?” just as readily. You'll fall into the rhythm without thinking about it.
Numbers first. Detail second. Changes flagged for your approval.
Capability areas
Get paid sooner.
Every invoice, quote, credit note, overpayment and prepayment — quick totals first, then the full paper trail with line items when you want it. Aged receivables summaries show who owes what, and for how long.
Pay the right people, on time.
Supplier bills, purchase orders, payments and batch payment runs, plus aged payables — so “what do we owe and when?” is a question, not an afternoon.
Know the cash position.
Bank transactions from quick aggregates down to individual records, a cash-flow summary, and month-by-month activity — the raw material of every rec, without the export.
Run the firm like a business.
If your practice runs Xero Practice Manager, this is where the assistant looks at you rather than your clients: XPM clients and jobs — tasks, milestones, staff — plus timesheets, WIP and recoverability, and a live read on team capacity versus actual time. WIP comes through as time — hours, not dollars. The partner questions, answered before the partner asks.
Keep every job moving.
The practice's own worklist: work item updates, client tasks (including from your own templates), assigning, snoozing, due dates and estimates, bulk subtasks, tags, workflow templates and recurring schedules. Delegate to the assistant the way you'd delegate to a coordinator — and review the same way too.
Answer payroll questions in seconds.
Employees with their leave, tax, bank and retirement-contribution details (superannuation in Australia), pay runs, payslips and leave applications. For Australian practices it goes further: payroll year-end finalisation totals (STP Phase 2) and workers-compensation wages (WorkCover). The questions that used to mean opening four screens now take one sentence.
See the story behind the numbers.
P&L and balance sheet, journals and manual journals, fixed assets with depreciation, budget versus actual, and — for Australian files — the tax and activity statement figures (BAS and IAS). Plus a data-quality score for the file, so you know how much to trust what you're reading.
Walk into every call prepared.
Client notes with version history and topics, client conversations and chat messages, and sharing notes into conversations. Three years of context, summarised before your 2pm.
Let nothing slip through.
XBert already watches your clients' books and raises alerts when something's off. Through the MCP your assistant reads them with you: what fired, exactly what needs fixing and how, the review state, each exception's action history, and notification summaries — plus alert configuration in bulk when a rule needs changing across many clients.
Invent your own alerts.
Wish XBert watched for something specific to your practice? Describe the problem in plain English and a Custom XBert is created — then tested on real client data, tuned from your feedback, promoted when you're happy, and rolled back or switched off when you're not. The whole lifecycle, in conversation.
Stop re-keying.
Create and update contacts, create bills and bank transactions from documents, record bill payments and bank transfers, and add comments, statuses, reminders and file attachments to tasks. Every write is validated and checked against duplicates before anything is submitted to Xero, QuickBooks, MYOB or FreeAgent — and each one is marked as a change to confirm, so your assistant stops and asks before it submits. The assistant does the entry; you do the approving.
The rules don't change as you go deeper.
Every area above runs under the same three rules: the assistant only sees what your XBert role allows; every write is validated, checked for duplicates and marked as a change to confirm, so your assistant stops and asks before it submits; and every action is written to the audit log. That approval prompt belongs to the assistant rather than to XBert. One thing worth checking: the data and reporting tools only run for clients on an AI-enabled plan. A client on any other plan still works for the workflow side — tasks, templates and notes — but ask about its books and the assistant will come back and say the plan doesn't allow it. Depth of capability, not depth of risk.
Stop reading. Start asking.
Pick one client and ask one question — that's genuinely the best way in. Connect your assistant, ask about aged receivables or this week's WIP hours, and see what comes back.