Xero Payroll Integration for Security Guard Teams

Payroll day means someone sitting with a stack of timesheets, a Xero tab open, and keying in hours guard by guard. Miss one, transpose a start time, and someone's pay is wrong, and they'll tell you about it.

What most security firms do today

Timesheets get filled in on paper, in a spreadsheet, or sent over WhatsApp, then someone retypes every guard's hours into payroll by hand at the end of the week or month. Every retype is a chance to get a start time, an end time or a shift wrong, and the guard who's underpaid finds out on payday, not before.

How the Xero payroll integration works

You connect TacDesk to your Xero organisation through Xero's own login screen, the same OAuth flow Xero uses for any app, so TacDesk never sees or stores your Xero password.

Once connected, there are two mappings you set up once. Each guard gets matched to their employee record in Xero, and each shift type (day rate, night rate, bank holiday, and so on) gets matched to the corresponding earnings rate in Xero, from a list TacDesk pulls in from your Xero payroll settings. After that, TacDesk keeps making the connection automatically: every day it re-checks who's active and syncs any new employees, then works through the last 30 days of clock records.

For each guard, TacDesk pairs up their clock-in and clock-out for each shift, works out the hours, and works out which shift type applies. Xero's UK payroll runs on weekly timesheets, Monday to Sunday, so TacDesk groups the hours into a timesheet per guard per week and creates it in Xero using the earnings rate you mapped for that shift type. Every timesheet lands in Xero as a draft, not approved and not paid, so whoever runs your payroll still checks it over before anything goes out. Approved leave requests sync across the same way, as leave applications against the guard's Xero employee record, so a week off doesn't have to be keyed in twice either.

If you also invoice clients from these shifts (see invoicing from worked shifts), the same connection can push an invoice's figures into Xero as well, once you've locked in the billable hours for that invoice. It's a separate, explicit action from the invoice screen, not something that happens on its own.

Why it matters

The hours that go to payroll are the hours that were actually clocked. The same GPS clock-in and clock-out described on the GPS clock in and out page feeds the timesheet, so a query about pay gets answered from the same record, not a retyped copy of it.

Nobody's typing the same hours in twice. The timesheet in Xero comes from the clock record automatically; your office spends payroll day reviewing and approving, not transcribing.

Setup is a one-off, not a recurring job. You map each guard and each shift type to Xero once. After that the sync runs by itself.

Where it sits

Xero payroll integration is included on TacCommand. It's a paid add-on if you're on TacStarter or TacPro, and it isn't part of TacFree. The pricing page has the current price for the add-on.

It works from the same clock and rota data as invoicing from worked shifts, so it's worth setting both up together if you bill clients and run payroll from the same hours. See also GPS clock in and out for how the underlying record is captured.

Book a demo to see the Xero connection set up end to end, or check the pricing page for the current add-on cost.