Xero adds richer credit note webhooks for developers

Xero is adding credit note webhooks to its developer platform, expanding the accounting events that third-party applications can receive as notifications instead of checking for changes through scheduled API calls.

Credit notes cover refunds and credit adjustments, and can change payment status and customer balances across connected systems. Until now, developers needing near real-time visibility into credit note activity in Xero have typically relied on polling the Accounting API at regular intervals.

The new webhooks send event notifications when credit notes change. Developers can subscribe through the same webhook configuration used for invoice, contact and subscription events, allowing existing integrations to add credit note coverage without adopting a separate model.

Moving from polling

Polling remains common in accounting integrations, especially where platforms offer limited event coverage. Developers schedule requests for updated records even when nothing has changed, increasing API traffic and operational overhead for both application operators and platform providers.

Xero already supports webhooks for a limited set of resources, including invoices and contacts. Adding credit note events follows developer feedback calling for broader coverage, particularly for workflows where refunds and adjustments are part of daily processing.

For software vendors, credit notes often feed downstream processes such as reconciliation, customer notifications and internal ledger updates. An event-driven approach can also reduce delays between an action in Xero and a corresponding update in another system.

Architecture changes

Xero has updated the underlying architecture that processes and delivers webhooks, describing it as a new approach designed to make adding event types simpler, starting with credit notes.

The update also establishes a repeatable pattern intended to make it easier to expand webhook coverage to other parts of the platform over time.

Developers configure credit note webhooks alongside existing subscriptions, then update webhook handlers to verify signatures, return a successful HTTP response quickly, and decide whether to fetch full resource details from the API.

Richer payloads

Xero is also changing the information delivered in webhook notifications for credit notes. The payload includes contextual fields so developers can determine whether an event is relevant without immediately making another API call.

These fields include status values such as ACCPAYCREDIT for accounts payable credits, and type values such as DRAFT and SUBMITTED. Developers can use them to filter, route or ignore events at the handler layer, reducing follow-up calls when the payload already contains enough information for a given use case.

Rate limits remain a practical constraint for many integrations, particularly those operating at scale across multiple tenants. By sending more context in each notification, Xero is positioning the feature as a way for developers to be more selective about when they retrieve full records.

Latency metrics

Xero provided performance figures from production use, reporting an average delivery of credit note webhook events at around 11 seconds. It also reported that 95% of events are delivered in under one minute under real-world load.

Xero monitors latency, delivery rates and failure patterns, and plans to continue tuning the delivery pipeline as adoption grows.

Webhooks are often used for workflows close to business operations, such as triggering refunds, updating customer records and matching transactions. Reliability and predictable delivery can matter as much as raw speed, especially when failed deliveries create manual back-office work.

Developer rollout

Developers add credit note event subscriptions through the Xero Developer Portal, then update webhook handlers to process the new payload fields and decide whether to fetch the full credit note record. Xero also recommends logging and monitoring events so teams can compare observed behaviour with expectations.

Technical details, including event schema, payload examples and retry behaviour, are available in Xero's developer documentation. This information is important for teams building resilient integrations that can handle duplicate deliveries, ordering issues or transient downstream failures.

"We're expanding our event coverage and enhancing payload data to help you build faster, reactive integrations," Xero Developers said.

Xero described credit note webhooks as an initial step toward more event-driven integrations across its ecosystem, and expects to add more webhook event types over time using the updated architecture.