We use Xero as our accounting package at Rittman Analytics and thought it’d be useful to bring in some of our key financial and performance metrics from Xero’s Profit and Loss report (Income Statement for our US readers) into our Looker environment, so that we can monitor gross and net revenue trends over time, check expenses and staff costs are within budget and keep an eye on our most important financial KPI, Net Margin %.

Although Xero is a supported data source for Stitch, Fivetran and most other data pipelines-as-a-service, trying to reconstruct a P&L report from all of the Xero API tables whilst applying manual journals, categorising accounts into revenue or costs and coming-up with the same numbers as Xero’s own reports is fairly tricky; another approach that we’ve used with success is to use a Google Sheets add-in such as G-Accon for Xero to schedule exports of Xero’s P&L report into a Google Sheet and then access the results using a Google BigQuery external table.