Xero offers cloud-based accounting software for small and medium-sized businesses.

Amazon QuickSight is the AWS business intelligence tool for creating dashboards and visualizations. Users are charged per session only for the time when they access dashboards or reports. QuickSight supports a variety of data sources, such as individual databases (Amazon Aurora, MariaDB, and Microsoft SQL Server), data warehouses (Amazon Redshift and Snowflake), and SaaS sources (Adobe Analytics, GitHub, and Salesforce), along with several common standard file formats.

Xero provides a REST API that lets you get accounting, payroll, asset, and other information stored in the system. To get a list of payments from the Accounting element, for instance, you could call GET /api.xro/2.0/Payments/. This call has four optional parameters that let you filter and sort the data being returned.

The Xero API returns data in XML format. For example, the result of a call to retrieve a particular payment might look like this:

<Payment>
  <PaymentID>b26fd49a-cbae-470a-a8f8-bcbc119e0379</PaymentID>
  <Date>2016-12-12T00:00:00</Date>
  <Amount>281.25</Amount>
  <CurrencyRate>1.000000</CurrencyRate>
  <PaymentType>ACCRECPAYMENT</PaymentType>
  <Status>AUTHORISED</Status>
  <UpdatedDateUTC>2017-02-20T08:22:27.847</UpdatedDateUTC>
  <IsReconciled>true</IsReconciled>
  <Account>
    <AccountID>297c2dc5-cc47-4afd-8ec8-74990b8761e9</AccountID>
  </Account>
  <Invoice>
    <Contact>
      <ContactID>3e1d3ba5-609a-4e10-bb1d-75b6d31ce922</ContactID>
      <Name>Seymour Grimes</Name>
    </Contact>
    <Type>ACCREC</Type>
    <InvoiceID>d3cb96c6-8f3a-45ec-a261-0a7b65d4b877</InvoiceID>
    <InvoiceNumber>OIT00504</InvoiceNumber>
  </Invoice>
</Payment>

If you don't already have a data structure in which to store the data you retrieve, you'll have to create a schema for your data tables. Then, for each value in the response, you'll need to identify a predefined datatype (INTEGER, DATETIME, etc.) and build a table that can receive them. Xero's documentation should tell you what fields are provided by each endpoint, along with their corresponding datatypes.

Complicating things is the fact that the records retrieved from the source may not always be "flat" – some of the objects may actually be lists. This means you'll likely have to create additional tables to capture the unpredictable cardinality in each record.

You must replicate data from your SaaS applications to a data warehouse (such as Redshift) before you can report on it using QuickSight. Once you specify a data source you want to connect to, you must specify a host name and port, database name, and username and password to get access to the data. You then choose the schema you want to work with, and a table within that schema. You can add additional tables by specifying them as new datasets from the main QuickSight page.

QuickSights provides both a visual report builder and the ability to use SQL to select, join, and sort data. QuickSight lets you combine visualizations into dashboards that you can share with others, and automatically generate and send reports via email.

At this point you've coded up a script or written a program to get the data you want and successfully moved it into your data warehouse. But how will you load new or updated data? It's not a good idea to replicate all of your data each time you have updated records. That process would be painfully slow and resource-intensive.

Instead, identify key fields that your script can use to bookmark its progression through the data and use to pick up where it left off as it looks for updated data. Auto-incrementing fields such as updated_at or created_at work best for this. When you've built in this functionality, you can set up your script as a cron job or continuous loop to get new data as it appears in Xero.

And remember, as with any code, once you write it, you have to maintain it. If Xero modifies its API, or the API sends a field with a datatype your code doesn't recognize, you may have to modify the script. If your users want slightly different information, you definitely will have to.