Square makes accounting easier for merchants by integrating with Xero

Square can make accepting credit cards easy for small businesses. Things get less simple, however, when it comes time to do the books for those businesses -- something that often involves painstakingly inputting Square transactions into accounting software manually. To lessen that misery, last November Square launched a partnership with QuickBooks, and today the company announced another integration, this time with accounting program Xero.

Starting today, Xero customers can connect their Square account and automatically import daily sales data into the program. We chatted with one of the merchants who has been beta testing the integration, Andy Ciordia from The Secret Chocolatier in Charlotte, NC, who told us that "anyone who has been doing this manually has a bit of gray hair" because of it. He says that while the partnership just brings in the first level of integration his business needs, later on he hopes they'll add support for individual inventory items. In its current form, it's already saving him four hours a week in accounting time. That's time we hope he spends creating more wild chocolate concoctions, like this Midnight Delight cake in a jar.