Xero announces machine learning system for SMB invoicing

The machine learning automation technology - which is currently without an official title - will automatically suggest the appropriate account codes for an invoice based on past invoicing behavior of the business owner and their advisor.

While the use case is indeed specific, Xero posits that small businesses frequently mislabel invoices, which in turn creates more work for themselves and their accountants down the road.

Xero says early trials of the machine learning system have demonstrated improvements to the invoice process. After one invoice, machine learning techniques understood invoicing behavior in general better than Xero experts. By the fourth invoice, the system was accurate over 80% of the time and by the 50th invoice, the accuracy consistently surpassed 90%.

The technology will initially be available to a handful of Xeros small business customers for testing before launching in general availability by the middle of 2017.