Enter your idea

We are currently building an automation workflow to support payroll processing for a UK-based organisation with ~250 employees and have identified a significant limitation in the Xero Payroll UK API.

At present, the API allows retrieval of pay runs and payslips (GET), but does not support creating or updating payslips or pay run data (POST/PUT), unlike the AU/NZ payroll APIs which do have these functions.

This creates a major gap for organisations that:

Generate payroll data externally (e.g. roster systems, care management platforms, or custom workflows)
Require bulk upload of calculated earnings, reimbursements, and adjustments
Need to avoid manual input of large volumes of payroll data into the Xero UI

In our case:

Payroll is generated externally and includes multiple pay elements per employee (care, travel, mileage, etc.)
Manual entry into Xero is tedious at this scale (250+ employees per run)
Timesheet-based integrations do not fit our data model, as we are working with calculated totals rather than hours

We attempted to implement this via the API but found that:

POST/update operations for payslips and pay runs are not available in the UK Payroll API
Equivalent functionality exists in AU/NZ APIs, but cannot be used with UK organisations

Why this matters

Without write support Xero Payroll UK cannot be used effectively in high-volume or integrated environments.

Businesses are forced to either perform manual entry, or move payroll processing outside Xero entirely.

This limits Xero’s ability to scale with growing organisations and restricts its use in automated workflows.

Request

We would like to request:

POST and PUT support for payslips within a draft pay run
Ability to create/update earnings, reimbursements, and deduction lines via API
Consistency with AU/NZ payroll API capabilities

Impact

This would enable:

True payroll automation
Integration with external systems (e.g. rostering, care platforms, HR systems)
Significant time savings and error reduction
Retention of payroll processing within Xero rather than external systems