Xero handles the books. Empower handles the floor.

Xero tracks income and expenses at the account level, and Xero Projects can track time against projects. But it doesn't capture time automatically from the shop floor, doesn't compare quoted hours against actual hours per production stage, and doesn't give you live job cost visibility as work progresses. For manufacturing workshops, you need a dedicated job costing tool that feeds data into Xero.

Empower syncs approved timesheet data — labour hours, employee details, and job references — directly into Xero. This means payroll records match actual floor data, and job costs in Xero reflect what really happened rather than what someone typed in afterwards.

No. Xero stays your accounting system. Empower adds the shop floor layer that Xero doesn't have — automatic time capture, live job costing, production scheduling, and manufacturing reporting. Data flows from Empower into Xero, not the other way around.

Xero Projects lets you track time and costs against projects, but it's designed for service businesses (agencies, consultancies), not manufacturing. It doesn't have biometric clock-in, production-stage routing, work centre tracking, or the depth of manufacturing reporting that a workshop needs.