Workhorse Order & Inventory Management
Overview
Workhorse is a complete order and inventory platform — quotes, sales orders, stock, purchasing, production, despatch, invoicing and reporting — with a two-way Xero integration. Every customer gets the full platform from day one; there's no cut-down starter edition.
Most inventory software expects the business to adapt to it. Workhorse is set up the other way round — during a managed implementation, every system is configured to the business that runs it: your team's vocabulary, your documents, your workflows, and nothing you don't use. If the trade calls it a kill sheet, so does the system. By the time it goes live, it already works the way you do. Where a process genuinely needs more, targeted customisation is scoped and built — like the wholesaler whose nightly stock file from a third-party cold store now updates batch stock automatically.
Workhorse fits owner-managed product businesses whose operations have outgrown spreadsheets and starter inventory apps — teams that need operational control, not just reporting. It runs four workflows:
Made to order — configurable products, per-job bills of materials, production stages and promise dates, with work orders generated straight from sales orders Batch traceability — lot numbers captured at goods-in and carried through production to despatch, so the trace runs in both directions: supplier lot to customer delivery Wholesale & distribution — back orders, part-despatch, customer price lists, bulk order upload, EDI and webstore orders Hire & repairs — serial tracking, one record per unit with its full history, and availability across the fleet
The platform covers multi-location stock, purchasing with supplier prices and lead times, goods-in with partial receipt and landed costs, kits and assemblies, picking and despatch with courier integration, recurring invoicing, and reporting from stock value to margin by customer.
AI document processing is live: customer purchase orders and goods-received notes arrive by email, are classified, and key data is extracted into Workhorse — validated before anything is written, with a confidence score per line so only the exceptions need checking. Further AI capabilities, including natural language reporting and assisted purchasing, are rolling out with human review and full auditability.
If you hold a handful of products in one place and orders ship complete, Xero alone may genuinely be enough — and we'll say so at the discovery call.
Workhorse Order & Inventory Management + Xero
Workhorse runs the operational side of the business — orders, stock, purchasing, production and despatch — and Xero keeps the financial record. Every transaction is entered once, in Workhorse, and arrives in Xero ready for your bookkeeper: correctly coded, at the status you've chosen, with nothing to re-key or correct.
What syncs:
Invoices and credit notes — Workhorse to Xero, in real time, when set to Sent Purchase orders — Workhorse to Xero, arriving as purchase orders or as bills; your choice, set once in configuration Customers and suppliers — both directions, as Xero contacts Payment status — Xero to Workhorse: invoices and credits are marked paid or part-paid after reconciliation, with the amounts — updated automatically overnight, or on request when you want it now Tax rates, chart of accounts and tracking categories — Xero to Workhorse, so every posting uses your codes and, where you use them, your tracking categories Products — Workhorse to Xero as items
You choose which accounts invoices, purchases and stock adjustments post to, and whether invoices arrive in Xero as draft, awaiting approval or awaiting payment — set once, to match how your Xero is already run. From then on, transactions land correctly coded at the right status: your bookkeeper reconciles them, and there's nothing to re-code.
We recommend products in Xero are left untracked. Workhorse is the stock record — quantities, locations, batches and values — so there's no second stock system to keep in step. Cost of goods sold posts as a month-end journal from a dedicated Workhorse report that values the period's movements: one journal a month, and Xero stays clean in between. Per-transaction COGS is also supported where an in-month balance sheet matters.
What the integration doesn't do: as standard, invoices and credit notes don't flow from Xero into Workhorse (their payment status does), purchase orders and bills don't either, and purchase order and bill payments don't sync back. Where a business has genuinely needed more, customisation has covered it — for one customer the integration fetches purchase orders from Xero; for another it creates sales orders from Xero invoices.
The integration is connected and configured during your managed implementation — our team sets the accounts and statuses with you, confirms the connection before go-live, and checks the first transactions land in Xero as they should. After go-live, the helpdesk takes over.
Getting started
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Book a discovery call. We dig into how the business runs today — your processes, how you're managing them now, where the friction is, and what the system has to do. Sometimes the honest answer is that Xero alone still covers the need — if so, that's what we'll say.
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See Workhorse taking shape for your business. A demo call built around your exact processes, using product data relevant to your business — with examples of the configuration you'd need and a straight conversation about any customisation we think it would take. If you're an accountant or bookkeeper assessing Workhorse for a client, bring the client's Xero setup and we'll show exactly what would post where.
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Receive a functional requirements document. Then you get it in writing: how the business works now, what the system will do about it, and what it will cost. Both sides see the whole job before committing to any of it.
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Managed implementation. A project manager works through each area of the business with the people who run it — orders, stock, purchasing, production, despatch, invoicing. The system is configured area by area, and your products, customers, suppliers and prices are loaded from templates we provide. Xero is connected and authorised during this stage: your chart of accounts, tax rates and tracking categories are pulled through, and posting accounts and invoice statuses are set to match how your Xero is already run. Webstore and EDI connections — Shopify, WooCommerce and the rest — are set up in the same stage. Implementations run in weeks, not months, and if the work is tracking over or under budget, you hear about it early — in either direction.
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Go live, supported. Test data is cleared, opening stock is loaded, and the Xero connection is confirmed before cutover. Our team checks the first transactions land in Xero as they should, supports the weeks that follow, and then hands over to the helpdesk. Small changes — a new field, a report tweak, hiding something no longer used — are included in the ongoing service, so the system keeps pace as the business changes.
