PLM Accounting

Connect Duro PLM to Xero with AI

Duro PLM and Xero sit at opposite ends of the hardware lifecycle: Duro defines what the product is — parts, revisions, BOMs, change orders — and Xero records what it cost. Almost no one connects them directly, because on paper they share nothing: Duro has no ledger, Xero has no concept of a revision. In practice they share everything, one hop apart: every Xero bill for parts traces back to a Duro part number at some revision, whether or not anyone wrote that down.

bomrail makes that implicit link queryable. Through one hosted MCP endpoint, Claude can walk a Duro BOM and pull the Xero spend behind each purchased component; or start from an ECO and find the bills that paid for now-superseded revisions. This is the cost side of change management that PLM tools structurally cannot see and accounting tools structurally cannot express.

The connection is read-only on both sides and every tool call is logged. Duro remains engineering’s source of truth; Xero remains finance’s. bomrail adds the ability to ask questions that require both — without building the BOM-cost spreadsheet that every hardware team builds, and every hardware team lets rot.

What becomes answerable

bomrail exposes both systems as read-only MCP tools. These are the joins an agent can make on demand:

BOM cost roll-ups

Walk a Duro BOM at any revision and attach real paid prices from Xero bills to each purchased line.

ECO cost exposure

For a given change order, the Xero bills and outstanding commitments that reference affected parts.

Revision-stale spend

Bills paid for parts at revisions that a released ECO has since superseded — scrap risk, quantified in currency.

Supplier-to-part mapping

Which Xero suppliers actually build which Duro parts, reconstructed from bill lines and PO references.

Example: what did this ECO actually cost?

ECO-201 respins a PCB. Three weeks after release, engineering wants to know the damage. The old answer is an argument; the grounded one comes from asking: "Total up spend against the parts ECO-201 superseded, from its release date to today." The agent pulls the affected items and revision bumps from Duro, finds the Xero bills whose lines reference those part numbers, filters by date, and answers: $8,900 across four bills — of which one $3,200 bill was for boards at the old revision, ordered two days after the ECO released.

That last finding is the process gap worth fixing: someone ordered from a stale drawing. An agent that sees both systems catches it in weeks-old data; a human reconciliation would have caught it at the annual cost review, if ever.

Frequently asked questions

Duro and Xero have no integration — how does this work at all?

bomrail does not integrate them in the traditional sense. Each system gets its own MCP tools, and an AI agent joins the data by reasoning: part numbers and PO references on Xero bill lines connect to Duro part records. Where the link is ambiguous, the agent says so instead of guessing silently.

Our Xero bills do not always reference part numbers. Is this useless then?

Partly degraded, not useless. Supplier, amount, and date still support fuzzy matching, and the agent flags which joins are inferred. Teams often use the mismatch report itself as motivation to start putting PO and part references on bills.

Can the agent modify a BOM or release an ECO in Duro?

No. The Duro connection is read-only, and Xero likewise. Write actions in bomrail exist only on the Growth plan, only for specifically enabled operations, and only with per-action human approval — releasing ECOs is not one we plan to offer.

What does "revision-aware" actually mean here?

The tools carry revision context natively: a BOM query is answered at a specific revision, and spend questions can distinguish rev C purchases from rev D purchases. Generic integration platforms flatten this into "the part", which is precisely how procurement data goes wrong.

Related

Run Duro and Xero?

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