For professional services firms — consulting practices, law firms, accounting practices, architecture studios, engineering consultancies — every entry in Xero represents revenue that has already been earned. Billable time records, project milestones, retainer drawdowns, WIP balances. These are not accounting abstractions. They are the documented record of professional work delivered.
Unlike a retailer who can reconstruct sales from a POS system, or a manufacturer who can reference production records, a professional services firm whose time tracking data disappears from Xero may have limited secondary sources. The integration that fed billable hours into Xero may have cleared its source data on sync. The project notes attached to an invoice may exist nowhere else. The client approval email linked to a progress billing milestone may be the only evidence that scope change was authorised.
WOWzer is an automated Xero Backup and restore solution available on the Xero App Store at $9.95 per organisation per month, with a free trial. This article explains what WOWzer protects for professional services firms, where it applies, and where its daily backup window means you need additional practices alongside it.
Confirmed WOWzer capabilities:
What WOWzer does not deliver — stated plainly:
WOWzer's XERO Backup Solutions window is seven days on a daily cycle. It does not offer twice-daily or on-demand backups triggered before month-end billing runs. It does not offer multi-year tiered retention. It does not restore individual client histories or specific date ranges in isolation — it restores the full organisation to a new Xero org. Long-term archiving of client records requires CSV exports stored separately, not WOWzer's rolling backup alone.
The restore process is approximately 98% automated. Some post-restore configuration — reconnecting integrations, bank feeds, and user access in the new org — is manual.
Billable time records are often the most vulnerable data in a professional services Xero org. Time tracking integrations — Harvest, Toggl, and similar tools — feed entries into Xero on a sync schedule. Depending on the integration's configuration, the source data in the time tracking tool may be cleared or archived after sync, leaving Xero as the only complete record of what work was done and when.
A note on WorkflowMax: Xero acquired and subsequently sunset WorkflowMax in 2023. Firms previously using WorkflowMax have migrated to alternative job management tools. If your firm made this transition, verify that your current integration is correctly syncing to Xero and that your backup covers the migrated data.
WIP balances represent revenue earned but not yet invoiced. For professional services firms, particularly those with milestone billing or retainer structures, WIP balances can be substantial — and the relational data connecting time entries, expenses, and billing milestones is complex enough that corruption is difficult to reconstruct manually.
Attachments on invoices — engagement letters, scope change approvals, client authorisation emails — may be your only evidence of what was agreed. WOWzer captures attachments as part of the full-org backup. This is a meaningful protection for professional services firms where the attachment is sometimes more important than the transaction it is attached to.
Trust account and retainer records for legal practices require particular care. Law society regulations treat trust account record integrity as a professional compliance obligation, not merely good practice. The specific retention requirements vary by jurisdiction — in Australia, the Legal Profession Uniform Law applies; in Canada, requirements vary by law society and province. Verify your specific jurisdiction's requirements rather than applying a general figure. WOWzer backs up Xero data — if your firm runs trust accounting through a dedicated trust accounting system separate from Xero, WOWzer's coverage does not extend to that system.
Consider a consulting firm using Harvest for time tracking. A synchronisation error causes six days of billable time entries for two consultants to be duplicated in Xero — inflating WIP and creating invoicing errors. The issue is caught during the weekly billing review.
With WOWzer, the backup from before the sync error ran is available. A full-org restore to a new Xero organisation recovers the clean time entry state. The consulting firm re-imports the correct data from Harvest and issues accurate invoices.
This is a hypothetical scenario. It applies when the problem is caught within the 7-day rolling backup window.
Consider an architecture firm with 15 active projects using a project management integration. A misconfigured integration update breaks the relational links between time entries, disbursements, and billing milestones across multiple projects — discovered two days after the update was applied.
With WOWzer, the backup from immediately before the update provides a clean restore point. Full-org restore recovers the project relationships, WIP balances, and billing milestone connections as they existed pre-update. The integration is reconfigured correctly before being reconnected.
This is a hypothetical scenario. Recovery depends on the error being discovered within the 7-day window.
Where WOWzer does not help: If a time tracking integration has been silently corrupting data for three weeks before anyone notices the project profitability reports look wrong, that falls outside the 7-day rolling window. The restore point does not exist. At that point, recovery requires your time tracking system's own records, manual reconstruction, and potentially a conversation with your software vendor.
WOWzer's daily Xero Backup Services is automated — you cannot trigger an on-demand backup immediately before a billing run. What you can do is use the browse-in-cloud functionality to verify the most recent backup looks complete and accurate before beginning a major invoicing cycle. If the most recent backup shows correct WIP balances and complete time entries, you have reasonable confidence in your starting point.
For high-value month-end periods, the most practical additional protection is a CSV export of your current Xero data immediately before the billing run. This is not a WOWzer feature — it is a Xero export function. Combined with WOWzer's daily backup, it gives you a same-day reference point alongside the rolling backup window.
Before updating or adding any Xero integration — time tracking, project management, CRM — verify that WOWzer's most recent backup is current and complete. Because WOWzer runs daily, you should be working within 24 hours of a clean backup. Browse the backup to spot-check a few client records and recent invoices before proceeding with the change.
Document the integration state before changes and monitor closely in the 48 hours after. If something goes wrong, the window for restoration is the next few days — inside the rolling backup cycle.
Quarterly, browse a recent backup and open two or three invoice attachments to confirm they are present and readable. WOWzer's Backup Xero includes attachments, but verifying this periodically — particularly after changes to how your firm stores or names documents in Xero — ensures you are not discovering a gap at the moment you need to produce a signed engagement letter in a billing dispute.
WOWzer's 7-day rolling window is not a compliance archive. For professional services firms with 7-year or longer retention obligations — and most have them across accounting, legal, and engineering disciplines — the practice is straightforward: export CSV archives regularly, store them securely outside Xero, and document your retention policy with the specific legislation that justifies each retention period.
| Jurisdiction | Retention Requirement | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Australia | 5 years from relevant date (tax records) | ATO |
| Australia | 7 years (financial records) | Corporations Act 2001 |
| Canada | 6 years from end of relevant tax year | CRA |
| Australia / Canada (legal) | Verify with your law society | Jurisdiction-specific |
| Australia / Canada (CPA) | 7 years typical — verify with your professional body | CPA Australia / CPA Canada |
Do not apply figures across jurisdictions without verification. ATO, CRA, and IRS requirements are not interchangeable.
Because WOWzer restores to a new Xero organisation, you can run a full restore test without touching your live org. Do this at least annually, ideally quarterly. Confirm that time entries, project relationships, invoice attachments, and WIP data are present in the restored org. Document the test. Know the post-restore manual steps required — reconnecting integrations, bank feeds, user access — before you are doing them under pressure.
Professional services firms carry professional indemnity insurance. Most policies have documentation requirements — the ability to produce time records, engagement letters, scope approvals, and billing histories in the event of a dispute or claim. A firm that cannot produce these records because they were lost and not backed up is in a more difficult position than the underlying dispute might warrant.
WOW Backup and Restore at $9.95 per organisation per month is a modest line item against the documentation risk it mitigates. A single billing dispute involving a high-value engagement — where the ability to produce the original time records and signed engagement letter from two years ago is material — recovers years of subscription cost in one event.
For accounting firms managing their own Xero org and potentially their clients' orgs, the single dashboard is worth noting. Each org is $9.95 per month. An accounting firm with its own org plus five client orgs under management costs $59.70 per month across six organisations.
Sophisticated clients — particularly corporate clients of law firms and accounting practices — increasingly ask about data security practices during firm selection. The ability to say that client records held in Xero are automatically backed up daily, that attachments are included, and that a full-organisation restore is available gives a concrete, credible answer to a question that some competitors cannot answer at all.
This is not a marketing claim. It is an accurate description of what WOWzer does, framed as a professional practice standard rather than a technical feature.
WOWzer is available on the Xero App Store with a free trial. One-click OAuth connects your Xero organisation. The first backup runs automatically within 24 hours. Browse the backup to confirm your data, including a few invoice attachments, is present.
For firms with multiple Xero organisations — your own practice plus client orgs you manage — connect each separately through the single dashboard. At $9.95 per org per month, three orgs cost $29.85. Ten orgs cost $99.50.
Start your free trial on the Xero App Store.
For professional services firms, Xero is not just accounting software — it is the system of record for professional work delivered and revenue earned. Billable time entries, WIP balances, project relationships, retainer records, and the attachments that prove what was agreed are all worth protecting.
WOWzer's daily automated Xero backup Files with full-org restore gives professional services firms a genuine recovery option within the 7-day rolling window. It includes attachments. It is $9.95 per organisation per month. It restores to a new org, which means a restore test does not touch your live data.
It does not cover everything — same-day data loss, problems discovered weeks later, and long-term compliance archiving require additional practices. But as the automated daily foundation of a professional data protection approach, it is straightforward to justify and implement.
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