Reveal vs Xero Ask: asking clients, or not having to

Xero Ask and Reveal both deal with getting what you need from clients, in different ways. Ask, part of Xero HQ, sends clients queries by email; they log in securely, answer and attach files, and you track who has replied. Reveal doesn’t ask for invoices and receipts: once the client approves access, it retrieves them from their inbox and supplier portals and links each one to its transaction.

Ask is built into Xero and ideal for questions. Reveal is for documents that already exist somewhere digital.

At a glance

	Xero Ask	Reveal
What it does	Sends queries and collects answers and files	Retrieves invoices and receipts from client-approved sources
What the client does	Logs in, answers each query and attaches files	Approves access once, from a link. No app, no account
Templates	Reusable queries with sections and questions	Not needed: nothing to fill in
Tracking	Replies and outstanding queries in Xero HQ	Each transaction shows evidence found, or not found
Best for	Questions only the client can answer	Invoices and receipts sitting in inboxes, portals and chats
Works with	Xero HQ	Xero, QuickBooks, Sage, FreeAgent, Zoho and others

How Xero Ask works

From Xero HQ, you build a query, or start from a template, and send it to any of the client’s contact email addresses, or to several clients at once. The client gets an email and logs in securely to reply, whether or not they use Xero. They can attach files to any answer, and their answers save as they go so they can finish later. You can see which queries are still outstanding.

For practices already on Xero HQ, it’s convenient: the questions and answers sit alongside the rest of the client’s work.

How Reveal works

The client clicks a link and connects their email. There’s no app to download and no account to create. Reveal reads the mailbox read-only, to recognise receipts and invoices: it can’t send, change or delete anything, and the practice sees only the financial documents it retrieves, never the inbox. Supplier portals are connected once, and some ask the client to complete a security step.

For each transaction, Reveal finds the evidence, links it to the payment and shows why it matched and where it came from. It extracts the details and suggests a treatment, but it doesn’t decide. Your team reviews it before it goes to Xero, or to whichever ledger the client uses. When nothing is found, the transaction is marked not found rather than filled with a guess.

The real difference: who does the work

A query is still a request. The client has to log in, find each invoice and attach it, and an unanswered query means another reminder. That’s fine for a question like “what was this £400 payment for?”, which only the client can answer. It’s slow for “please send the invoice for this payment”, when the invoice is already sitting in their inbox.

Reveal handles the second kind. It finds the invoice, so the query never needs sending.

Can you use both?

Yes. Let Reveal retrieve the invoices and receipts first, then use Ask for whatever is left: the transactions with no evidence anywhere, and the questions only the client can answer. Your queries get shorter, and clients answer the ones that matter.

Which should you choose?

• Xero Ask, if what you need from clients is mostly answers and information, and you work in Xero HQ.
• Reveal, if most of your queries are requests for invoices and receipts that already exist digitally.

Sources

• Ask in Xero HQ, Xero Central
• Create or manage an Ask query template, Xero Central
• Integrations and Trust Centre, Reveal

Checked on 2 October 2026. Products change: if anything here is out of date, tell us at hello@revealos.com and we’ll correct it.