How to onboard a new employee into Xero with signed paperwork

Onboarding is where paperwork goes to die. A new employee or contractor signs an agreement, and then someone has to create their record, file the signed document, and make sure payroll and accounts can find it. Skip a step and you have a compliance gap and a hunt for the document later.

Done well, onboarding into Xero should be a non-event. Here is how.

Step 1: Save your onboarding documents as templates

In SignAndGo, save your employment agreement, contractor agreement, and induction forms as reusable templates. Now sending an onboarding pack is a few clicks, not a rebuild every time.

Step 2: Connect Xero and turn on contact creation

Connect Xero in Settings, Integrations, then turn on auto-filing and "Create a Xero contact if the signer is new". This is the setting that matters for onboarding: a person who has never been in Xero will get a contact created automatically.

Step 3: Send the onboarding pack

Add the new starter, choose which Xero entity they belong to, and send. They receive an email and sign on any device. Your team does nothing while you wait.

Step 4: They appear in Xero, filed and ready

The moment the pack is signed, the new starter shows up in the right Xero organisation as a contact, with their signed paperwork attached, ready for payroll or accounts payable. No re-keying, no chasing, no lost documents.

For businesses with multiple entities

If you run a group of companies, each new starter files into the correct entity from day one. A worker onboarded into one entity lands in that entity's Xero, never another. See multi-entity Xero e-signatures for how that works.

Every signature is legally binding

All signed onboarding documents are legally binding under the Electronic Transactions Act 1999, with an audit certificate recording signer identity, IP, timestamp and a tamper-evident hash chain, plus a verification ID anyone can check.

Read the full Xero onboarding overview or the Xero integration.

Frequently asked questions