Xero
Cin7 Core
Real Estate
EquifaxSandboxes
Trialling in a sandbox is a good idea. There's one behaviour you need to know about first, because the default is not what most people expect.
When you refresh a sandbox from production it copies the Xero connection with it. If the ongoing sync was running in production, the sandbox keeps syncing against your real Xero organisation — creating and updating records in your live accounts.
Nobody intends this. It's simply what a refresh copies.
After every sandbox refresh
Do one of these before anything else:
- Stop the ongoing sync in the sandbox — Manage Syncing → Stop Ongoing Sync, or
- Disconnect the Xero organisation in the sandbox entirely
Then, if you actually want to test there, connect a Xero Demo Company instead. Xero gives every account one free, it comes with sample contacts, products and invoices, and you can reset it whenever you like.
Why a Demo Company rather than the real one
A sandbox is where you experiment: test invoices, repeated syncs, changed mappings. Pointed at your real Xero organisation, every one of those lands in your actual accounts and has to be voided or deleted by hand.
The same Xero organisation connected to both a sandbox and production means two connectors writing to it, competing with each other and creating duplicates. Disconnect the sandbox before going live.
It can also break your production connection
Xero rotates the refresh token every time it's used. A sandbox quietly renewing the same connection can consume the token production needs, which shows up later as "Reconnect needed" on the production org — see Reconnecting an expired Xero connection.
That's the strongest reason to disconnect a sandbox promptly rather than leaving it running.