# Reconciliation needs capacity beside live Xero traffic

Historical checks and retries share integration resources with current work. Schedule them so recovery does not starve new business operations.

By Cobnex editorial. Published 2026-09-10. Updated 2026-09-11.

## Identify competing workloads

List live exports, status refreshes, historical reconciliation and retry processing. Measure their request patterns and the organisations they affect.

Use the current Xero limits and response signals for the application's actual access tier and endpoints. Avoid hard-coding a remembered quota into the operating plan.

Keep provider throttling separate from local worker capacity so adding workers does not simply increase rejected calls.

## Allocate a bounded recovery share

Give reconciliation a controlled concurrency and request budget while preserving capacity for important current work. Adjust according to observed provider responses and the business priority of the backlog.

For an illustrative local scheduler allowing ten work slots, reserving some for live operations can prevent a large historical scan from occupying all of them. The actual split should follow measured demand and the provider's constraints.

Use fair scheduling across organisations so one large backlog does not block every smaller customer connection.

## Avoid unnecessary full scans

Use supported identifiers, filters and incremental mechanisms where appropriate, while retaining a periodic reconciliation strategy for missed or uncertain changes.

Do not assume an incremental cursor proves every historical mapping is correct. Balance efficient routine work with targeted checks for known uncertainty.

Preserve progress so an interrupted scan resumes without repeatedly reading the same entire history.

## Measure useful completion

Track confirmed operations and resolved discrepancies per unit of work, not just API calls per second. A fast loop repeatedly inspecting the same ambiguous invoice is not useful throughput.

Observe backlog age and the oldest high-priority unresolved item. Estimate recovery time from the net completion rate after new work arrives.

The capacity plan should keep live integration usable while making measurable progress on reconciliation. More parallel requests are helpful only when the provider and local state model can support them safely.

## Sources

- [Xero: OAuth API limits](https://developer.xero.com/documentation/guides/oauth2/limits/)