Talking Cents

Xero tips and tricks from Sydney small business accountants

Here at m.a.s. accountants, the small business accountants in Sydney, we love embracing new technology, especially when we know it will make an impact on our client’s day to day small business compliance and management needs. This is just one of the reasons we love using Xero to take care of our clients bookkeeping and general business reporting. Xero as a platform for small business continues to evolve and issue new features and upgrades to its software on a regular basis. So with that in mind we thought it timely to take a quick walk through some of the more recent features that have been integrated into Xero, just in case you aren’t up to speed with them as yet.

• Inventory. When Xero was first released many small businesses/bookkeepers and accountants all kept screaming for Xero to integrate inventory into its base offering rather than being forced to take a third party add-on at extra expense. Cleary this feature was a big job for Xero as I am certain they would have put it in place much earlier if they could have. So for basic inventory you can now add item codes on all of your purchase invoices to create an inventory base on your balance sheet. Then when you create a sales invoice you simply use those very same item codes and Xero auto-magically moves your sold stock from the balance sheet to cost of sales. It’s simple and it works. The key is to have all item codes correctly set up and to ensure consistency across all of your Xero users.
• Find and recode. This is a great little tool that allows you to recode in bulk a group of transactions that have been incorrectly classified or if you just want more detailed tracking of certain expenses in Xero. Just be careful before using this feature as it can result in major changes to the look of your financial reports.
• Billable Expenses. When you have costs associated with a particular job for a client it is very easy to lose track of those items and forget to add them to the clients invoices. Recouping chargeable expenses is critical to ensuring profitability on each and every job. Now when you enter an expense in Xero you can assign that expense to a particular client contact. Then next time you create a sales invoice for that client you are automatically reminded to add those expenses into the client’s sales invoice.

For those of you already using Xero it makes sense to revisit Xero, especially their wide range of videos posted on Vimeo to make sure you are getting the most out of Xero. If you’re not using Xero yet to manage your small business finances then why not check out their free trial or give us a call for a free demo on Xero and its benefits to you and your Sydney small business accounting.