Xero

Xero is used in many accounting firms across the globe for bookkeeping, audit trails, efficient administration, and the elimination of errors. This incredible tool offers affordable monthly subscriptions that support accrual and cash basis accounting.

Features:

User-Friendly Interface
It takes time to learn how to use Xero. Luckily, the interface comes with videos and articles to guide you through the process. It also offers a free comprehensive accounting guide that helps users to set up a Xero account.

A Customizable Dasboard
Xero has a re-arrangeable dashboard with graphs labeled bank accounts, invoices not yet paid, bills to pay, and the total cash flow.

Sales Overview
In the latest update, Xero added the sales overview with charts and graphs that break down invoices and estimates. While it only provides one invoice template, users can create more templates.

Time-Saving Features
These include recurring invoices, automatic invoice reminders, and default payments for invoicing and payrolls.

Unique Xero to Xero Feature
The Xero-to-Xero feature allows easy sending and receiving invoices to and from other Xero users.

Quotes
Businesses can create online quotes and convert them into invoices or purchase orders using the Xero software. One can also duplicate past quotes and add internal quotes. Interestingly, Xero uses the same templates for quotes.

Client Portal
Adding the client portal to the Xero software sets it apart from other accounting software. Here, customers can view, print, and pay invoices online. Moreover, existing and new clients can comment, accept or decline quotes online.

Contact Management
In the contact management feature, businesses add basic contact information, discounts, and tax raise for customers. They can also create contact groups, where one can target VIP clients or create a group for loyal customers. This feature also has a new smart list that helps users email all customers at once while offering promotional deals.

Expense Tracking
Businesses can link Xero to their bank accounts or manually import bank statements into the Xero app. This helps to categorize expenses and manage transactions. Xero has a smart categorization that remembers past transactions and automatically categorizes and updates new transactions by clicking the expense trucking button.

This feature is beneficial to established plan-only users. It includes additional features like expense claims, automatic receipt scans, and extra expense analytics. This means full expense management.

Bank Reconciliation Reports
Xero creates a chart of accounts based on the organization plan and the type of business. One can manage fixed assets and choose between depreciation schedules such as declining balances and fixed rates. One can also enable current bills by attaching relevant documents to Xero.

Checks
Xero can write, customize and print checks to customers directly from the bank account.

Inventory
Xero has an inventory where one can add products or services they sell. Additionally, one can add the product description, add attachments to items, track inventories and make adjustments. The advantage of tracking inventories with Xero is that it keeps tabs on the stock levels, average purchase amount, and the number of products quoted.

Reports
Xero offers comprehensive reports on profits, loss, sales and budgeting, and cash flow. These reports can be customized for easy access. The reports are 55 in total.

One can also create a budget manager report that ranges from 3 months to 6 months, or 1 year depending on the goal one wants to achieve. This budget can be accessed any time to evaluate growth and determine whether the goal is being met.

Other features include class tracking that can be classified into departments, locations, and teams, purchase orders that may detail delivery dates and supply orders, and packing that can be downloaded from Xero.

Pricing Tiers:

Starter
$25 per month

Send quotes and 20 invoices
Enter 5 bills
Reconcile bank transactions
Capture bills and receipts with Hubdoc
Short-term cash flow and business snapshot

Standard
$40 per month

Send invoices and quotes
Enter bills
Reconcile bank transactions
Capture bills and receipts with Hubdoc
Bulk reconcile transactions
Short-term cash flow and business snapshot

Premium
$54 per month

Send invoices and quotes
Enter bills
Reconcile bank transactions
Capture bills and receipts with Hubdoc
Short-term cash flow and business snapshot
Bulk reconcile transactions
Use multiple currencies

Benefits:

Easy Data Entry
Xero has helped ease manual data entry that is usually time-consuming and often leaves room for errors. Xero digital software automatically remembers past transactions and updates the new ones. Additionally, one does not need to manually key in figures. Instead, they can take photos of invoices and payrolls and upload them into Xero, automatically updating the figures.

Integrations
Another advantage of using Xero is that it is easy to integrate it into other apps and software packages, such as bank accounts, reports, and payrolls.

Audit Trails Effectively
Xero captures audit trails effectively and in real time. It captures the transaction chain: who has entered what, who has approved it, who has edited what, and when. This helps business owners to review in case something has gone wrong without pointing fingers and shifting blame.

Customisable Reporting
Xero also allows room for reporting. One can easily customize and adjust the reporting tools to help monitor growth.