When running a business, business owners are always looking for ways to minimise their time spent on administrative tasks. That’s where Xero comes into play as they have a lot of powerful features that business owners can use to improve their efficiency in running their books so they can focus on generating more profits.
Below are 7 features Xero offers to improve your efficiency:
Cloud access
With Xero available on the Cloud, you will be able to access your Xero file any time, anywhere as long as you have a laptop or smart phone with internet access. You can run your business on the go and are no longer stuck at your office work desk.
Bank feeds
Automatic bank feeds allow your bank to send through bank transactions to your Xero file directly. It happens behind the scenes daily – you wouldn’t even notice it! This vastly improves the timeliness of reconciling business transactions, not to mention more accuracy (less typo!) in the data recorded in Xero.
Bank rules
With automatic bank feeds, many business owners will be able to reconcile their bank transactions daily, providing them with an up to date overview of how well their businesses are travelling. Generally, some transactions are repetitive, such as monthly subscription fees, or certain types of income (e.g. Shopify payments paid via Paypal for example). As these transactions will always be reconciled to certain accounts, you can set up bank rules so Xero can suggest the rules to you as long as the criteria is met. This again will save considerable amount of time for business owners – instead of manually typing in the details during reconciliation, a bank rule can be applied which helps pre-fill certain fields, all you need to do is to click “OK” and that’s it!
Tracking categories
For businesses who have multiple streams of income, setting up tracking categories allows them to see the profitability of each stream of their business, and they can tailor different strategies to improve each business stream.
Online File storage – Hubdoc
Hubdoc is the online file storage that is available to any Xero standard subscriptions. It allows business owners to upload their a photo or copy of their bills onto the platform, where Hubdoc will analyze and “read” the bills and convert them into a draft bill for you to process and publish in Xero. Once they are published to Xero, depending on your preference, you can then reconcile each bill against a bank transaction straight away. This is a huge time saver for those who have a lot of bills to process, and improves the accuracy by reducing the amount of typing required.
Dashboard customization
Because every business is different in terms of their needs Xero allows business owners to customize their dashboards so they can see what they want to see. A few items you can add on the dashboard are main business bank accounts, invoices owed to you, bills you need to pay and watchlist of accounts that are important for you to monitor.
Payroll access
You can also manage your payroll through Xero and comply to the ATO’s Single Touch Payroll requirements. With a few clicks you can setup a new employee, process and file a payrun with the ATO. It also provides your employees with a Payroll portal where they can login, record when they work on a timesheet, update their personal details, request and apply for leave and view their payslips.
Need help with your Xero? We provide one-on-one Xero training to tailor suit your needs, we also offer ongoing assistance to answer any day-to-day Xero questions you may have.
