Xero Blog

One of great things about Xero is how it saves you time by taking care of the mundane and repetitive aspects of running a small business. In today’s release we added more features on this theme, so I thought now was a good time to present these and give an overview of some of Xero’s existing time savers.

(Repeating) manual journals

If you’re a business owner, you may not care too much about manual journals. Fair enough, but your accountant or bookkeeper certainly will and we think they (and nearly 300 voters on Community) are going to like another time-saving update.

Much like repeating invoices, it’s now possible to create repeating journals. Great for apportioning costs throughout the year or making regular adjustments.

Find out more about repeating manual journals.

Bank reconciliation

At the heart of Xero is the way we’ve simplified getting transactions from your bank into Xero. In traditional accounting software you spent hours manually entering data and then reconciling this with your bank accounts. In Xero, we’ve brought these processes together into what we call Bank Reconciliation.

Xero is smart. It knows when a deposit is a payment against an invoice. It knows when money leaving your account is for a bill. It remembers when you’ve classified a similar transaction before. It’s like magic!

Find out more about bank reconciliation.

Bank rules

You can define your own rules that tell Xero what to do with specific bank transactions during bank reconciliation. For example, you can create a rule that says whenever you spend money at any of the gas stations you visit, to code it to Automotive Expenses.

During bank reconciliation the rule will match incoming statement lines and all you have to do is press OK to confirm.

In the last release, we extended bank rules with more control over which part of a bank transaction to use as the reference in Xero.

Find out more about bank rules.

Repeating invoices

If you pay/receive regular payments for things like rent, subscriptions or any other recurring transaction for the same amount then repeating invoices are ideal. You define the invoice and how often it should be created, Xero takes care of the rest.

Monday’s simple, yet powerful update, allows you to define dynamic placeholders that refer to the invoice (or bill) date.

On the reference, or any line of the invoice, you can insert placeholders for the week, month or year of the invoice, making them easier to find and more informative for your customers.

Find out more about repeating invoices.

Email templates

Email templates allow you define standard messages and quickly pre-populate emails you send to your customers. Not only does this save time typing but it’s a great way to make sure you don’t miss any important information your customers need to know about, while keeping things consistent and accurate.

You can add placeholders to messages that will automatically be replaced with information specific to each client and invoice.

In response to this Community thread, we’ve included a new placehold for the invoice reference – great if you use the reference for a project description or customer reference.

Find out more about email templates.

Avoiding duplicate contacts

Whenever you type a new contact name in bank reconciliation, invoices or other documents, Xero conveniently creates a new contact record for you – great, more time saving! But have you ever accidentally created a duplicate contact by mistyping their name or using an alternative spelling?

To help avoid this, we’ve added a small visual enhancement to let you know Xero doesn’t recognise the contact name and will create a new one.

Simple!

But wait there’s more

Not everything in this release is about saving time. There new stuff that’s more beautiful, informative and compliant – all important stuff when you’re running a small business.

• New editable dashboard with cash summary widget – am sure you didn’t miss this update! Tony’s recent post gives more details about this and what else to expect.
• Copy credit notes.
• For our UK users who have registered for the VAT MOSS Scheme, we’ve added a new tax rate type that makes reporting a breeze.
• New columns available for new Account Transactions report – gross, net, tax, tax rate, tax rate name and tracking.
• Practice staff can add disclaimers to all new reports.
• Import invoices, bills and credit notes as tax inclusive.
• and lots more

Hope there’s something in the last release for all of you – if you’re having a break over the holidays, have fun, and we’ll catch up again next year.