Last updated: 4th May 2020
Anna Curzon, Xero’s Chief Product Officer, announced Business Snapshot at Xerocon London in 2019 and it has since been piloted by almost one thousand organisations globally. The feature provides a visual dashboard of key financial metrics, so you can quickly see how your business is doing and start a deeper conversation with your advisor.
Business Snapshot displays Xero data in beautiful charts, tables and at-a-glance figures that make it easy to compare profit and loss, turnover, expenses and efficiency between different periods. It can also help you manage cash flow, by allowing you to see your cash balance and the average time it takes to get paid and pay suppliers, all on the one page.
Access the pilot program
While the feature is still in pilot phase and the functionality is quite limited, we know how useful it will be to small businesses and advisors during COVID-19. So we’re extending the pilot to all Xero customers with read-only, standard + reports, and advisor roles in Business Edition plans from 4 May 2020. It will be rolled out in a phased approach and can be accessed under the ‘Business’ tab in Xero.
The pilot version of Business Snapshot will be available until 31 August 2020. We hope it will help you:
- Understand the impact of COVID-19 on your revenue compared to the same period last year
- Look at trends for revenue and expenses, to help with projections for business recovery
- See your largest costs and consider how you can reduce them or negotiate payment terms
- Look at the balance of assets, liabilities and equity, so you can review your funding structure
Coming soon
Business Snapshot is part of a broader suite of work we’re doing to help small businesses manage their cash flow. We are also piloting a Short Term Cash Flow feature that visually projects your bank balance 30 days into the future, showing you the impact of existing bills and invoices if they’re paid on time.
We hope to extend the Short Term Cash Flow pilot to all customers soon, to ensure you have the tools you need to stay on top of your cash flow during this period of uncertainty.
Wow so similar to my product SME Snapshot released into your market place several months ago!!
Hi Tyronne, we’re always working to help small businesses succeed by giving them simple tools to make the most of their financials. We’re committed to an open ecosystem and by providing these simple features, we raise awareness of the category and ultimately increase the number of our subscribers who are given the option to choose a more advanced or dedicated solution. ^BA
Love this and think those direction will set Xero apart from the competition.
My wish list of other ways to extend this is to compare to other similar businesses. Xero have all the data and could really gives advisors/CFOs additional data points to help their customers.
Thanks Colm – we’re really excited about this too 🙂 Hope you can join us on the pilot. ^BA
Totally agree with this idea. Great thinking. Thanks.
Image is so small and I cannot read anything. Can you upload the original image.
Thanks for your feedback Chris – we will take a look. Thanks – BA
Any update on when the full roll-out will be yet?
Hi Danny, thanks for your comment. The feature is still in pilot phase and the functionality is quite limited – however, we’re extending the pilot to all Xero customers with read-only, standard + reports, and advisor roles in Business Edition plans as of today (4 May 2020). We have just updated the blog post to let you know more. Please have another read. Thanks!
I really like the new report. Could you please look at more flexibility in the period covered – in particular, the YTD report to finish at the end of the previous month (instead of today) to be consistent with the rest of our monthly reporting.
Hi Julie, thanks so much for your feedback – I will pass it on to my team here to have a look at. Have a nice day!
Hi again, Julie – I have just caught up with the team in regards to your feedback and they have informed that we are looking to add more date ranges and enable users to customise the date ranges. Please feel free to let us know if you have any other feedback by raising a ticket here -> http://support.xero.com. Thanks so much!
the profit figure should be from the end of the prior month ideally.
a cashflow summary broken down into cashflow from operations, investments etc would be good as well.
this is a useful page.
Hi Cameron, thanks so much for your feedback. We are looking into different ways to enrich our snapshot and cashflow tools, and we will definitely consider your feedback when prioritising what needs to be done. Thanks again!
Are we able to customise this to include other accounts? For instance, I noticed the report can only include one gst account which is the one and only xero gst accouny.
Hi Karl, unfortunately this ability does not exist at the moment but we are working on enhancing the business snapshot to hopefully allow users to customise it in the future. Watch this space!