“We moved all our limited company clients to Xero Tax – here’s why…”

In March 2020, we launched Xero Tax – our beautiful end-to-end tax and accounts production software – built to save time, reduce errors and cut costs with a single platform workflow.

The following filing options are available, at no extra cost, to accountants and bookkeepers in practice, who are on the Xero partner programme:

• Corporation Tax and Accounts Production for micro entities
• Corporation Tax and Accounts Production for small companies (abridged) NEW filing options (you can now submit an abridged P&L and balances sheet)
• Corporation Tax and Accounts Production for small companies (full accounts) NEW

Since launching, we’ve been working hard to build new functionality that gives accountants and bookkeepers in practice increased visibility and efficiency when filing for their clients. This includes a new tax and computation summary, practice-level default disclosures, statement of changes in equity and session storage features.

Accountants and bookkeepers using Xero Tax have told us how much it’s benefited their practices and clients. We caught up with one of them, Gillian French, Director at DNA Accountants and Xero partner, to talk about her experience using Xero Tax.  

Tell us a bit about yourself and your practice?

I have over 30 years experience of working in practice, dealing with everything from bookkeeping to management accounts. 

For the last 20 years, I have run DNA Accountants with my husband Ian, seeing the turnover triple in that time. We work with all types of clients, anything from one-man-bands to family owned businesses turning over £7m.  

How did you start using Xero Tax? 

We beta-tested Xero Tax when it was still a prototype so we were aware of the potential, but we were using a desktop-based tax software at the time. In fact, we’d been using this software for over 20 years. 

In September 2019, we became increasingly frustrated with this tax software and we decided to get in touch with our Xero account manager about rolling out Xero Tax for all our accounts production and tax filing needs. 

Getting started was so easy and to top it all off, we didn’t really need any training to use Xero Tax because it’s so intuitive.

What has Xero Tax done for your practice? 

Before Xero Tax we were manually entering trial balances, from selected bookkeeping platforms to our then tax software, which was an incredibly onerous and time-consuming process. Xero and Xero Tax take this step out altogether saving us precious time and eliminating any chance of manual errors occurring. 

That’s one of the main reasons we decided to move all our 450 limited company clients to the core Xero product and Xero Tax. The two are deeply integrated so we can prepare and file statutory accounts and CTA600s all in one place. 

The move has made us entirely paperless and this proved invaluable during lockdown. With our offices shut, we could no longer rely on paper records or face-to-face meetings. Using Xero Tax enabled us to continue serving our clients because we no longer had to send out paper accounts for signing – it’s all done in the cloud.  

What are some of your favourite Xero Tax features? 

I have several favourites but I wanted to see what everyone else at DNA thought, so we did an office survey. Even though there are many Xero Tax features we love, we ultimately all came up with the same answer: The ability to e-sign the accounts at a click of a button – without this feature, I feel our work processes would have ground to a halt during lockdown.  

What advice would you give to accountants and bookkeepers who haven’t started using Xero Tax yet? 

For those that are hesitant to make the change, I’d say give it a try! It’s free as part of the Xero partner programme and the set up is straightforward. When you try it, you’ll be able to see the benefits first-hand. Using Xero Tax has brought us closer to our clients and changed the way we do business, I couldn’t recommend it enough. 

If you’re a Xero partner, visit our Xero Tax resource centre for more information and resources to get you up and running.

If you’re not yet a Xero partner, visit our Xero Tax page where you can find out more about becoming a partner and getting started with Xero Tax.