At Xero, we believe every small business should have access to trusted, insightful data that helps them understand where they are now, and where they might be in the future. That’s why I’m thrilled to announce that we’ve developed a powerful new tool called Xero Analytics Plus, which is available from today.
Analytics Plus is the next evolution of our short-term cash flow and business snapshot features, with greater customisation and more accurate projections. We’ve also bundled short-term cash flow and business snapshot into a free tool called Xero Analytics. It comes with some exciting new features, to help you better manage your cash flow and measure your financial performance.
Powerful predictions at your fingertips
If you’re like many businesses, you probably use a number of different tools to predict what your cash flow might look like in the future. With Analytics Plus, you can do it all within Xero, using data from your Xero account to analyse trends and get a deeper understanding of how your business is performing. You can:
- view a projection of your bank balance 7, 30, 60 and 90 days in the future, to give you better visibility of your potential cash flow in the longer term and help you plan ahead
- see a prediction of future recurring transactions in short-term cash flow (such as Xero Payroll expenses), in addition to repeated invoices and bills that are already scheduled
- manually add or remove transactions, so you can see how certain changes might affect your cash position and do some scenario planning
- quickly analyse trends in your business performance, by customising the date ranges and account codes displayed in business snapshot
- drill down to a transaction level at any point, to see how we’ve arrived at a particular prediction
The beauty of Analytics Plus lies in its simplicity – the dashboards are clean, simple and easy to use. Even after launch, our predictive algorithms will keep improving, providing better forecasts and actionable insights to help your business thrive. It’s also useful for advisors, giving them the opportunity to have deeper conversations with clients and help them plan ahead.
What customers say about Analytics Plus
“I feel that as a business owner, Analytics Plus reduces the anxiety of cash flow. It is quite stressful when you employ people and have bills to pay. Just knowing that you’re going to have enough money to cover everything – I feel like you can’t really put a price on having your stress levels reduced.” — Small business owner, NZ
“I really like the business snapshot tool in Analytics Plus. It is very helpful for me to take a look at the year-to-date view and compare my performance (like revenue earned and revenue billed) to last year and my internal goals. I am constantly trying to grow my revenue and this is making it much easier.” — Small business owner, US
Adding more value to your Xero plan
When COVID-19 first hit, we released our short-term cash flow and business snapshot tools to all customers free of charge. These tools help you visually project your potential bank balance 7 or 30 days into the future and get insights on your business performance, so you can spot opportunities and mitigate risks ahead of time.
We’ve now bundled these tools and renamed them Xero Analytics. If you’re on a Xero business plan, they’ll still be available free of charge, located under the ‘Business’ tab on your dashboard. The tools in Analytics also have some exciting new features that add even more value to your Xero plan. You can now:
- click on any point in the short-term cash flow graph to view the cash going in or out that day
- enjoy the flexibility of grouping your cash flow projections by day, week, or invoices/bills
- choose whether you want to see your invoices and bills in a summary or table view
- see scheduled repeating bills and invoices in your short-term cash flow dashboard
- view business snapshot data either on a cash basis (when you pay or receive money) or an accrual basis (when you get a bill or raise an invoice)
You may have already noticed the beautiful new look for short-term cash flow that has been released with these changes. If you haven’t already, I encourage you to take a look at Analytics on a regular basis and talk to your advisor about what actions they would recommend, so you can focus on what’s most important in your business.
Try Analytics Plus for free until 31 January 2022
Xero Analytics Plus is now available as a paid add-on in all regions except the US and Canada, where it is included in Established and Premium plans. If you’re on a Starter, Standard or Premium plan, you can try Analytics Plus for free until 31 January 2022. Once the free period has ended, the standard pricing will apply.
If you’re a Xero partner, don’t forget to register for our upcoming webinars, where the team will show you how to make the most of Analytics Plus in your practice.
All this is a good effort. But please focus on the basic linkages and tracking of progressive billing and invoicing and billing from quotes and purchase orders. Xero is losing big time there.
Hi Anitha, thanks for sharing your feedback with us. We are aware of customer feature requests and issues across these range of products. There are different teams investing heavily in continuing to enhance these products and there is various work underway.
Could you elaborate rather than give such vague statements? What user-requested feature is being worked on?
This been the standard vapid response to community queries and feature requests from 2-3 (and more) years back that it no longer holds any meaning. Please fix basic requests asked for by paid users. E.g. receipt ID for issued receipts, customizable receipts etc. I’ve got similar responses for queries dating years back.
Hi Joseph, our teams are currently working on a number of projects – unfortunately I have no more information to share at this stage. However, we will provide more updates when we can either via the feature request discussions in Xero Central or here on the Xero Blog.
How much will it cost after 31 January 2022 please?
Hi James, we’re working to include the pricing breakdown after the free period ends on our pricing page. Please check back again soon to see the pricing for your region in your local currency. Thanks.
Some solid updates here! Thought I’d share a couple quick notes in the hope it’s helpful for the team, and maybe I’m missing that these are available there already…
We use Projects a ton, and so in the Project page, it shows the project Estimate, and percentage complete toward that estimate. Wondering if that can somehow be incorporated into Cashflow? For example, with the “Add upcoming money in or out” that data needs to be entered here again, but it’s kinda part of the Project I think. Could it pull from “draft” invoices or something like that.
Year long cashflow would be amazing. I know this is called “Short Term” ha, but most of our projects space years, so to see how things are projected to be months from now is key. 90 days doesn’t really help us much, just a quick glance to know things are going to be fine which is nice too.
Hi Ethan – thank you so much for sharing your thoughts with us. I have passed them on to my team.
One basic feature which would make Xero much better is the ability to automatically email out financial reports so they don’t need to be manually generated / emailed. Thanks
Hi Aidan, thank you so much for your comment. I have passed your feedback on to my team.
This is not something I will ever use, so I’ve no wish to pay an extra £5 a month for it. How do I opt out? It isn’t showing in my subscription page as a separate option at the moment.
Hi Chris, Xero Analytics Plus is an optional add-on so there is no obligation to pay for it unless you would like to add the functionality. Xero Analytics, which includes the basic version of short-term cash flow and business snapshot, will continue to be included in any business edition plan for free. Hope that answers your question.
If I opt in to the Xero Analytics Plus until January 2022, can I choose to opt out if I find that it does not work for me, prior to automatic charges for this optional add-on? Is there a confirmed notice period or penalty for delaying my decision … I may simply have forgotten to opt out in time.
An observation and request: It would really be useful for Xero to be upgraded / enabled to do the following:
1. Allow clients to assign specific prices to specific customers i.e. individual pricelists. If it already does, please let me know how?
2. Provide a the touch of a button, stats such as e.g. identifying your top ten customers over a specific period etc. … i.e. unless the new add-on, Analytics Plus can do this? Please confirm.
Many thanks, Ruth
Hi Ruth-Anne – thanks for your comment. Don’t worry, we will send out communications in plenty of time to remind you that Analytics Plus will start to be charged from 1 Feb 2022 and when you’ll need to downgrade by if you find that Analytics Plus is not right for you. The rest of your questions have been shared with our Product team. ^BA
Hi there Analytics Plus it great tool which you add recently. it let to have everything under “one roof”. We have one comment that 90 days in future it is not enough for some buisnesses. I hope you can extend it in near future. BR Michal
Hi Michal – thanks so much for your feedback and suggestion, which has been passed on to our Product team.
Hi again Michal, after speaking with the team – even though we are only planning to provide a short-term tool at this stage – there are a number of connected apps in the Xero App Store such as Fathom and Float that offer more longer-term forecasting tools that may be suitable.
I’m trialling this out now and paying the $10 to see what the features are. I’m confused whether this includes Payroll expenses? Perhaps the AI is still analysing my accounting snapshot. I’ll come back in 24 hours to see what the result is. In the mean time, I imagine that this should include payroll wages?
Hi Mikey, you need a few months of past reconciled spend or receive money transactions in your bank account(s) before predictions appear. It can also take up to 24 hours for predictions to appear after getting Analytics Plus. The dashboard can’t predict payroll expenses if they come through as a bill or a journal. To include this amount in your cash flow projection, add it as an upcoming money out.