Last updated: 26 October, 2021
At Xero, our goal is to help your business or practice thrive by providing reports that are easy to use, with valuable insights you can trust. We’ve had two versions of our reports for a while now – the older version and our ‘new’ reports, which is where all our exciting new features and additional value can be found.
In the months ahead, as we ramp up our investment in technology, you’ll start seeing even more value packed into our new reports. They’ll have features you love in the older version, with even more functionality and a refreshed design. It’s all part of our vision to provide you with a custom suite of reports to help you get answers fast, and streamline your financial analysis.
I’ve already shared some of our recent enhancements to new reports, including the ability to tailor your Account Transactions report, add Total and YTD columns in Profit and Loss reports, add watermarks, and change the font size in Xero HQ. We can now give you a sneak peek into some of the other exciting changes that are on their way in the months ahead.
Get answers fast
We want to help you get answers fast, with an extensive range of reports and quick access to the ones that matter to you. Our US customers will be the first to enjoy our beautiful new report centre from today, with other regions to follow in the months ahead. This will include:
- a beautiful new report centre, with reports grouped under clear headings that can be collapsed or expanded, depending on which sections you want to see
- report descriptions to help you understand what each report does (these can be toggled off if you don’t need them)
- enhanced search functionality, so you can search easily for a report even if you don’t know the report name
- quick access to your favourite reports from the top of the page or the Accounting menu (simply click the star next to the report name to add it to your favourites)
Customise reports to your needs
Every business is different, so we want to make sure the content and layout of our reports can be customised to your needs. Keep an eye out for these powerful features coming in the Profit and Loss report:
- A selection of common formats within the report, which will give you a few different ways to look at your revenue and expenses, such as month-on-month and year-on-year comparisons
- A new collapsible side panel that gives you easy access to the selection of common formats in your report
- A dropdown menu to quickly compare periods, such as this month versus the previous two months, or the same month in the previous two years
- Easy access to Xero’s standard layout, if you want to start from scratch – you’ll also be able to save these custom reports and access them in the side panel
Streamline your financial analysis
To help small businesses understand the numbers and collaborate with their advisors in real-time, we’re introducing some of our most-loved features from the older version of our reports:
- Professional management reports that you can customise, bundle together and share in a pack, so everyone can keep an eye on what’s happening in the business
- Cell annotations that you can use in conjunction with existing footers, text blocks and schedules, to add commentary and life to the numbers
Help us reimagine the future of Xero
As you can see, we’re starting to pack some amazing value into our new reports. Right now, our teams are focused on upgrading the technology that underpins reporting across the Xero platform. The good news is that once this is done, we won’t have technical constraints and can deliver new reporting features faster than ever before.
It’s exciting to think about the kind of possibilities we can unlock in the future. Imagine: reports that are surfaced at the right time of year, or smart automations that sort and filter reports just the way you like it. The changes we’re making now are just the beginning, so if you haven’t given our new reports a try, we really encourage you to check them out.
If you’re a Xero partner and would like to be part of this journey, we’d love to have you on the team. Simply sign up to the next gen practice insiders program and you’ll get early access to our new features and invitations to beta trials. Your feedback will be a valuable part of our test, learn, refine process, so we can truly help your business or practice thrive.
Hi, any improvements on a budget v actual p & l. Thanks
Hi Michelle,
We’re currently working on a new Budget Variance report that will be coming in the next few months. Is there any improvement in particular you’d like to see? If so, I can pass it on to the relevant team.
Thanks,
Joanne
Hi, just an easy way to pull the report, month v budget, ytd v budget with a percentage variance. Thanks Michelle
Thanks Michelle, I’ve passed your feedback onto the team, and it sounds like this new report will be helpful to you. It’s coming in the next few months, so watch this space.
Agreed, the new P&L is great as you can custom it, but having the budget to compare would make it useful.
We are a church. Is there a report that creates a tax statement of a giver/Donor?
Hi Den,
Thanks for your question – we don’t have that specific report available right now, however you could use the Contact Transactions – Cash or Account transactions report filtered by the contact name in the Description field as a starting point. If you need more advice or assistance, please raise a case in Xero Central and one of our experts will walk you through it.
Thanks
Joanne
We would like to be able to put in annual budget as don’t need it broken down into months
Hi Raewyn,
It sounds like you are referring to Budget Manager. We are working through the major technology upgrade for reporting in stages. Once we finish the first phase, it will better enable us to deliver features like Budget Manager which is currently constrained. We do know it’s very important to our customers and we hope to be able to deliver it in the next phase but need to finish the initial work to be able to scope it.
Thanks for reaching out,
Joanne
What new payroll reports will be available? Any that will extract data on employees to enable an efficient way of detailing staff salaries and hours? Or how about the ability to download multiple payslips for one employee rather than having to download each payslip singly? Or perhaps a report that details an employee’s date of birth, rate of pay and NI category? These are basic reports which are not available on Xero Payroll at the moment but would be of huge benefit to users.
Hi Linda,
Thanks for your comment. At present, we don’t have any short-term plans to introduce new reports or bulk extract functionality. I have passed your suggestions onto our Payroll product team for consideration.
Thanks,
Joanne
Hi, will there be a way to produce a report showing quantities of specific items purchased in a custom time period?
Hi George,
Depending on how you record purchases in your organisation, you could use the Inventory Item Details report, which will show all transactions associated with your inventory items. You can apply a filter to this by Item name and Source (so you could select Spend Money, Payable Invoice, etc) which will show you a breakdown of the line that item is included on.
Alternatively, there is the Inventory Item Summary report, where you can tick the Quantity Purchased column from the Columns dropdown. These reports have a lot of customisation options, like filtering by item code and other available fields, which should hopefully allow you to get the information you need. Feel free to get in raise a case with our support team via Xero Central if you need more help.
Thanks
Joanne
Any updates on supporting SSO, and allowing Xero customers to bring their own IdP (SAML or OAuth)? The community has been asking for this for a long time
https://community.xero.com/business/discussion/4538981
Hi Matty – thanks for getting in touch. The team are still working on this and we will provide an update once we have more information to share. ^BA
Apparently the team have been working on this since at least 2017. Any idea when they might be close to delivering this?
Hi Matty, thanks for your comment. We appreciate that it may seem that is has taken us a while to deliver this work but we have been releasing enhancements to reports over the last few months and you’ll start to see even more value packed into our new reports in the months ahead as we ramp up our investment in technology. We are unable to provide exact dates at this time but are teams are working as fast as they can to deliver new features. Thanks!
Will the Project Details Report now bring the Estimated costs and the Actual costs together in a manner that is useful?
Refer to discussions regarding this issue raised in Case #CX0011383563.
Thanks.
We will still be able to access the old reports? The new ones are fine in some cases, but I found editing the P&L’s / Balance Sheets to get them how you want them is a much slower, painful process than the old reports.
Can you add an “All Time” option to the Date Range dropdown?
Hi Brad, your comment has been shared with the team. Thanks!
Hi. Budget & cashflow (forecast and actual) reports are the main area which we particularly need for many of our clients. In particular the forecast budget needs to include capital items, GST payments, loan repayments etc as well as just income and expense codes. Also the reports need to show the opening bank balance, cash movement and closing bank balance in both actual and forecast reports. In other words, exactly what the Banklink system provides! Is this coming? Thank you.
Hi Hannah – thanks for your feedback, which has been shared with the team. You’ll start to see even more value packed into our new reports in the coming months so watch this space.
Will the original reports continue to be available?
I find them much quicker and easier to use for certain tasks (i use both old and new).
Hi James, we are choosing to focus our investment on new reports rather than having duplicate versions, so that’s where you’ll see the most new value from now on. This will allow us to release more features and add value to your business or practice faster. We are making sure the features you love in our current reports are in the new versions (plus more), and making new versions easily available, before we consider retiring the older versions. However, we encourage you to check out the new reports and get accustomed to the look and feel because this is where all the exciting features will live in the future. We hope that answers your question. Thanks!
Hi, we use the account transaction report for so much of our analysis…..it would be a huge help if we could add the option to add contact to this report. I know that isn’t exactly what you referring to here, but it is still a report
Also, I am hopeful that the new PL will allow comparison to custom date ranges to the same period in prior years. We had this with the old PL.
Hi, thank you – we really appreciate you taking the time to share your thoughts and suggestions with us. We have shared your comment with our Product team.
When will the new management reports be available as shown in the video?
What about a report where a selection of tracking codes can run a p and l .. not all or just one .. and in the tracking report having a date range option not just to current
Hi Carol, thank you so much for your suggestion. We will make sure it is passed on to our Product team.
Will Xero ever have built-in charts? Graphics are better then just numbers.
Hi Michael – thanks so much for your suggestion, which has been shared with the team.
Am I missing something but does Xero have a standard P&L option to produce month and YTD numbers? I can’t see that as part of the new formatting options