Business admin is a headache for many business owners and most people would agree that spending their spare time catching up on outstanding bookkeeping is far from ideal. We work with many businesses that find Cloud based accounting using Xero helps to minimise the time spent catching up with ‘paperwork’.
For those using Xero, here are our Top 5 tips for helping to reduce the amount of time spent catching up on the administration of the business;1. Set up Bank Feeds
Setting up bank feeds removes the need to individually enter your bank transactions and to have to then manually tick off the bank statements each month to ensure you reconcile. Depending upon your bank, the transactions will appear in Xero automatically or at the click of a refresh button.
2. Create Bank Rules
You can set criteria so that Xero will identify the regular transactions. This way Xero will make suggestions for transactions to include, and all you have to do is click OK each time it appears in the bank.
3. Recurring Invoices
If you have regular monthly invoices to send out these can be set up in advance to go automatically on a specified day.
4. Invoice Reminders
Xero has an inbuilt function to email your customers when invoices become overdue. You can fully tailor the message to your customers within the template and determine when the invoice becomes overdue to start sending reminders.
5. Payment Services
Add payment services to invoices to receive payment quicker from your customers. You can add electronic links to Stripe, Paypal, GoCardless and Worldpay plus numerous other payment services that your clients can use to pay electronically straight from the invoice into your account.
The above are just a few tips you can easily implement to help reduce the administrative burden of your bookkeeping, help you to issue your invoices quicker and ultimately receive faster payments. There of course many more additional features available when using Xero.
The Shorts have achieved the highest Platinum partner status with Xero, we have over 80 users of which nearly 40 have the highest level of adviser status, who are able to help with any queries on how to use Xero and provide any training you might require. We also have a dedicated Software Projects Team who focus on making businesses more efficient, increasing productivity and driving growth using digital technology and systems and process reviews.
Contact Malcolm Pope or Tim Baum-Dixon if you would like more details on how you could transfer your accounting system onto Xero or click to arrange your free consultation
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Alicia Williams
Alicia is Director of the Genus team at Shorts, a chartered certified accountant and Xero specialist.
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