What Is It?
Xero provides integrated accounting and inventory management software for small businesses. Easily keep track of the quantity of the inventory items you have on hand. Create quotes and invoices faster by automatically entering items. Get real-time stock valuation through automatic updates to your balance sheet. And track the profitability of your inventory by easily seeing the quantity of sales each item is generating.
Why Is It Useful?
Painless setup
From data entry to deep accounting, Xero is designed to facilitate the already cumbersome financial operations, and reduce the time spent scrambling voluminous records. Once pulled inside the system, all transactions and contacts are governed from the same page, and that’s exactly where Xero’s charm becomes most visible.
Xero allows editing ‘on the go’, the advantage of it being fast and accurate transacting from moment one. As experienced accountants will agree, there aren’t that many small-biz-friendly apps that will offer such flexibility without asking users to pay recurring fees or purchase expensive add-ons. If you’re really rushing to move money around, you can consider their Express Setup feature, or contact the Help Center to provide you with an accurate roadmap on how to add users, insert information in the Chart of accounts, or connect your bank feeds.
Most of the system’s functionality is concentrated on the Dashboard, where you can monitor the company’s billing and invoicing status and compare finances in fancy charts, but also access directly all action sections that matter to your financial management.
Simplified transactions
Xero is quite generous in the configuration sense, and transaction forms allow a user to experience how that really feels. All purchase files can be edited within seconds, in particular the ready templates offered by the system for those who prefer to skip drafting individual ones. If you’re not that much of a creative person, open the template, and check/uncheck just as many data fields as necessary to make the documents feel personal.
What you will also like about Xero’s transactions is the multiple-approval model and two-factor authentication, which minimizes the probability of financial fraud. For every transaction, there will be a detailed list of performed actions, including dates, users, and manual notes. In terms of sales, this method will make it possible to control purchase orders, and categorize invoices as drafted, awaiting approval, awaiting payment, or delayed.
An overview on your business’s current financial health
How about an app that will genuinely provide feedback for your financial operations? Financial reporting is among Xero’s strongest advantages, as it can summarize the effects of all your activities, by simply filling the filters you’d like to see included. Basically, even when pulling a standard report out of this system, that report can be tailored to your specific needs.
Standard reports as such are available in Xero, including Balance sheets, Income Statements, and Cash Flow records, but its true value hides behind additional analysis: few of the system’s reports are highly specific, tackling sales per items, expenses per contacts, aged payables, and so on. You can also use Xero’s reporting to filter important transactions per category, or draft prolific invoicing histories for each client. Advanced accountants should pay attention to the Business Performance tool that tracks equity ratio debts and net value per sale, and the Management Reportsthat reveal the full picture of the company’s profitability based on ROI and cash flow observations.
Transformed inventory management
Currently, Xero processes and runs payrolls, and automatically adjusts taxes for more than 20 states, and one could not help asking how a small-biz app can actually do that.
The reason is that Xero is just as much of an inventory and stock management powerhouse as it is a payroll performer, and allows you to create and keep detailed possession records to use automatically in your transactions. All of these records are robust, and contain details such as tax status, purchase costs, committed quotes, and relevant descriptions.
Features
- Bank reconciliation
- Contacts – Keep track of suppliers and customers
- Dashboard
- Expense claims
- Files – Attach documents to your financial data
- Financial reporting
- Free, unlimited email support
- Inventory
- Invoicing – Create and send invoices automatically
- Log in from anywhere
- Mobile apps (Android, iPhone/iPad)
- Multi-currency
- Online accounting – Access Xero anytime, anywhere
- Payroll
- Purchase orders
- Quick and easy 1099s
- Receive bills electronically
- Smart lists – Segment contacts based on purchase history
- Fixed assets
- GST returns
Pricing Plans
Xero provides its clients with a 30-day free trial and three SMB and enterprise pricing plans to choose from. Here are the details:
Starter – $9/month
- 5 Invoices and Quotes
- 5 Bills
- 20 Bank Transaction
Standard – $30/month
- Invoices and Quotes
- Bills
- Bank Transactions
- 5 Payrolls
Premium 10 – $70/month
- Invoices and Quotes
- Bills
- Bank Transactions
- 10 Payrolls
- Multi-Currency
