Book Image

Efficient Accounting with Xero

By : Jay Kimelman
Book Image

Efficient Accounting with Xero

By: Jay Kimelman

Overview of this book

Xero empowers business owners to gain insights into their business and performance and collaborate seamlessly with their accountants and tax professionals. This book goes beyond the basics and explores the more advanced Xero features, techniques, and best practices for managing sales taxes, budgeting, and reporting. You’ll begin by diving right into Xero, setting up a bank feed, and exploring its power while experiencing just how easy it is to use. The book will guide you in setting up Xero the right way to ensure that you succeed in each of your transactions. As you progress through the chapters, you’ll learn what spend money and receive money transactions are and be able to easily send invoices and collect receivables or payments, collect and pay bills, and even track your business assets with Xero. Toward the end, you’ll be proficient at producing powerful reports, giving you the keys to running or advising any business. By the end of this Xero book, you’ll have gained the confidence to add a company to Xero, set up the bank feeds, reconcile the transactions, send invoices, and pay bills, ending up with beautiful financial statements.
Table of Contents (27 chapters)
1
Part 1: Hitting the Ground Running
7
Part 2: Handling the Day-to-Day Processes
12
Part 3: Closing Out the Accounting Period
16
Part 4: Reporting – Knowing About the Performance of Your Business (KPIs)
18
Chapter 14: Business Analytics with Business Snapshot and Short-Term Cash Flow
20
Part 5: For the Advisor

Your first major Xero decision – the COA

The COA for your business is like a table of contents. It has major sections (assets, liabilities, equity, revenue, and expenses). It also has sub-sections (current assets, non-current assets, and more) and line items. Your COA is involved in everything you do in Xero moving forward. The choices here lay out how you record your transactions and how they will be reported later.

How do you plan on laying out your COA? Are you going with a flat structure or a broad structure? What I mean by flat is using as few accounts as necessary, such as a single sales account, let’s say Revenue. A broad structure involves using multiple accounts in an area. Let’s say we want to track sales by channel; we might have Revenue – Retail, Revenue – Online, and Revenue – Wholesale. This should be driven by what the data and reporting needs are of your company and its management. We will cover tracking categories later...