You may be working on a Xero which has been set up with very little changes to the standard settings it came with, or you could have tailored it somewhat but are still not completely satisfied with the reports it is giving you.
We believe that tailoring your Xero to meet the needs of your business is paramount. You want it to give you meaningful data and help you operate your business.
As there are several ways you can customise your Xero reports, we will give you this in sections over a several blogs. This is Part 1.
So if you want your reports to give you different or more in-depth information about your business, it all starts with the set up.
There are 3 places that you can configure the settings in Xero to give you more relevant or more in-depth information.
- Chart of Accounts
The Chart of Accounts in Xero comes as standard but you can configure this to meet your business specific needs. So, the chart of accounts gives you all the categories that you can assign transactions to.
So for example, if you have sub contractor costs in your business and there isn’t an account code for this then you can set one up. This will mean that you can report on that specific cost in your business. Perhaps you have income coming in from various sources and you want to see on your profit & loss how much income is coming in from each source – so you could set up different sales income account codes for each source.
Your chart of accounts can be found by clicking on accounting on the top menu and selecting chart of accounts. So look here first to see if you have all the categories you need and if you don’t then you can simply create these. This does need to be done carefully to ensure that anything new you create is assigned to the correct type or it could send the information to the wrong reports. Here is a link to how to edit or create a new account code in the chart of accounts https://central.xero.com/s/article/Add-or-edit-an-account-in-your-chart-of-accounts
- Tracking categories
If you are a project based business you may want to use tracking categories so you can track income and expenditure against individual projects. This enables you to then run a profit & loss report for each project and see if they are individually profitable.
Tracking categories are also used widely if you have a business with multi locations so that you can report on the profitability of individual stores or locations.
Here is a link to more detail on how to set this up https://central.xero.com/s/article/Set-up-tracking-categories
- Xero Projects
Xero Projects is useful if the tracking function is not going far enough for you.
The advantages of this are:
You get a dashboard which you can use to help you manage projects
- You can put in estimates and then track the income and spend against those projects as you work on the project, allowing you to change course if you need to
- You can also account for the time of employees working on those projects giving you a fuller picture of each project.
- You get more in-depth reporting against each project
Here is a link to an article which tells you more about this.
https://central.xero.com/s/article/About-Xero-Projects
Need any Help?
If you have found this blog useful and are now encouraged to change how your Xero is set up, please don’t hesitate to ask us for any help you need. You can contact us via:
https://thebookkeepingdepartment.co.uk/contact-us/
Tel: 01462 455455