Purchase Orders

The Purchase order function in Xero looks very good indeed.  You can partially receipt or fully receipt, turning the purchase order into a bill to save data entry.  You can also create custom templates to better brand your purchase orders, you can also use the email settings for purchase orders.

The full history as you expect in Xero applies here as well, as well as drafts and submit for approval.

To find purchases, so to Accounts tab, Purchases, then scroll down the screen, purchase orders appear under the bills.

GST

The new improved GST process has also been released today.  This process will now show you any unreconciled transactions in the period, so you know to complete them.  Our rules still stand if you were taught by us – check the recon report for every account on the dashboard, prior to running your GST.  This is still a good process to follow as you will be alerted to any issues early on.

Also, make sure you save a copy of the published report off Xero.  We have found our lovely GST reports deleted from time to time by well meaning people…

Check out the blog for more information and other updates.  Still coming this year, I expect, are quotes and stock.  Purchase orders are a part of this set, so it is looking good that Xero have released purchase orders.

Xero has done it, they have gone fully document enabled!  And (insert appropriate swear word), it is awesome!!!

We have been talking about this for some time, so we are absolutely stoked they have done it.  Quite simply called Files, it is awesome!!!

You can now:

• Attach multiple documents
• Attach documents to spends and receives
• Attach multiple format documents – jpgs, excel, pdfs etc
• Add purchase orders to Sales
• Plus more

Under Settings, there is now a file link, you can add folders to organise docs.  You can do a bulk upload, then assign them as you wish.  You can create Sales and Bills etc from the Files menu.

Click the screen shot to check out the video:

I attended the Xero Roadshow this morning – as normal, it was inspiring, for various reasons.

Some notes:

• WorkflowMax rewrite is due for release in September/October – the new look is awesome as are the the new time features – I think you still won’t be able to schedule based on time of the day, but you will easily see missing time, or time not clocked, the time recording features are improved also
• Xero purchase order features are due to be released in two months
• Xero stock lite is due for release around Christmas/New Year
• As per my last post, the new payment gateway options have been released, this affects online invoices, so it may be worth reviewing this in your business
• Quotes in Xero are in design and building, no release date yet, this will have dynamic function, where you can have your client select options they might want online and this will be integrated with your Xero, so not simply “Quotes” as you might know it
• Also coming soon is the new email settings, so you will be able to specify the sent from email address etc
• Fully document enabled – through out Xero is due in July/August this year!  Yay!!

The new reporting framework, among other things, is allowing larger clients to come aboard with Xero.  Transaction limits up to around 2,000 per month can now be handled – It is advised to run parallel with your existing system for a month to test it – run a GST return at the end of that period, if the report runs ok without timing out, it will be fine.  Xero have said they are running a few GST returns for people direct from their servers, where the upper data limits have been reached.  Exercise caution here, we would absolutely recommend testing – and we would state that quite clearly.

Simon Mundell from Results.com had the key note speech.  He was awesome.

Funnily enough, my brother, at Jack of All Trades, demonstrated the Results.comapp to me last week – you can download from the app store for free.  Simon has awesome, if you get this today – text Results to 244 for the slide show, you can join their webinar too for free.  They also give you their strategic plan template.

I will attempt to blog a bit more about this in the next week or so…  I have to get my head around it.

In the world of business, cashflow is king and we’ve just made it quicker and easier for your clients to get paid.

From today, more of your clients will be able to get paid instantly through online invoicing. As well as PayPal, we’ve integrated with a number of payment services – including DPS Payment Express, GoCardless, Stripe and, soon, eWay – so all your clients’ customers need to do is hit the ‘Pay Now’ button, and the money will be on its way.

Once a payment service is setup, your clients will get paid faster, freeing up valuable cashflow and easing their workload.

Setting up the payment service is simple and we’ve created a video to help walk you through the process. Check it out on our blog.

Xero Update – 27/05/13

Thanks to my awesome team, we have achieved Xero Bookkeeping Partner of the Year 2012.

Wow, massive changes this morning!

http://help.xero.com/#Changes_10December2012

• Email Template – go to settings, general settings, email settings.  You can set templates for invoices, credits, remittance, repeats and statements.
• Remittance advice for single payments – open the payment in your account transactions screen and click on options, select ‘send remittance’.
• Outstanding statements rather than activity statements – this is a big one for us as bookkeepers, where there is months of activity, but only a few invoices un-paid from a few months back, we would have to send months of activity data as a statement, for large clients with lots of invoices, this would be messy, so, we would export the customers transactions to excel, delete the paid ones and send that.  This is awesome!  It is like the list in the contact records rather than every invoice and payment etc.
• Sales and Bills rather than Receivables and Payables – this is just a change of term, but there are new layouts under the Accounts tabs for these.
• Chart of accounts search – AWESOME!!!  You used to have to scroll to the bottom, change to 200 lines, hit CTRL and F to find, then search for something.
• Due date shortcuts – when entering +7 in the due date field, it would be 7 days from today, rather than from the invoice date (which might not be today), so this is more logical.
• Change to timeout – now an hour rather than 30 minutes, this will be very important to some users using a job systems where they had to keep re-logging into Xero for invoices to export.

For more detail or for further changes, see the release notes:  Read More

Account / Sales – new layout

Email Settings

If you haven’t already noticed the recent changes for Xero invoicing, you will soon and you are guaranteed to love them.

• When you email an invoice to a client now, when they open the invoice a read receipt is noted on the history of the invoice.  So when they say “Oh, I never got it…” you can say “…actually, you read on Monday at 2.31pm…” (if you want to).
• The invoice shows their current account balance too, so they can click the link and get copies of their invoices without having to ask you – It might be worth educating clients that they can now self-serve for invoice copies.
• If your customer uses Xero, they can save the invoice directly into drafts, and like magic, it saves the pdf copy with it = Yeehaw!  This is even better than repeating drafts where you have to then save the invoice copy.
• There is a pay now button, so if you are using PayPal, it is now easier to pay the invoice immediately.  Just consider the additional cost of PayPal fees if you are thinking about using it.  If it means getting paid sooner, maybe it is a good idea to look into it.  Check out our recently updated debtors page for further hints for getting paid faster.

 If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to call the office on 09 269 5466.

Xero Custom Invoice Templates are now available

Xero Custom Templates were included in the major Xero upgrade this morning. These include an invoice, statement and credit note. They look awesome and you can do all sorts of format and placement changes on them, including large back ground images.  For those who don’t want to read about it, there is a video available.

Branding Xero Custom Invoice Templates

Need help with Xero Custom Templates?

More specifics

For more information about Xero custom templates, or WorkflowMax custom templates, contact us now.