Introduction to Your Xero Dashboard and Coding

Hi. I wanna give you a quick demo of some easy ways that you can use Xero to help you manage your business. When you first log in to Xero, you’ll be approached by a dashboard like this. You’ll even have some help topics at the top. I’m going to hide that from now so we can get to the meat of what we’re looking at.

Bank-related accounts

So on our screen here, you’ll see checking accounts and savings accounts or whatever accounts that you have that are bank related. They could also be credit card accounts.

You’ll be able to hook the feed up to your bank so that those transactions flow in for you automatically. To make it very quick to reconcile and keep your records in order.

Invoices

You’ll also see your invoices that are owed to you, as well as bills to pay. If you’re using the accounts receivable and accounts payable functions.

You don’t have to get that fancy, but if you find that those are helpful for your business, they’re very easy to use and navigate in Xero.

Summary of the cash

You’ll also see a summary of the cash coming in and out. You can highlight over those, and it will provide you with information based on the invoices that you received payment on, and the bills that you paid.

Customize a watch list

You can also customize a watch list. If you’re tracking your revenue and you have some goals that you want to meet, you can track that really quickly, readier on your homepage, and easily adjust that all throughout the year or to manage any important accounts that you wanna keep an eye on.

How to reconcile a few transactions

So let’s take a look at how to reconcile a few transactions. You’ll notice that big blue buttons screen tell you you have something to do here. So we’ll click on that. It will lead us into the checking account.

Again, there’s some helpful videos you can watch on how to do this, but it’s pretty easy. You’ll see that this check cleared for 1,181.25, and there was a bill that matched up to that already there. So it’s going to automatically notice that those are the same, and all you’ll need to do is hit okay.

Same here with an invoice. They recognize that the deposit coming in matched that invoice exactly. So it’s going to suggest that for you.

Now, if you run across a payment that’s coming in like this a hundred dollars and you don’t know what to do with it, you can put a note or make yourself a note or make a staff member a note so that you can save it and come back to it at another time and remember where you left off.

But if you know where a transaction goes, you can set up bank rules to help this be very quick. But if this is a one time transaction, you can enter that and code it to your sales account.

You can also enter in descriptions, and if you need to break this out into more than one account, for example, if you have multiple sales accounts, you can just click the add details and it will give you a full update here where you can have multiple lines if you need it.

Alright, and then spending money, again. We can enter in a new vendor right on the fly if we need to, and code that. You can code based on an account number or an account name, either one. You can also hit a dropdown here and see all of your list of choices if you have any questions at all.

Set up bank rules

So you can see how this process works pretty easy and quick. We can also set up bank rules. So for example, the 7-Eleven actually has a rule. I’ll show you what that rule looks like. It says, anytime the payee contains 11, then you wanna code it to office supplies, and that’s for any account.

So the next time it sees any transaction that contains the word 11, it will automatically prompt you with this rule.

Setting up a bank rule is super easy. You just go to options and create a bank rule. It’s going to automatically add in some info here.

Here’s a pro tip for you: Keep this as concise as possible. Sometimes your banks change how they code transactions and push them through feeds. So I like to use any text field contains, that way if tomorrow changes to Cooper Street Bakery, Inc, your transactions will still be coded properly.

So we’ll set up the vendor if we don’t already have it in there, and I’m going to tell it that I want it to (oops) create it, and that I wanna code that to meals. Let’s see, what’s our meals account called here? We’re gonna call it entertainment here. It would normally be meals, and we’re going to let it run that rule on all accounts or on the checking account. I’m going to leave it just on the checking account for here, so we’ll save that. And now anytime it sees the Cooper Street Bakery, it will automatically approve that.

So that’s a little bit about how to code transactions.

For additional read: Learn the Power of Xero Reports

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Donna Bordeaux, CPA with Calculated Moves

Creativity and CPAs don’t generally go together. Most people think of CPAs as nerdy accountants who can’t talk with people. Well, it’s time to break that stereotype. Lively, friendly, and knowledgeable can be a part of your relationship with your CPA, as demonstrated by Donna and Chad Bordeaux. They have over 50 years of combined experience as entrepreneurial CPAs. They’ve owned businesses and helped business owners exceed their wildest dreams. They have been able to help businesses earn many times more profit than the average business in the same industry and are passionate about helping industries that help families build great memories.