Learn the Power of Xero Reports

Alright, we’ve given you a little intro to the Xero dashboard. Let’s take a look at Reports. You’ll go to Accounting, and then Reports. Xero has a wide range of reports already built for you, but you can customize these to your needs. So it’ll prompt you with some favorites up here at the top.

Let’s take a look at a couple in particular before we hop into the normal financial statements of balance sheet and income statement.

Let’s check out some Financial Performance Information.

So first, we’ll look at the analytics for a business snapshot. Alright, this is a great report. One of my favorites and has a lot to look at, and you’ll find that the graphical interface makes it a little bit easier to see things.

So the first block is going to show us our profit and loss. If we click on that, we will open up the income statement in another tab.

So this is going to give us some comparison numbers of how we’re doing this year versus last year. Right now, we’re showing a loss. We better get some help from our accountant, right?

In this demo company, the income is up a lot over last year, you can see we’re up $27,000, but expenses are up $40,000.

So these are some pretty high percentages and I wouldn’t expect to see these in your business, but this is demo data, so we’ll never know what we’re gonna get here.

Net profit margin

So, taking a look a little on down the page, if we now hop over to the net profit margin part of the screen, this is going to be an important characteristic to tell us how our pricing is doing.

We want to look here and it’s going to show us and navigate for every dollar of sales revenue, the average net loss of 50 cents was made. So we’ve got some catching up to do on our pricing and really analyzing our financials.

So this is bottom line net profit. Gross profit is your sales list, your cost of goods sold. So without all of the overhead in your business, this again, is a really good indicator to look at for our pricing to make sure we’re in line with industry standards and with where our goals are that we want to achieve.

Coming down a little further, we can now see the largest operating expenses. Again, all of these numbers are clickable. If you click on them, it will take you to the detail of the expense report so you can see all of the expenses associated that underlie that number.

Summary of balance sheet

Finally, at the bottom portion, we have the financial position and the cash. So it’s giving us a summary on our balance sheet, our overall cash balances with a link to check out our upcoming cash flow needs.

We also show that our average time to get paid is seven days, and our average time to pay suppliers 320. Uh oh! I bet we have some mad suppliers.

Financial ratios

We can also toggle the bottom here to turn on the financial ratios. These are in a pilot program right now, but they’re giving us current ratio, debt ratio, and current liabilities to net worth.

Those are helpful if you’re into the deeper financial side. If you are a top level business owner, those may not be all that exciting to you.

Alright, so that’s one of the an analysis reports.

We can also toggle this to look at it based on last year, current month, last quarter. We can also toggle between cash and accrual basis, and we can print that report if you prefer to have a hard copy in hand.

Let’s go back to our reports. There are tons of these reports, so I’m not going to take you through all of them, but one other one that is a favorite here is the business performance.

This one takes a look into some ratio analysis again. And last but not least, the executive summary is also a favorite.

Executive summary

This one will allow us to look at our cash, where it’s going, our profitability metrics, whether we’re going up or down on our variances, our sales, how many invoices we issued, and what the average ticket price is, our performance and our accounts payable and receivable numbers.

So another good favorite, but let’s go ahead and take a look as promised to our traditional financial statements.

Also, you will notice that if you put a star by a report that you like, it will appear on this menu bar for you. So you’ll have shortcuts to the things you specifically like.

Income statement

So here’s our income statement we just pulled up. You’ll see it’s defaulting to year to date, but if you click on the left, you’ll have many other choices.

You could switch this over to see a current and the prior three months, the current fiscal year, fiscal year by month, a month to date comparison, year to date comparison, and if you’re tracking categories, you can use that to look at the regions in this case.

Alright, we’ll just stick with this current year to date, but let’s say we wanna see how we’re doing compared to the last two years.

We can choose a compare with and choose a custom date range, or if you wanna see the whole year to see how you’re tracking, you can do that as well. And we’ll hit update.

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So now we’re seeing the previous same amount of days before in those periods. So you can get a really quick comparison.

Again, with our demo data, those numbers don’t mean a whole lot here, but I think you’ll understand the points there.

Let’s take a look also at our balance sheet.

Our balance sheet is going to show us what we have versus what we owe and look more at our equity positions. Again, you have options on the left to look at comparisons, and you can also compare by year, by day, by month, by quarter here.

Alright, so we can see that we have 11,000 in assets, but we owe people 6,400. So our equity or what our worth is in the company at the moment is about $5,200.

So I encourage you to explore in the reports in Xero, find those reports. If you’d like to see a bigger description before you click on them, you can toggle that little button and it will give you more description there. But there are lots of these reports to try out.

So see what you think and see what you like. If there’s a report you like, put a star by it. It’ll appear on the menu for you.

I hope this has been a good, helpful demo of how to look at the reporting in Xero.

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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.