Get started with Cloud Accounting and Xero
Firstly financial and business information plays a vital role in the management of businesses.
Furthermore it is used for numerous day-to-day operations to help:
- Comply with accounts, tax, PAYE and VAT obligations
- Tell us about levels of cash, income, costs, debt and monies owing
- Track income and expenditure from products, services and project.
Moreover a cloud-based accounting system like Xero helps you to manage your financial information. Resulting in running your business more efficiently and cost-effectively.
Benefits of cloud accounting, like Xero include:
- Better real-time overview of your current financial position
- Access for multiple users allows easy conversations/collaboration with members of your team and advisors
- Spend more time doing things you enjoy, thanks to the automatic updates
- Everything runs online which cuts out the need for installation. Your work is saved and backed up all the time, ensuring you don’t lose anything
Make the move today
Three key stages:
1) Prepare
- Define your expected requirements from the system. For example, tracking categories, reports needed, business systems it will integrate with and the available apps.
- Communicate it to everyone in your business and make adequate resources and training available.
- Choose an appropriate date for migrating. Typically this will be at the end of your financial year or a VAT quarter
- Create a checklist of the data that you’ll need to enter and import. Such as customer and supplier financial and contact information, account headings, bank information and how much accounts history you wish to transfer across. This will also be the ideal time to clear up contact, client and supplier information.
2) Migrate
- Going live immediately is high risk, so I suggest you run parallel systems for a short period of time. This will help familiarise you with the new system and processes and check the accuracy of your data processing and reports.
- There are many ways, human and software based that can make the data transition smoother and less costly.
- If you have no previous systems, maybe because of a star up situation then the migration journey will be less involved.
3) After
In conclusion:
- Once you have migrated onto Xero it’s important to make sure you get the best from it. New systems and new ways of working can be quite daunting, so we train and support our clients to deal with it on a build-up basis and share the load with them.
- You’ll see the power of Xero and get comfortable with it when using the customer invoicing and credit control aspects. The remaining financial information, such as bank and supplier information can be dealt with by a combination of automation and/or getting support from your accountants
- Finally ensure you maintain and access the new system regularly
Download our Free Cloud Accounting guide. Get in touch with us to see how we can help you and your business converting to Xero and all your accounting and tax needs. For more business and finance , news, advice and tips, don’t forget to watch our weekly broadcasts, listen to our weekly podcast I Hate Numbers.