As you know, part of my job is to learn new stuff to share with my clients and with our community of business owners (that’s you, if you read these emails, at least)

Yesterday, I went to the Xero roadshow and learned some more about the amazing world of the cloud. I spent the day with 200 accountants and bookkeepers. And yet………..I was excited!

Oh my, there is such a lot of cool stuff going on. And it can save so much money.

Short version of this story:

Get Xero, save paper and time and money and pay your bookkeeper less each month, have better visibility of your money at the same time.

Long version:

There’s an old way of doing things which involves MYOB or another accounting system at your office, on someone’s computer. You have to back up the file regularly or risk losing your data.

When you do your tax or BAS, you send your file to your accountant or bookkeeper and they keep it. Now there are two or three versions.

Your accountant does journal entries when he or she fixes some of your many cock-ups come on, you know they’re there). So now, your version and his aren’t the same.

It’s clunky and annoying. You enter all the invoices and bills by hand (someone does at any rate). There’s lots of paper, your bookkeeper prints off your b ank statements every month and reconciles your accounts by hand, making sure nothing is missed out. It takes ages and is very dull. Thank goodnes I’m not doing it, I say.

New world:

Xero – it sits in the cloud surrounded by fluff and is backed up by the Xero fairies in their many datacentres. Your data is safe and backed up and not subject to flawed back-up plans or spilled coffee.

It’s easy!

Enter stuff once and it kind of flows through the system so the need to keying things in is reduced by 30% or more. Bank feeds mean reconciling is not required – it kind of automatically does it for you.

“This transaction in your bank, for $100 from Optus looks like this Optus bill you keyed in.” “Yes it is” Click. Done.

(Can you tell I’m neither an accountant nor a bookkeeper?)

Check out the apps!

There’s one called Receipt Bank where you can take a photo of a receipt and it reads the writing and the numbers (I know there’s a word for it, get lost) and automatically populates your accounts payable. No paying someone to do the data entry!

Shoeboxed gives you a little bag to out them in so you can send them off to have this done for you if taking pictures is too much like work for you.

Invoices now can be sent from Xero as web invoices with a “Pay Now” button in them. Your customers can click on it and (using Ezidebit’s merchant facility) pay your bill online with their credit or debit card.

And it goes into your bank and into your receivables records too!

There are project management tools that link into Xero so that timesheets can be assigned to jobs and invoices – you can know whether a project is profitable before it’s finished instead of 3 months later when you do your BAS.

I’m sorry if I sound overexcited. I’m usually interested in sales and marketing and people and growth but this has the potential to make people’s lives easier (including my own – I’ll case study myself, how’s that for an idea).

Check it out or contact me and I’ll put you on to someone who can help with the migration from not-cloud to cloud accounting.
Jon