Report Packs boost accountant productivity
Until now reporting software for accountants has been extremely complex, expensive and disconnected from the software used by their clients. With the release of Report Packs today, accountants can now create customised report templates at a practice level and populate these with any kind of client data.
Report Packs are the holy grail of productivity improvement for accounting firms. Bringing together small businesses accounting and accountant-side reporting tools on a single ledger is great for a couple of reasons. Clients only pay for the software once and it also removes the cost of time spent transferring data.
The first cab off the rank for Report Packs is New Zealand. As you’ll appreciate introducing a completely new concept like this requires a tight feedback loop. We’re already well underway with this initiative in Australia, the UK and very soon the US.
Given that every business owner has a different Chart of Accounts, we’ve standardised these data sets using Reporting Codes.
Within the adviser tab of the client organisation, reports can be customised specifically for that client.
Which means every client can now have a customised set of reports! But the problem for the accountant is they have to customise each set of reports for each client, which isn’t a very productive use of time.
With Report Packs, accountants can define at practice level a different pack of reports to suit a specific vertical or segment of client – such as clients in hospitality for example.
The reports can also be customised to suit that vertical or segment – changing things like the layout of key reports such as the Profit & Loss, Balance Sheet, and Movements in Equity.
For accountants looking for the detail about how this works, watch this video:
Helping accountants build this sort of IP into their firm is really exciting for us. The extra time created by these sorts of productivity gains can be spent with clients on higher value services like helping with cashflow management, debtor collection services, strategic planning sessions and much more.
Let us know what you think.
(Updated) Here’s a couple of links to our Help section to assist with getting up to speed;
Categories: Accountants
Brilliant! Well done Xero’s….we might need some training now…
by Justin on Aug 16, 2011 at 10:46 am
Nice work Xero! big plus!
by Jerry Zhao on Aug 16, 2011 at 11:01 am
I’d like to be able to customise the customisable text fields and notes to the report pack as well, then importing to each client ledger wouldn’t require these to be updated each and every time for each new client.
by Jim on Aug 16, 2011 at 11:03 am
Excellent work Xero, this will be an excellent tool as accounting practices start to move to cloud based software.
by Jordan Slappendel on Aug 16, 2011 at 11:06 am
@Jim – good call on the notes front. We’ve got this lined up for the next release as well as a few more tweaks that will continue to create more and more productivity gains for our partners.
by Richard Phillips on Aug 16, 2011 at 11:28 am
Good improvement to reporting – Another great feature would be the ability to add your own file ie PDF to a clients report pack so then you could add in reports from your tax system etc that would be bundled with the report pack. Also you could then add in highly customised analysis ie graphs/non accounting data etc to the report.
by Mark Lawton on Aug 16, 2011 at 12:27 pm
Huge relief this is out! We just did 2011 client reporting on existing templates which were pretty cool anyway BUT this is truly awesome! Thanks Xero team …. And sorry for our challenging DiffRep questions to date.
by Judith on Aug 16, 2011 at 3:41 pm
@Mark thanks for the thoughts. Document storage inside Xero is something we’re investigating doing at the moment so your use case is another validation for doing this.
by Richard Phillips on Aug 16, 2011 at 6:14 pm
Looking forward to this Xero. ETA for Ireland. ? Ballpark ?
by Denis Breen on Aug 17, 2011 at 10:33 am
Well done guys, you’re getting further in front of the competition.
by Mark Telford on Aug 17, 2011 at 12:03 pm
Well Done Xero, very exciting stuff. ETA for Ireland, ballpark ?
by Denis Breen on Aug 17, 2011 at 9:15 pm
@Denis we’re constantly adapting our roadmap to meet demand. Report Packs rely on the Reporting Codes framework to be built, then it’s a pretty simple roll out from there (the Product Team love it when I say that). As it stands we’ve got Report Codes lined up for Australia, the UK and US, followed closely by Global – which should be some time next year.
by Richard Phillips on Aug 19, 2011 at 2:04 pm
Thanks Richard. You could probably role out the pack for Ireland at the same time as the uk, the accounting standards and reporting framework is more or less identical.
by Denis on Aug 21, 2011 at 1:00 am
is this just for practices? I am a xero user and want better reporting
by AJ on Aug 25, 2011 at 3:05 am
@AJ – Report Packs has been designed for accountants to enable them to create reports for groups of clients once, then share amongst colleagues in order to improve practice productivity. All the customisation available at the practice level can be accessed on an individual entity level (and then some) so you’re not missing anything from that perspective. Could you provide some specifics around what you want from reporting that you can’t currently get?
by Richard Phillips on Aug 25, 2011 at 12:07 pm
Richard, we need this kind of functionality in Canada too with GIFI codes – http://www.cra-arc.gc.ca/E/pub/tg/rc4088/rc4088-09e.pdf for corporate tax filing. Will this be coming in the global version of Xero?
by Earl Rudolfo on Aug 26, 2011 at 5:14 am
That’s right Earl – Canada will be included in the Global roll of Report Codes. With Report Packs having a massive impact on productivity we knew this would be a highly requested feature once it went public. We’re working hard to get this out to everyone as fast as possible. The next phases beyond core accounting functions will completely change the game so next year is going to be huge as we near completion of the horizontal requirements of an accounting engine. Thanks for the GIFI link, the BA’s are on it.
by Richard Phillips on Aug 26, 2011 at 9:11 am
With the reporting pack here, we need to to complement the modern practice with an audit work papers solution.
by Justin on Aug 31, 2011 at 12:37 am