Stay in the loop with income vs expenses

Today’s Xero Personal release lets you choose a timeframe to view your income vs expenses.

You can look at how much you made and spent in the last few days, weeks or months. Or you can make it more relevant by looking at your income vs expenses in your last pay period.

You can then see your spending trends by looking at how your income vs expenses have changed for a given period and compare this year on year.

Watch this video for an overview:

If you want a better view of your income vs expenses in the New Year, try Xero Personal for free.

Stay on track with your goal history

Keeping track of your budget over time is almost as challenging as sticking to it!

Xero Personal’s new goal history shows you what to cut back on if you need to get your budget under control – whether it’s coffee, clothes, or something else entirely.

From now on, when you start a new goal period, your previous results stay on the goal overview page. You’ll soon have a goal history showing how each aspect of your spending has contributed to your overall budget.

Watch this video:

Like what you see? Get started with Xero Personal here.

Join the conversation at Xero Answers.

Have it your way with Spending and Savings

Today’s Xero Personal release gives you the flexibility to look beyond the usual 30, 60 or 90 days and choose whichever period you like to look at your Spending and Savings.

This could mean tracking how you’re doing from payday to payday and then matching this against your goal period to have everything nicely in sync.

Watch this video for an overview:

Have a look at Help Centre for more detail and ask questions or see what others are saying at Xero Answers.

Tracking cash payments – no problem

Electronic banking is so ingrained for many of us that receiving cash or payments which don’t get recorded in our bank account can really mess with the budget.

Some of you feel so strongly about this, that the ability to account for such payments is the no.1 feature request for Xero Personal. So today in this release we’re putting a smile on your face as we introduce Manual Transactions.

One of the most common scenarios that call for Manual Transactions is when you pay for a group gift on your credit card and everyone pays you back in cash at some stage. Using Manual Transactions you can account for that cash and this is especially helpful if the payment is delayed.

Watch this video to see how Manual Transactions work in Xero Personal:

Also in today’s release we’re extending the ability to import data so you can now bring in transactions using CSV format. For more detail on CSV importing see Help.

If you’d like to ask questions or see what others are saying have a look at Xero Answers.

A wealth of information using search

Having personal finance software to help you manage your money is one thing, but being able to drill right into your spending history opens the door to so much more.

Today we’re releasing Detailed Search for Xero Personal. This gives you the added flexibility of finding what you need, whether its how much you spent on holiday, getting ready for tax time, or simply comparing monthly or annual spending. You can also access information right back to when you started accumulating data.

Watch this video for an overview:

You can search using a vast array of  criteria and combinations, such as by bank account, transaction amount, splits, archives, multiple date periods and a whole lot more. Search criteria can be saved for reuse at anytime.

Once you have your search results you can quickly categorise, label and archive them all at once, using as many labels as you need to help find them individually. And if you need to get reimbursed and want to send someone a record of your spending, it’s easy to export your results to Excel or Google docs. This is also useful for sharing tax data with your accountant.

Have a look at  Help Centre for more detail and ask questions or see what others are saying at Xero Answers.

Financial snapshots

Today we’ve launched Financial Snapshots – personalised email updates that let you know how you’re tracking with your finances in Xero Personal. These are a great way to keep on top of things, especially if you’re time poor.

You get to choose the exact details you’ll be sent. For instance this might include bank account balances and planned payments. You can also include summary details of how well you’re doing on your spending and savings goals to keep you motivated.

You decide how often you receive the Snapshots, which can be weekly, fortnightly or monthly or you may choose to turn them off.

If you’re a Xero Personal customer you’ll receive your first Snapshot in coming days. Be sure to update your preferences so you get the right information at the right time. See Help for how for to do this.

Getting those bills under control

Today we’ve released some great new functionality in Xero Personal around planning for some of the bigger expenses you’ll face over a three month period.

Plans & Reminders lets you anticipate upcoming payments whether they be expenses or income. Not only does it give you better visibility of when money is going to be coming in and out of your accounts, but you can see in advance if you will have enough money to meet substantial regular or one-off  payments.  You can also opt to be sent a reminder email before the payment date.

So there’ll be no excuses for missing a bill payment or running out of funds just before the due date!  Watch this video overview to see just how it works.

Xero Answers updated

Xero Answers, the community site for Xero Personal, has been running a couple of months now and the questions are piling up – thanks everyone for helping build it into a valuable resource.

Along the way we’ve had some good suggestions from those using it, and we’ve noticed lots of similar questions being asked, so we’ve fine-tuned a few things to help you get more out of the site. Perhaps this will encourage those of you who haven’t jumped in to answer or share ideas about being smart with money, to give it a go.

Next time you visit Xero Answers you might notice the following changes or new things:

• More topics!
  Most questions were ending up in the ‘Using Xero Personal’ category and with almost 200 questions in the site now we could see some clear groups of questions emerging so we’ve added these as new topics. Also makes it a bit easier to browse if you’re interested in the range of questions being asked on a particular topic.
• New ‘Recently Answered’ tab
  Too many good follow-up answers and suggestions from you on earlier questions weren’t being seen by other users on the site so we’ve added this list of questions that have had an answer added recently.
• Browsing through questions
  Browse the whole list of questions by clicking the ‘More’ button at the bottom of the questions on the home page or drill into a topic and page through questions from there.
• Search
  We’ve smartened up the search that goes on behind the ‘Ask’ button when you’ve entered your question or keywords. We found that lots of similar questions were being posted on the site because search results weren’t returning closely matched words and phrases. Now when you search you’ll hopefully get better results as well as some suggested pages from the Xero Personal Help Centre.

Don’t forget to upload a picture to your profile (use the ‘My public profile’ link at the top right of the screen when logged in) – as more of you are able to answer other people’s questions it will be nice to see who’s helping out!

Don’t be shy – this is a place for you to create a great resource for ideas and information about Xero Personal – we’d love to see you! http://answers.xero.com/