This is a blog post I’ve been meaning to write for years. There remains a rampant problem in NZ: sites that lead to a Address Not Found error if you neglect to type www before the web address, for example…
These sites cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to build, maintain and promote. Adding a redirect to the www address is a basic, ten second job for any web geek (see: wildcard DNS redirect).
Please try your site now. If somebody can’t access your site by simply typing your domain and the suffix (ie .com) then go fix it now!! Getting an error is a bad experience. You’re losing business and you’re frustrating people who happen to be persistent and knowledgeable enough to re-try with www in front.
You may have noticed a new business guide section under Business Support on our website. Under this section is a collection of articles to help you run your business better.
In todays tough market cash-flow is everything. Check out this guide to get some useful ideas on how to speed up getting money from customers: Invoicing tips to improve your cash-flow
Please let us know if guide is useful or any other areas you’d like us to write about.
Since releasing our Common Formats feature in Profit and Loss reporting a few weeks ago we’ve had some great feedback from our accounting partners that this very useful. Especially when used with tracking categories.
Most companies use P&L reports to see how their business is going. P&L reporting is especially useful in Xero as the numbers are up to date every day so they are a valuable management tool. How is my income doing compared to last month? Are my expenses under control?
We had lots of feedback that while everyone uses a P&L, there are many ways to look at the information.
This month compared to the last few, so I can see how I’m tracking
Actual vs Budget
This month compared to the same time last year - for businesses with seasonal variations
As we designed this Andrew came up with the idea of just creating some common formats so that you could quickly look at your P&L in a number of ways. Here is a video that shows you how simple it is.
You probably spotted that I’m using the Blue microphone I picked up in Palo Alto a couple of weeks ago. We use Screenflow to capture the tour and Vimeo to host the video. It only takes a few minutes to make a movie and get it up so you’ll see many more of these from us. And yes - we all dislike the sound of our own voice :)
There’s obviously a lot going on at the moment in terms of the markets and how this downturn is going to hit some small businesses. It may seem like a momentous leap – from Wall St to your small business – but the ethos remains the same, how do you protect your assets, your business and most importantly, your cash.
Accounting software such as Xero is there to help in the leaner times as well as the good..
Here’s some ideas on what you can do.
Process your bank transactions daily to see what your available balance is, if you have excess funds then you may want to transfer money to a higher earning interest account. You’ll then know exactly who owes you money.
Keep on top of your debtors – make sure that people are paying you. You can check away from the office on your mobile device (m.xero.com).
Be aware if anyone one large debtor creates a disproportionate exposure .
Tighten up your expenses – identify expenses that are unnecessary and costly. Keep a close eye on travel especially.
Monitor your staff’s expense claims. It might be useful to send an email around your team to clarify your policy around expenses.
Enter your Budget and use the Budget Variance report to see how your expenses are tracking against the actual budget – and whether you need to re-evaluate what you’re spending.
Invoice as soon as you have completed a job rather than waiting unto the end of the month. You can change your payment terms to be pay on invoice.
Prepare your management reports each month and send them to your bank manager so they can see you’re on top of your financials.
We’ve heard from many of accounting partners (especially the Diva team in Pukekohe) that there are lots of different ways people want to look at their Profit and Loss accounts. Our common formats allow you to quickly pick which view you want.
One of our affiliates, Pennys Worth Ltd based in Auckland will be running a series of training courses for Xero customers starting with a practical, hands-on course covering the basics.
The 3-hour session uses your own Xero trial company, which means all the tasks and examples done while on the course will stay on your system, so you can access them for the following 14 days to remind and refresh you on how you have put in the information. Pennys Worth will also issue copies of handout material to take away with you.
The course will cover the following, plus more:
Basic bookkeeping principles
Invoicing
Paying suppliers
Expense claims
Basic reporting
Bank feeds
Using ‘Help’
GST returrns
The course cost is $199 + GST. The dates are: Thurs 16 October – Auckland or Tues 11 November – Auckland
Please register your interest as soon as possible, so we can reserve a space for you.
We have quite a number of Xero customers who are moving into the next stage of their careers as independent consultants. It’s an exciting time as often they’ve been in a large corporate environment and now they have the opportunity to balance work and other interests as well as do projects they’re passionate about.
An afternoons golf really can be business development!
Coming out of a corporate environment, your technology has just been been provided and you’ve probably had little choice or even interest in it. Getting your technology right will make things a lot easier, make you appear more professional, as well as save you time and money.
There are some very cheap, if not free technologies, that you should have good look at. I really believe you want to get as much online as possible so you don’t need to worry about backups, loosing data or having your laptop stolen. Let these services be your IT department.
So what should consultants do for their IT?
First of all you need to think about your requirements.
What sort of documents do you produce?
Is it just you, or you and a few others
Do you need any special software?
Do you want to email while on the road?
Where do you travel?
Do you need to be in contact while at the beachhouse?
One of the great uses of Xero, and a fun way to get started, is to manage your investment properties in Xero.
We’ve observed that many property investors are way behind with their property accounting and then have a huge job at the end of the year. Or they deluge their accountant with a shoebox containing a year’s receipts for them to untangle. There is a better way!
Rental properties are largely cash businesses, most transactions appear on your bank statements. As Xero allows you to import historical bank transactions you can go back and retrospectively catch up. Even a few hundred transactions you can quickly process to get back up to date and in control.
Our repeating invoices allow you to create rent schedules for all the people that are paying rent. These can also be set up retrospectively so when you process your last 6 months of bank transactions you can match payments off what was due. I’ve set up a few friends’ investment properties on Xero and every time we’ve discovered missing rent. And each time the amount has been more than a year’s subscription to Xero. Instant ROI!
Once you have caught up, the repeating invoices automatically create rent transactions as they are due. This means you can match payments off and see immediately if anyone is late.
You track expenses and rent in the Profit and Loss report and use Tracking Codes to have separate reports by property.
In the Balance Sheet you can see what each property is worth, your mortgages and the amount of top up funding you are putting into your properties.
We’ve developed a guide to setting up rental properties correctly and would love your feedback. If enough of you want a hand to get set up we’d be happy to run some workshops. Either contact your accountant or let us know.
I seem to be on a bit of a speaking tour at present with the CIO Summit in Auckland being my most recent event. I was there to talk about our security work with Aura Software Security and how they’ve been critical to the success of our security story.
Our reputation depends on providing airtight security and from the early days of Xero we have been working with the experts at Aura to continually audit our security and provide us independent expertise on how to integrate secure practices throughout our organisation. Aura have been highly impressed by Xero because “the security of Xero was embedded in the company’s mindset and filtered down from the CEO right through to the admin team”. It is this “holistic” view of security throughout Xero that has been the driving force behind this success.
Below are some of the security precautions we take. There are many more that we won’t publish because, as you might expect, that wouldn’t be good security policy:
We model our security on the policies and measures taken by banks. To be as “secure as a bank” is an aspirational goal for us and one we continually strive for.
We use 128 bit SSL encryption, the same used for internet banking.
Our servers are hosted with a world leading hosting provider, delivering the highest levels of availability, performance and security.
Only a select few authorised personnel at Xero have access to the Xero production environment and all access is actively monitored and logged.
No one has access to your organisation unless you’ve invited them. You can remove any invited users whenever you want. You have the option to invite Customer Care, but it’s for support purposes only and completely at your discretion.
There is an audit trail of everything a user has done in Xero and you can monitor the activity of all your invited users.
Users must choose a strong password and we enforce automatic lockouts when incorrect usernames and passwords are entered, alerting us to any attempts to hack in.
We don’t allow the browser to save your login information which mitigates unauthorised access from a stolen or compromised computer.
If you are logged in and don’t use Xero for an extended period you will be automatically logged out in case you’ve left your computer unattended.
Security is an ongoing process, not a singular event – we continuously reinforce our defences.
How is Xero more secure than desktop software?
Unlike desktop applications your data isn’t stored on your computer, so if your laptop is lost or stolen no one can access your data without a login.
Providing access to your data by inviting specific users into your organisation and controlling their access is much more secure than emailing your data around or giving out discs with your data on it.
While we continually work very hard to keep Xero and your data secure there are some simple steps you can take to stay protected as well:
Create a password nobody can guess, so no dictionary words or family names. Be cryptic or use multi-word pass phrases - easy to remember, hard to crack.
Don’t write your password on a sticky note and attach it to your computer.
Don’t share your email address and password with anyone else. Xero allows for unlimited users for each organisation: that feature is there for your security - use it!
Keep your browser software up to date. For enhanced security we recommend Internet Explorer 7 (download here) or Firefox 3 (download here)
Make sure you have anti-virus software installed and kept up to date.
