Xero Product Update – November 2021

Bookkeeping, News, Xero,

As part of the renewal of our Xero Certification, we recently attended the quarterly Xero Product update, when Xero take Partner firms through the recent updates they’ve made to the software.

Now it’s time to pass the news on key changes and tweaks on to you!

Contacts

The list view page has been ‘refreshed’ to make it easier to manage customer and supplier information from the list view page. See more here.

Invoicing

Are you using the new format invoicing? It can pre-fill some of the details for you and automatically saves your invoice as you go, so there’s less risk of having to start again or losing what you’ve done already. It does look different, so there will be some familiarisation time needed, but there are gains to be had if you can get through that! Find out more about the different invoicing formats here.

So what’s changed here?

  • Show / Hide Invoice fields – The Invoice table that forms part of the new format has been redesigned and users now have control over what fields are shown or hidden when creating an invoice.
  • Add Last Items – You can now add the last invoiced items for a contact to a new invoice by clicking one button. This could be really useful where you can’t use a repeating invoice, but have to regularly raise invoices for the same things, perhaps with irregular repeat dates or similar.
  • Repeating Invoice Banner – A notification banner will now appear on invoices that have been generated from a repeating invoice template with text about the frequency of the invoice and a link to the template.
  • Pay Now Banner – online invoicing. The ‘Pay now’ button will now stay visible at the top of the page while a customer scrolls through an invoice on their screen.
  • Google Pay – online invoicing. If you add Stripe as a payment method to online invoices, customers can pay using Google Pay through an android device or Chrome.

Bank Rules

One of the biggest time savers in Xero! If you’re not using them yet, we’d strongly recommend you follow this link to find out how to get them set up, or get in touch and we can walk you through the process.

The tweak this time is simple, but you can now search for specific bank rules by name or condition. Anyone who uses bank feeds will be pleased to see this one!

Products and Services

You can now filter your products and services list to show active items only, or all items including those that you’ve archived. If you’ve been using Xero for a while, or your business has evolved over the time you’ve been using the system, this one could be a bonus!

The new item creation page has also been updated, to help make it a faster and easier to use.

More information about this one is here.

Mobile

One of the big benefits of Xero is being able to use it on the go, and the recent updates to the App will only improve things further:

  • View purchase orders – You can now view any purchase orders created in Xero on your desktop in the App.
  • Reconcile fees – You can now filter by, search by and match both spend and receive money transactions form ‘Find and match’ on the App.
  • Expense claims in Xero Me – It’s now possible to submit an expense and mileage claim in Xero Me, for those who use Xero Payroll. Expenses approvers should still use the Xero Expenses App.

Square & Xero

A new Square / Xero integration has arrived, giving you the ability to easily reconcile Square sales in Xero, capture point-of-sale transactions, and accept Square payments on Xero invoices. 

IMPORTANT! You will need to switch to the new version of this integration by the 30th November 2021 to avoid any interruption to the flow of data into your Xero system.

That’s about it for the updates that have already been implemented. If you haven’t seen all of them just yet, you should do over the next few weeks.

As ever, if you have any issues with the system, Xero support can be really helpful, so do follow the links to that, but if you’re struggling, drop us an email over and we’ll do what we can to help. We can’t become an extension of Xero Support, as we just don’t have the capacity if we’re going to hit the deadlines for clients that are coming up in the next few weeks, but are happy to help if we can!

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