Donna Genie demonstrates how to use and customize Xero reports. She walks through the Reports menu (under Accounting), highlights the Business Snapshot/Analytics (clickable profit & loss block that opens the income statement), explains net profit margin and gross profit, shows largest operating expenses with drill-down links, and points out payment/collection metrics and pilot financial ratios. She also mentions Business Performance and Executive Summary reports, how to star favorites for shortcuts, and how to view traditional financial statements (income statement and balance sheet) with date/period comparison and basis toggles. The demo uses sample/demo data and closes with contact and social links.
Questions this video answers
May 11, 2023
Seven days
320 (units implied as days in the narration)
add donna@calculatedmoves.com
Chapters
All right, we've given you a little intro to the Xero dashboard. Let's take a look at reports. You'll go to accounting and then Reports. Xero has a wide range of reports already built for you, but you can customize these to your needs so it will prompt you with some favorites. Up here at the top, let's take a look at a couple in particular. Before we hop into the normal financial statements of balance sheet and income statement, let's check out some financial performance information. So first we'll look at the analytics for a business snapshot. All right, this is a great report, one of my favorites and has a lot to look at. And you'll find that the graphical interface makes it a little bit easier to see things. So the first block is going to show us our profit and loss. If we click on that, we will open up the income statement in another tab. So this is going to give us some comparison numbers of how we're doing this year versus last year. Right now we're showing a loss. We better get some help from our accountant. Right in this demo company, the income is up a lot over last year. You can see we're up $27,000, but expenses are up $40,000. So these are some pretty high percentages and I wouldn't expect to see these in your business. But this is demo data, so we'll never know what we're going to get here. So taking a look a little on down the page, if we now hop over to the net profit margin part of the screen, this is going to be an important characteristic to tell us how our pricing is doing. We want to look here and it's going to show us and navigate. For every dollar of sales revenue, the average net loss of $0.50 was made. So we've got some catching up to do on our pricing and really analyzing our financials. So this is bottom line net profit. Gross profit is your sales list, your cost of goods sold. So without all of the overhead in your business, this again is a really good indicator to look at for our pricing to make sure we're in line with industry standards and with where our goals are that we want to achieve. Coming down a little further, we can now see the largest operating expenses. Again, all of these numbers are clickable. If you click on them, it will take you to the detail of the expense report so you can see all of the expenses associated that underlie that number. Finally, at the bottom portion, we have the financial position and the cash. So it's giving us a summary on Our balance sheet, our overall cash balances with a link to check out our upcoming cash flow needs. We also show that our average time to get paid is seven days and our average time to pay suppliers 320. Uh oh, I bet we have some mad suppliers. We can also toggle the bottom here to turn on the financial ratios. These are in a pilot program right now, but they're giving us current ratio, debt ratio and current liabilities to net worth. Those are helpful if you're into the deeper financial side. If you are a top level business owner, those may not be all that exciting to you. All right, so that's one of the analysis reports. We can also toggle this to look at it based on last year, current month, last quarter. We can also toggle between cash and accrual basis and we can print that report if you prefer to have a hard copy in hand. Let's go back to our reports. There are tons of these reports so I'm not going to take you through all of them. But one other one that is a favorite. Here is the business performance. This one takes a look into some ratio analysis again. And last but not least, the executive summary is also a favorite. This one will allow us to look at our cash, where it's going to our profitability metrics, whether we're going up or down on our variances, our sales, how many invoices we issued and what the average ticket price is, our performance and our accounts payable and receivable numbers. So another good favorite but let's go ahead and take a look as promised to our traditional financial statements. Also, you will notice that if you put a star by a report that you like, it will appear on this menu bar for you. So you'll have shortcuts to the things you specifically like. So here's our income statement we just pulled up. You'll see it's defaulting to year to date, but if you click on the left you'll have many other choices. You could switch this over to see a current and the prior three months, the current fiscal year, fiscal year by month, a month to date comparison, year to date comparison. And if you're tracking categories, you can use that to look at the regions in this case. All right, we'll also we'll just stick with this current year to date. But let's say we want to see how we're doing compared to the last two years. We can choose a compare with and choose a custom date range or if you want to see the whole year to see how you're tracking. You can do that as well. And we'll hit update. So now we're seeing the previous same amount of days before in those periods so you can get a really quick comparison again with our demo data. Those numbers don't mean a whole lot here, but I think you'll understand the points there. Let's take a look also at our balance sheet. Our balance sheet is going to show us our what we have versus what we owe and look more at our equity positions. Again, you have options on the left to look at comparisons and you can also compare by year, by day, by month, by quarter here. All right, so we can see that we have 11,000 in assets, but we owe people 6,400. So our equity or what our worth is in the company at the moment, about $5,200. So I encourage you to explore in the reports in Xero. Find those reports. If you'd like to see a bigger description before you click on them, you can toggle that little button and it will give you more description there. But there are lots of these reports to try out. So see what you think and see what you like. If there's a report you like, put a star by it. It'll appear on the menu for you. I hope this has been a good helpful demo of how to look at the reporting in Xero. Please follow us on Facebook and Instagram. Please make sure to check out our blog and our website linked below. Subscribe to our YouTube channel and hit the bell to be notified when we post. Email me at add donna@calculatedmoves.com.
