Setting up and using Xero as a small business certainly isn’t easy. Xero takes a bit of knowledge and training to get going so that you can start to see game changing business insights.
We want you to get the most of the software, which is why we provide hands-on support to help setting up and using Xero.
With the right system in place, you can make savvy business decisions, easily identify the most profitable areas of your business, and discover ways to grow and develop your company. But, getting there requires some help and a good road map.
As Xero consultants, we’re experts at shining a light on your business data and changing the game. And, without the right support and assistance, you’re just on the hamster wheel, spinning fruitless circles.
Benefits of Xero Accounting Software
Xero helps you unlock new insights and streamlines your financial process. Manual bookkeeping can be consuming and takes time away from what matters most — growing your business.
Xero helps you:
- Streamline services and automate routine accounting tasks
- Access real-time financial reporting and effectively manage cash flow.
- Get detailed insights into the health of your business as well as its inefficiencies.
- Automatically backups your financial data, so you don’t have to worry about your system crashing and losing valuable information.
Here at Empowered by Cloud, we help clients capitalise on real-time insights to help clients secure a better understanding of their financial systems and overall business operations.
Setting Up and Using Xero as a Small Business
Establish Your Business Goals
When you enlist our help setting up Xero, we’ll start by talking about your business goals. What would you like to achieve? What’s your biggest most pressing problem?
Whether you want to secure a certain profit level or simply stop waking up at 3 am to balance the books, we’ll take the time to understand your goals.
Your business goals serve as the road map and underpin all of our efforts. Or, in other words, it structures the entire process and shapes our approach.
Collect Financial Information
Next, we’ll ask for backups from your previous financial system and bookkeeping records. Looking at your past financial information helps us to establish benchmarks and determine how you currently operate. After all, we can only know how to reach your goals if we understand where we already stand.
Our main goal of this process is to transform your financial data into game-changing insights. Insights that you can leverage to future-proof your company and quickly achieve high-growth.
Review Processes & Operations
Achieving financial insights is only half of the equation — we also want to help you streamline your current ways of working and improve efficiency. To do this, we need to look at how you currently operate, employees’ unique roles and the intricate details of your unique business.
Collecting this information allows us to determine a benchmark, which we can measure our progress against. We’ll then work with you to develop a process that helps you know your numbers and improve efficiencies.
Identify Bottlenecks
To make your system more efficient, we need to identify what’s not working and any processes or parts of the process that are taking you a long time. In other words, we need to pinpoint the inefficiencies.
Research from the Federation of Small Businesses (FSB) shows that 67% of small business owners feel that admin tasks are stopping them from focusing on their company. And, most small business owners spend 9 hours a month on new business development, while roughly 25% of these individuals spend over 33 hours on admin.
We’ll help you reduce your admin time, especially the many, many hours you spend on bookkeeping.
Suggest Xero apps
Xero has over 850 integrated apps, including popular favourites like ReceiptBank, Pleo and Float Cash Flow. With so many choices, there are apps for almost every type of business and you can customise Xero to fit your unique needs.
We’ll make suggestions on which apps to try and we will put in place a plan to implement them. Ideally, we want to find the apps that’ll help you streamline processes and save you valuable time.
Check out our other article on how to move from Sage to Xero to learn more about what we can do for you.
Set Project Guidelines
At this point, we’ll have a good understanding of the project scope. So, we can tell you how long it’ll take to complete the migration, train your employees and make sure the system is working correctly.
Most projects take between 6-12 weeks, but it varies depending on your company’s unique needs.
Setting Up Xero Accounting
We’ll handle setting up your Xero accounting software and make sure to train your employees before the system goes live. We carefully plan our conversions so the system can go live from the first day of the new financial year, and we will support you over the following weeks to answer the questions that come from using the system hands on.
Prepare for Change
Change is never easy. Research from McKinsey shows that 70% of change programs fail. However, change mostly fails because of employee resistance and lack of management support.
You can beat the odds and increase your chances of success by making sure everyone, especially senior team members, are onboard. Take time to explain why you need a new system and how it’ll benefit employees.
Our training sessions go a long way to helping cultivate the right attitude and educating employees on the benefits. But, it’s essential to recognise that all change comes with a learning curve, so things will get worse before they get better.
With Xero, there’s naturally a period when things will take you longer than they did before. But, pushing through and getting past this period will unlock incomparable benefits that’ll totally change the game.
Let’s Get Started
Ready to get the ball rolling? Contact us to schedule an initial consultation and learn how we can help you unlock data-driven financial insights with Xero.
