Get Shift Done: Tips and Tricks
Monotonous. Repetitive. Excruciatingly boring. Reconciling expenses in your accounting software is a critical, but painfully dull and time-consuming part of successfully running nearly any business. Thankfully, a little-known Xero trick can turn an hour’s worth of punching away at individual fields into just a few seconds of work.
First, go ahead and log into your Xero account. Once you’ve logged in, you’ll see all of your various accounts laid out on the homepage.
Click on the name of the account that you need to reconcile to get started. In the case of our tutorial here, you’ll see the account is named Big Bank. It’s circled there in red:
In the past, maybe you’ve gone ahead and clicked on each individual item to reconcile your expenses one at a time. And who could blame you! That seems like the intuitive thing to do. But this is where we zag rather than zig by clicking on the Cash Coding tab:
That Cash Coding tab will take you to a page that looks like the one below. Click the “Description” header in the middle of the page to arrange your expenses by type. This field is auto-populated by Xero, and usually manages to pull in reliably accurate, helpful data.
Here’s where the magic happens. With your expenses arranged by Description, go ahead and click the box on the left for the very first of the various line items attributed to the same Description, and then the very last one as well. It could be as few as one or two, but the real productivity kicks in when there are dozens of expenses in the same group. Clicking just the first and last will automatically highlight the entire group of expenses.
Then click the Account box to the right of the Description on the first expense in the group, all the way at the top of the list. Filling out the field for just that one expense will update the entire group.
Then, simply click the bright green Save & Reconcile All button, and the entire group will vanish from your list. Poof! Repeat the process for your remaining groups of expenses, and call it a day, with plenty of precious time left to spare.
GSD: Tips and Tricks is brought to you by Xero, the cloud accounting software solution for your small business. With Xero, you can log in anytime, anywhere to get a real-time view of your cash flow and manage your books. Start your free 30-day trial today.