Xero have increased the limits on their Starter plan as well as improving the functionality of payments and insights tools. The Xero updates remove the limit on bank reconciliation and increases the invoice limit to 20 per month, or approximately one per business day. The new plan will include the same features in the existing Xero Starter plan, including Hubdoc for automated document collection and management.
Xero is interesting as it’s one of a handful of accounting solutions for which eBay payments have made the ability to sync reports via OneSaas.
Improved predictive data and insights tools
Xero Projects’ new profitability dashboard provides small businesses with an easier way to see and manage the profitability of each project. The dashboard shows the total profit margin, all work invoiced and costs associated with the project. It also highlights any outstanding invoices, as well as how the project is tracking against estimates, making it easier to identify which projects are the most profitable and which need tweaking.
Xero will also extend availability of its existing insights tools to all business edition customers to help them manage cash flow at crucial times. The short-term cash flow and business snapshot tools, initially extended to customers during COVID-19, will now be an ongoing feature on the platform. The short-term cash flow tool allows businesses to forecast their bank balance for the next 30 days based on their existing bills and invoices, while business snapshot gives accountants and bookkeepers high-level insights into critical business metrics at a glance.
Future Xero updates will introduce premium functionality for business snapshot and short-term cash flow in the future.
Payments set up easily with Stripe and GoCardless
Xero continues to work closely with global payments partners Stripe and GoCardless to create seamless experiences with more functionality to help businesses get paid quicker. Enhancements to the Stripe set up experience makes it faster and easier for any small business to create an account and accept card payments from Xero online invoices. Xero is also building a deeper integration with GoCardless to create a more seamless experience for small businesses to accept direct debit payments. The enhanced integration will be live later this year.
Enhanced integrations with PayPal and Square to make payments easy will be coming soon in future Xero updates.