Your future practice experience with Xero

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At Xerocon London we shared a snapshot of the vision for your future practice experience. Our vision for your practice is a seamless, beautiful experience with your clients at the centre of everything you do.

We announced several new products and enhancements we’re building across several core areas of development including accurate and fast data, end-to-end tax and compliance and real-time insights. This is what you need to know:

Introducing Xero Tax in the United Kingdom

Built on the same, world-class Xero platform and using the capabilities of Instafile, which Xero acquired in 2018, Xero Tax will save accountants and bookkeepers significant time and reduce errors, by giving you a single source of truth to work from for data collection.

Xero Tax is a fully integrated tax preparation workflow and the new features will include single sign-on with Xero, integration with Fixed Asset Register, document styling and electronic signatures, offering practices a simple workflow. Advisors will also no longer need to rely on manual data imports with transactional checking of underlying bookkeeping data.

The corporation tax and accounts production module will be released in March next year as part of a partner subscription in the UK. There’s so much more to come for Xero Tax and we’re excited to work with you to develop the functionality for future modules like personal tax and partnership tax.

Get an aerial view with Xero HQ VAT

In September, we released a new aerial view in Xero HQ of VAT requirements across your entire client portfolio. This gives you a dedicated home to understand immediate tax obligations and easily manage compliance with Making Tax Digital.

Now, you have a holistic view of upcoming compliance requirements for all of your clients, instead of tracking it across different spreadsheets, task lists, emails, or individual client files.

From Xero HQ, advisors will have a real-time view of when clients’ MTD VAT returns are due, filing status and which clients are registered as non-VAT. There’s so much more we’re working on to make Xero HQ your dedicated home for managing your VAT clients.

Real-time insights with Business Snapshot

We also announced new small business tools that we are first piloting with partners to provide you with real-time insights to help your clients understand the performance of their business and flag potential concerns and opportunities.

Our new Business Snapshot pilot will begin in the first quarter of next year, summarising business’ critical performance metrics — such as income, expenses, gross and net-profit, receivables and payable days, cash and balance sheet — in one view.

These beautiful visualisations are part of a suite of efforts Xero is making to help small businesses grow and thrive. In September, we announced a pilot of a short-term cash flow tool. This will give small businesses a 30-day view of their business health in the platform. It will also enable them to make decisions on payments and bills based on potential impacts to cashflow. Business Snapshot is the next stage and provides the all-important context to understanding the relationship between cashflow and profit.

Revamping payments to help small business pay and get paid faster than ever

We are enhancing payments on our platform to make it easier than ever for small businesses to set up card and debit payments for customer invoices, pay multiple bills quickly, and reconcile everything against their accounting ledger.

This includes a new solution Pay with Transferwise – a new transformative way for UK small businesses to pay bills, no matter who they bank with, reducing time spent paying suppliers and increasing efficiency with seamless reconciliation. We also can now offer instalment payments and foreign currency options with GoCardless to customers via direct debit, helping them grow their customer base.

Additionally, we are improving the onboarding process with Stripe and GoCardless to make it simpler for small businesses to accept different payment methods.

Hubdoc integration nearing completion

The foundation of all your client work is reliable, up-to-date client files and we’re building fast, accurate data solutions that create and process transactions automatically. We’re removing the need to chase receipts and bills through the magic of data automation, and it’s changing our world as we speak.

A year ago Xero acquired Hubdoc as an integral part of our data automation vision. We’re now nearing completion of the integration. This means partners will get increasingly more benefits from the seamless connection between the two platforms.

We believe data capture technology will have a huge impact on your everyday workflow and we’re making that a reality.

New tools put profitability in the business’ hands

We’ve invested heavily in the past year on expanding our must-have small business products to help small businesses better manage their staff, operate and scale.

We have enhanced our much-loved and awarded small business products with some simple updates that make a big impact. These include; a new mileage tracker in Xero Expenses that automatically calculates fuel and mileage expenses to reimburse staff There’s also a new quotes functionality within Xero Projects to accurately cost projects and track profitability. Plus within Xero Payroll, there is a new automated direct connection to HMRC removes tedious and time-consuming manual tasks for employers providing car or van benefit in kind to their staff during the tax year.

A bright future together

At Xero, we are dedicated to understanding your work and the challenges you face. In fact we have more than 30 teams throughout Xero dedicated to walking in your shoes.

We are finding the solutions that are most important to you to build your future practice experience around them. We’re giving you peace of mind, supercharged efficiency and insights to help you have more meaningful conversations with your clients. We’re excited about the enhancements we shared at Xerocon London and are looking forward to continuing to innovate alongside you.

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