Xero for iOS: The latest round-up

In our last iOS feature round-up we told you about how we’d overhauled login, created a new unified list of invoices, and added viewing and recording invoice payments. With this round-up we continue on the theme of improving how we support sales in the app, and there are a whole host of updates for managing contacts.

A better sales summary and the first stage of quotes

Goodbye Invoices tab, hello Sales! Don’t fret – everything invoicing is still there. But with the ongoing addition of quotes to the app, it made sense for the two to share a home.

We know you love to use the app to monitor your business, so we’ve made sure the Sales tab provides a quick overview of all your invoices and quotes, across all stages of the sales process. Views of all invoices, all quotes, or just those at a specific stage are all just a tap away from here.

You can now view the details of individual quotes as well. Of course, the improvements to sales in the app won’t stop there!! We’ll continue to add to what the Sales tab offers.

Dashboard – keep your finger on the pulse

Your dashboard now includes two significant changes that make it even easier for you keep track of how your business is doing at a glance. Being able to understand quickly where your bank balances are at, what invoices you need to chase, what potential work you might follow up on, and what your cashflow is looking like are vital to your business.

The first big change we’ve made to the dashboard is that you can now see the key numbers for invoices, quotes and receipts all in one place. A set of up to four tiles shows you the totals for:

• Overdue invoices
• Unpaid invoices
• Approved expense claims that are awaiting repayments
• Sent quotes

Tapping on any of these tiles gives you a view of all matching items, grouped by contact.

The second improvement is your cash flow graph. It shows cash in and out for the last three months plus the current month to date. Tapping on a month shows you a pop-up with the actual amounts, plus the difference between cash in and cash out.

A swag of contact improvements

We’ve been steadily improving contacts management over the last few releases. The big one for some will have been the ability to add and edit contacts in the app.

If you’re adding a new contact on the spot you want it to be as streamlined as possible so you can get back to the task at hand. At the same time, contact records can be quite detailed, with many fields to consider and potentially fill out. With that in mind, we made sure you can add as much or as little detail as you want quickly and painlessly by creating a contact screen that only displays what you need, when you need it.

You can also archive contacts you no longer need to tidy up your contacts list.

Even if you mostly manage your contacts on the web, there are still a number of improvements to contacts that make many tasks that little bit quicker, easier or more convenient.

Spotlight Search

If you’re a fan of Apple’s Spotlight Search, which lets you search across your whole device from your home screen, you’ll be pleased to know Xero contacts now show up in Spotlight Search results – search for a customer in Spotlight Search now and you won’t only see what emails and messages you have for them, you’ll get a link straight to that contact in the Xero app.

From there, you can take advantage of another new feature and create new invoices or receipts directly from a contact. So when you get off a call to your customer, you can go straight to invoicing them for the new order they just put in.

Flipping that around, if you’re viewing an invoice and want to check that customer’s details or get in touch with them, you can now jump straight from an invoice to that customer’s contact screen. Just tap the blue icon to the right of the contact name when viewing the invoice.

Last year we made contact search pretty much instantaneous, and now we’ve improved things for people with many thousands of contacts.

Browsing through thousands of contacts is much easier with the new alphabetical index, which shows to right of the contacts list and lets you jump straight to contacts starting with any character.

We’ve also sped up automatic contact syncing – like magic, hundred or thousands of contacts will easily sync behind the scenes.

Stay tuned, more great stuff is on the way

We’ll be building on what’s already delivered for quotes. Support for creating and editing quotes is next up, but we’re working continuously to improve how sales works in our app, so it won’t stop there.

The way we’re approaching quotes means you’ll see some great performance improvements, with quotes being listed and viewed instantly in most circumstances. We’ll later be able to provide this for invoices as well.

Another exciting piece of work relates to leveraging the latest version of iOS, the software Apple’s iPhones and iPads run on. We can’t reveal exactly what yet though – it’ll be a surprise for September, when iOS 11 is expected to drop!

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Source: Xero Blog