By Thomas Julier, Accountant at Hive Business

Are you spending more time on your bookkeeping than you need to be? Have you spent hours sifting through transactions trying to find that one small error? Well stop what you’re doing and learn how to use Xero’s Find and Recode feature.

As long as you have advisor access to your Xero you can use the Find & Recode feature to do any of the following and much more:

• Cleaning up contacts when there are variations of a contact name
• Combining accounts
• Finding a specific or group of transactions
• Fixing allocation errors

Step 1: Find

No more ‘needle in a haystack’ digging for that one transaction; with the Find & Recode feature you can build complex, multi-value search criteria, choosing from nine different conditions to scan bank accounts, invoices, and bill transactions.

You can search by transaction type, account, date, user, and more. The search feature also allows negative search criteria, such as “Transaction Total is not more than £1000.” Depending on what you’re trying to find your search can be as detailed or as vague as you like by combining conditions such as searching for a transaction of £100 made on the 21st February. You also have the option of searching for a range of transaction such as “Date is between 1st March 2018 and 31st March 2018”.

Step 2: Recode

Once you have completed your search you can select one or more transactions from the list that match your criteria. When you then go to recode you have the option of recoding the source transaction or recoding with a manual journal.

If recoding the source transaction then you have the option to recode the Contact, Account or the Tax code for all your selected transactions. For example to reallocate all of the selected transactions to “Repairs and Maintenance” you would select “Repairs and Maintenance” from the drop-down next to “Account” then select review and confirm and you’re done! What could have taken ages has now taken a matter of minutes.

Example

You have noticed that some of the monthly payments to BT for your phone bill have been misallocated to General Expenses throughout the year. The steps to amend this are as follows:

• Go to Adviser- Find & Recode
• Add the following conditions:

1. Account is General Expenses
2. Date is between 1st April 2017 and 31st March 2018
3. Contact is BT

• Select the desired transaction from the resulting list and click recode.
• Select Telephone & Internet from the drop-down next to Account.
• Click review and confirm.

For more information on Xero: find & recode see this video tutorial.

If you would like to find out more about how Xero could benefit your business get in touch on  01872 300232 or email us at hello@hivebusiness.co.uk.