We recently highlighted how to make your Xero Dashboard work for you. In addition to this, Xero have introduced a new tool to give you a quick view of your business – the Xero Business Snapshot. This is currently in the pilot stage but I think it will be really useful for dental business owners.

The Business Snapshot can be found as a drop down option under Accounting, and can be run for the last financial year, the last quarter, the last month or the year to date. It provides simple graphs and charts to give an immediate picture of how the business is performing compared to previous periods. Data provided covers:

• Profit or loss for the period as a value and also as a bar chart compared to the previous period – this will enable you to compare recent performance to previous periods.
• Income and expenses by month as a value and also as a line graph – this will mean that you can quickly identify whether there have been any unexpected fluctuations and take action if necessary, for example if costs have increased but income has fallen.
• Movements in the largest expenses – this will show you where your main costs arise and enable you to monitor variations.
• Some balance sheet information, in particular bank balances at the period end.

To give an idea of how it works, the first page of the Snapshot looks like this:

This is a quick and easy way to keep an eye on how your business is going and it is so simple to produce that it can be used to monitor your business on an ongoing basis. Although the graphs provided are pre-set and cannot be edited, the information given is likely to be what most business owners would like to know and it is available at the click of the mouse.

The reliability of the Snapshot will depend on the quality of the bookkeeping within Xero. The more up to date and accurate your bookkeeping is, the more reliable, and therefore useful, the Snapshot will be.
If you would like more information on how to optimise your use of Xero so that you can make the most of the Snapshot tool and interpret the data being displayed, please get in touch with us.