I was gobsmacked by a stat at a recent conference: 67% of businesses are NOT using a live bank feed in their accounting.
Using Xero bank feeds remains one of the best things you can do for automation.
If you are not using it, drawing on some of the Gareth Southgate analogies from last year’s European Championships, that’s akin to driving a Ferrari at 10 mph or putting your phone on low power mode when the batteries are on 99%.
Bank feeds make things easy. You connect Xero to your bank using your regular online banking username and password. And…… that’s it.
From there, all your transactions are downloaded into Xero: date, payee/payer, and amount. This means neither you nor anyone else has to do it manually.
Xero matches the transactions to your sales and purchase invoices where it can. You can set rules for things like bank charges to code them to the correct place automatically.
It does occasionally have a blip, meaning you still need to check it monthly against your actual bank statement balance. But most of the time, it’s giving you Real Time Information about your bank balance and how much cash you have.
Xero has so many features. Beyond its ubiquitous bank feed, it makes me wonder which other features those 67% could be using to save them time and give them better information.
Do you need to review your use of Xero? To see whether you can crank up the Ferrari (or Volkswagen Golf, which is perhaps, to be fair, a better comparison for Xero) to get more out of it.