Step by Step Guide to Xero Conversion by mmcconvert

We chose Xero as our start point and looked at how we could move all of our systems across in the Xero suite of products. It wasn’t a “must have” back at the start of 2019 to have everything in the cloud, but with the power of hindsight, it’s proven invaluable. SuiteFiles & XPM are known to integrate really well with each other, which made the decision that much easier. These bank rules are also an example of two heads being better than one. Tonya will generally recognize when automation or macros could be helpful but tends to get stuck and frustrated when trying to implement them. However, I was determined to make using Xero as automatic as possible and had the patience and mindset to create the necessary rules.

QBO (web connect) transaction files are imported the same way as transactions downloaded directly from your bank. After import, open imported statement under Bank Feeds, match vendor records and assign expense/income accounts and add transactions to the register. Now that I know what to do every week when I reconcile transactions, I’m genuinely enjoying using Xero. It provides that ineffable sense of completion when you reconcile all the transactions, and there https://bookkeeping-reviews.com/myob-to-xero-direct-conversion/ are times I’ll even swing through the easy ones using the iPhone app if I have a few minutes to kill in the middle of the week. Even then, I seldom spend more than 15–20 minutes on it, which is both a lot less time than it took Tonya to fuss with the manual data entry in AccountEdge and sufficiently little that I never feel like it has become onerous. Some transactions are too complex for Xero to fill in automatically, and for those, you can create bank rules.

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What I lacked was the bookkeeping know-how to understand what some of the rules should do. Its interface has a spacious feeling and focuses on what you need to see and do at the appropriate moment. Overall, its design draws you in and makes you feel like spending more time in the app, rather than making you dread the tediousness of your bookkeeping sessions. And yes, to address the puffy white elephants in the room, Xero requires a subscription and is cloud-based. I’m sure some reading this will consider one or both of these facts anathema, but we see them as advantages.

We hoped that Xero would have an integration that we could use,  but Xero’s technical support reps said that such a feature exists only for a couple of New Zealand banks. It’s increasingly uncommon for us to write business checks now that we’ve figured out how to pay our authors using ACH from our credit union. But we do write checks now and then, and it wasn’t challenging to use Xero’s check template editor to match the pre-printed business checks that we run through our laser printer. Bank rules even include options to specify fixed value line items and then allocate the remainder in various ratios. It’s slightly irritating, but not so much that we were willing to pay an additional $8 per payroll run to link Xero and Paychex. This section will be useful to you if your business is already running and you’ve managed your financials with others systems (paper records, spreadsheets, another accounting program like MYOB) and you now want to start using Xero.

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About 25 years ago, Tonya took over the accounting for TidBITS from me. I don’t remember what we used originally—possibly MacMoney—but when it came time to set up a proper business accounting system, a financial adviser friend helped us configure and learn MYOB. Over the years, MYOB went through numerous corporate transitions, and the app itself became known as AccountEdge. https://bookkeeping-reviews.com/ It was capable but clunky, never really evolving beyond its 1990’s heritage. While Tonya could get it to do everything we needed, particularly after taking an online accounting class in 2018, it was neither easy nor enjoyable to use. The main alternative was Intuit’s QuickBooks, but we had seen Intuit jerk Mac users around too many times with canceled Mac apps to trust it.

• QIF transaction files are easily imported by Quicken (please make sure to your QIF target accordingly) and allow to supply categories and tags for each transaction.
• I’ll admit to some trepidation when it became clear that we needed to switch to a modern accounting system.
• The first time I pay an author, if that person needs a 1099, I add them to a special contact group in Xero.
• At the time of course, we couldn’t have known that we’d be working remotely for long stretches of 2020.
• It’s much easier and less error-prone because you never manually enter dates or dollar amounts.

We finally solved the problem by manually adjusting the starting balances in Xero as of January 1st so that they matched what we had as final numbers for 2020 in AccountEdge. This website is using a security service to protect itself from online attacks. There are several actions that could trigger this block including submitting a certain word or phrase, a SQL command or malformed data. I’m sure every business has its own necessities and quirks, so I can’t begin to tell you if Xero would be appropriate for other situations.

Step by Step Guide to Xero Conversion

At the time of course, we couldn’t have known that we’d be working remotely for long stretches of 2020. It has made all of the difference in keeping our practice running as close to normal as is possible in this environment. It means we haven’t had to maintain a server, try to arrange access from remote locations, and has minimized downtime in what is already an incredibly stressful time for businesses. We’ve been able to better support our clients because we’re not scrambling for information, we have regular and continuous access from wherever we are. We started with the conversion and migration of our MYOB general ledgers about 4 months before we moved our practice & document management data across.

When our payroll processor, Paychex, deducts money from our checking account, the transaction isn’t necessarily the same as the previous one. Bank rules let us separate out the different Paychex payees and accounts and record them appropriately. Many accounting software packages like QuickBooks Desktop (any edition like QuickBooks Pro or QuickBooks Premier or QuickBooks Accountant) provide a buffer zone (bank feeds center) to review imported transactions and delete (ignore) or add to the register.

Despite all of Apple’s claims of innovation in the credit card space and sporadic data export improvements (see “You Can Now Export Apple Card Statements to Quicken and QuickBooks,” 5 June 2020), there’s no online access for systems like Xero. Instead, I export the transactions in OFX format from the iPhone’s Wallet app every month, using the share sheet to store them in a Google Drive folder from which I can then import them into Xero. It’s clumsy in comparison with all the fully connected accounts, but it works. Of course, part of the reason for accounting systems is to provide information about the financial state of the business. Xero’s top-level view is a customizable dashboard that shows every account with a chart of changes over the past month. You can rearrange the various panels that appear, plus add boxes that help you pay attention to certain expense accounts, invoices owed to you, bills you have to pay, payroll that’s managed through Xero, and more.