Xero Tips & Tricks - Automating your Accounts Payable

Posted 8 Mar '19

Xero Tips & Tricks - Automating your Accounts Payable

By Yana Robinson

We can help you reduce the amount of paper in your office.

With the increasing presence of the cloud in everything we do today, it is no wonder that we are looking for more efficient ways of carrying out our business operations.

There has been a shift from businesses sending their invoices in the post to businesses now emailing their invoices to customers. This shift has provided businesses with the opportunity to streamline how they account for, pay and store their supplier invoices by harnessing cloud software solutions such as Xero to automate this business function electronically. After all, paper is so 1990’s!

Xero has recently introduced a feature which allows for businesses to email their supplier invoices directly into their Xero file. Once Xero receives the copy of the invoice it will then automatically create a draft bill in your Xero file and attach a PDF copy of the original invoice. In addition to this, Xero will then go a step further and start to read the fields on the invoice and pre-populate some of this information into the Xero draft bill.

Xero will then split your screen view so that you can see the original supplier invoice on one side and the Xero bill on the other. You can then review the prepopulated information and approve the bill. At the end of the month, when it is time to pay your bills, you can download a batch ABA file from Xero and upload it your internet banking which will automate the payment of all your suppliers for the month.

As you can see, this recently added feature in Xero allows a business to automate its accounts payable function and perform the entire process without a single piece of paper. Gone are the days of having filing cabinets and folders full of your important documents.

Please contact our office to discuss how we can streamline your accounting software so that your business can harness the automation and efficiencies available.