The Dashboard is extremely powerful. At a glance you can take a look at your bank balance, who owes you money, movements in key accounts, how much money you owe to suppliers. As usual everything is also only 1 click away, meaning you can drill down to any of the detail straight from the Dashboard as well. 

Introduction to the Dashboard

The Account Watchlist

The Account Watchlist allows you to at a glance to see the balances on any account you chose. We always suggest putting your GST, Super and PAYG Withholding on the Account Watchlist so you can easily see how much money you should have set aside in your tax account. But you can also add any other account such as Sales or Inventory or anything you want to track without having to look up how you are going. 

The Account Watchlist shows this month + the Year to Date balance. 

To add items to the watchlist go to Settings > General Settings > Chart of Accounts > click on the account you want to add & tick the box next to Show on Dashboard Watchlist. 

Bank Accounts

As soon as you log into Xero you can see your bank balance. You can also see a graphical representation of your account going up and down for the last month, as well as how many transactions remain unreconciled. 

This means you don't need to log into your internet banking to see your balance or the transactions on your account, it's all in Xero. 

You can have all of your bank accounts and credit cards on the Dashboard making it easy to see if your tax bank account balance has enough to cover your tax, GST and super. 

Money you are owed

For those of us who aren't paid on the spot for services or our product, it's super important you keep an eye on who owes you money and if these are overdue or not. It's also important you keep an eye on this from a cashflow point of view. 

Straight from the Dashboard you can see how much you are owed, what is overdue, and future due. You can click straight into those invoices and even create a new invoice. Don't forget you can also setup Invoice Reminders to automatically remind people who have overdue invoices they need to pay.

But by far the best thing is the snapshot view as soon as you log into Xero.

Who you owe money to

Again this is great as a snapshot for bills you need to pay in the future, how much they are and when they are due. You can also see if you are behind in paying anything or create a new bill you need to pay. 

All visible as soon as you log into Xero.

Cash

Everyone knows cash is king in business. The cash graph allows you to see the total in and out each month. You can then drill down into the detail by clicking on a month. 

Business Performance

You can also track important ratios for your business. You might want to track your Gross Profit percentage or key balance sheet ratios such as current ratio. 

You can add these by clicking on Reports > Business Performance and starring the ones you want to see. 

The Dashboard

The Dashboard is a fantastic tool to give you a snapshot of how your business is going without you needing to run reports or look at 10 different screens. 

Of course if you don't keep Xero up to date the info will be pretty useless! 

The good news is you can also edit the tiles on your Dashboard. You can put Invoices owed to you at the top if that's the important part, or maybe you want to see the Cash in and out graph. 

To edit the Dashboard just click on Edit Dashboard at the bottom of the screen. You can then move the tiles around to suit. 

As always if you are stuck let one of the Growthwise team know. Happy editing!