First let's understand there is a big difference in reports that the business owner will want to look at vs the sales manager vs the finance guy. If you are all 3 of those people then you certainly will want to utilise different reporting systems when you are wearing each of those hats!
We are big fans of Spotlight Reporting as your monthly visual progress report that gives you the detail you need to be looking at with your business owner hat on. But when you need the detail behind those reports, when you are trying to dissect and review your results to find the drivers Xero reports are fabulous.
To find reports just head on over to the Reports Menu at the top. You will see All Reports and New Reports. To eliminate clicking into one of these menus you can click the star next to any of your reports to make them a favourite :)
Reports Snapshot
By far our fav report to look at is the budget variance. It tells a great story about how the business is going and allows you to easily drill down into the underlying transactions. You can look at this per month, quarter, year etc.
We also love looking at the Inventory Items Summary to see how many of each item you have sold. Great for people who have a few different services they are selling. Another is the Income by Contact so we can see which customers have been consistent purchasers over the years. We also dissect this per month and quarter as well.
New Reports
Whilst the old reports are great the new ones allow you to drill down and filter what you really want to see. Take the Inventory Items Summary report in new reports. You can click on report settings and take out the purchases information if you are a serviced based business. This would allow you to look at the hours you have billed against each service. Or maybe you just want to look at every customer who has purchased a specific service from you.
For those of you who purchase items and then on-sell them to your customers the new Billable Expenses report is perfect. You can run this at any given point in time. You can change columns and decide if you want the detail on this report or just the helicopter snapshot. And you can decide that you might want to group this report by customer to see each customer total or by supplier. This can give you a good indication of how much you still have to invoice your customers compared to how much you have either already paid a supplier or perhaps still owe them.
We always suggest automating your debt collection process as much as possible by turning on Invoice Reminders or better still using Chaser, but you can also use the new Aged Receivables Detail report to help you get an understanding of the detail behind who owes you money. If you have multiple businesses you sell to who have the same owner why not add them to a contact group and just look at how much that group owes you. If you segment your clients using a contact group you can filter your report to only see one segment. I especially like the fact you can add the Phone Number column to this report!
The information you can look at in these reports to dissect into exactly what you need and want to look at is great.
What's your favourite report?
