Xero Add-Ons That Will Have a Huge Impact on Your Business
Running or managing a business is hard at the best of times, throw in COVID-19 and the task gets monumental! Responsibilities of business owners have got that much harder. For business owners, managing resources available effectively is the key.
A great way to maximise productivity and utilise resources to the max is using the add-on apps for Xero. There a are number of add-on apps which can help breakdown and simplify many of the day to day tasks a business must accomplish.
To save you the trouble of having to search the web, here are some cool apps that we use and can recommend, to boost your business productivity.
Receipt Bank – Been in the market for a few years and is one of the first add-ons nearly all businesses should jump onto. No need for someone to sit at their desk for hours on end and post invoices. Once you open an account with Receipt Bank, they will give the business a unique email address to send all the invoices to. Once you have this email address, all you must do is forward all you supplier invoices to this the unique email address. Now is the best time, if you haven’t already done, to ask all your suppliers to email invoices. Gone should be the days of receiving hard copy by post! In short, Receipt bank integrates with Xero and takes the manual data entry out of purchase invoices. It extracts all the necessary information from an invoice (also accepts sales invoices) and publishes to Xero within minutes. It also has an app so you can take pictures of receipts and invoices on the ago and create expense reports. There are also number of Add-ons for Receipt bank.
Hubdoc - This is essentially the same as Receipt Bank. This add-on, at the time of writing, is free for Xero customers. Unlike Receipt bank you cannot produce expense reports with Hubdoc.
Chaser - This is an add-on app for debt management integration with Xero. You can automate credit control by scheduling reminder, “chaser” emails to your customers. You can customise the “chaser” to suit the business needs. This app should help you boost your cashflow. The templates that comes with Chaser for credit control could be personalised to ensure that the communications with your customer is personable.
Infoodle - Gift Aid (UK). Having trouble with keeping record and tracking gift aid? Check out this very good add-on. If you have setup your donor's details on Xero then you can pull the contact data automatically. This will automatically import and process transactions from Xero. One click filing of gift aid claim on HMRC portal. Once the claim is filed, with one click you can add the claim as an invoice to Xero. You can also keep records of donor approval of gift aid claim. You can attach documents to identify evidence of approved gift aid claim by donors.
BrightPay - This is a payroll software with API integration with Xero. We found setting BrightPay a bit tricky but once setup its gold standard. BrightPay is a payroll package for payroll professionals and now with integration with Xero. Let’s be frank here, Xero payroll is not great, we are not its biggest fans. This where BrightPay comes in and sits well. You have everything you need from an award-winning payroll package integrating with Xero. BrightPay also takes care of your work placement pension duties together with, should you require, HR requirements. Downside, yes there is one, BrightPay is not a cloud-based software.
Our Cloud team are here to help you with these apps and many other Apps in order to help you improve your efficiency. To find out more about our cloud services, click here or feel free to get in touch.