Hi there, I’m Nick Roberts, I am an accountant who has been working in public practice for the last 12 years.
I was an early adopter of Xero in 2007, and have been working with this platform (as well as other accounting systems since). I would like to use my expertise to help people with their use of Xero and other accounting software solutions.
For my fourth blog post I would like to cover how the tracking function in Xero can give you more detailed reports from Xero.
Xero uses tracking categories and options instead of department codes or cost centres.
You can have up to two active tracking categories, with up to 100 tracking options.
Review reports by tracking category
Review and filter reports by tracking category and category option to see the performance of different locations of your business.
Tracking Summary Report
View specific data from a tracking perspective. You can customise specific groups of accounts.
- Tracking Summary Report
Run the report
- In the Accounting menu, select Reports.
- Under Financial, select Tracking Summary.
- Select your date range in the From and To fields.
- Select an Account Group and the Tracking Category.
- Click Update to view the report.
Select filters
Account Groups
- The groups you can choose from represent the account types from your chart of accounts, and are the same groupings used by the default Balance Sheet and Profit and Loss.
- You can only report on one account group at a time.
Tracking Category
Choose which of your tracking categories you want the report to be broken down by. It’s only possible to report on one category at a time.
View report
- All options in the tracking category that have approved transactions (except purchase orders and quotes) assigned to accounts within the account group during the period of the report will display.
- Activity will only display for an option if transactions have been assigned to an account in the selected account group.
- If there are transactions occurring in the account group chosen that were not tracked, these are displayed as Unassigned.
- Opening and closing balances are displayed for each category option across all accounts used by that option based on the date range. The balances are based on the financial year to date for revenue and expense based account groups and a balance of all transactions for asset, liability and equity based groups.
- Net activity shows the outcome of all approved transactions (except purchase orders and quotes) in and out of the accounts belonging to the account group.
New financial reports
Add a tracking column to any of these new reports using the report layout editor:
- Balance Sheet
- Movements in Equity
- Profit and Loss
- Statement of Cash Flows – Direct Method
- Payroll reports
- Account Summary
- Account Transactions report
Tracking can be used in all of the above reports, I will go through an example of how this works with the Profit and Loss report.
- In the Accounting Menu, select Profit and Loss.
- Click Report Settings.
- Fill out the Location drop down boxes.
- Click Update.
Now you have an understanding of how tracking can be used to give the reports out of Xero an additional level of information to help you make financial decisions regarding your business.
Thank you for your time in reading this, if you have any questions or suggestions for future posts please contact me at nick@zero-tohero.com or on 0224059312.
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