We’ve been watching with interest as Xero rolls out and refines its “Analytics powered by Syft” features over the last six months. They offer a powerful suite of visualisations and dashboarding options that are surprisingly easy to customise and save.
While our firm provides comprehensive financial reports to clients using other, specialised tools—which often makes the Xero analytics redundant for us—we firmly believe in the power of habit. Any routine that encourages business leaders to regularly look at their financials will, without a doubt, improve their performance.
For many business leaders, Xero Analytics provides an excellent starting point and a vital gateway to developing better financial awareness and disciplines.
If you are not already getting (or reviewing) good quality, comprehensive financial reporting, here is our suggested approach for getting the most out of Xero Analytics:
Tips for a Productive Review
- Check the Data Completeness: The graphs default to showing the current month, which is often incomplete, leading to confusion. Make sure the accounts are finalised for the periods you are viewing.
- Don’t Forget to Sync: The visualisations are not “live.” If you’ve just updated your accounts, click the sync button to pull in the latest data.
- Focus Your View: Avoid casting your eyes around aimlessly. Start with a clear business question (e.g., “Are marketing costs growing as fast as revenues?”) and then go find (or build) the graph that gives you the answer.
- Pro Tip: Visualisation customisations save for next time, and you can create and save full dashboards once you have them looking the way you want.
- Design a Review Flow: Consider creating a customised, stepped-view of your business using a “flow” of dashboards. This can replicate the systematic review of a traditional financial report:
- Start with overall performance.
- Drill into business unit/tracking category performance and specific expenses of interest.
- Move to cash and balance sheet accounts.
- Integrate Key Ratios: Use the “KPIs” area in Visualisations or the “Business Health Scorecard” widgets in Dashboards. These are essential for adding important profitability, cash, and working capital ratios to your reports.
- Filter with Tracking Categories: If you use tracking categories, you can filter your graphs by them. Save separate Dashboards for each category for easy comparison.
- Add Context with Trends: In Visualisations, we recommend switching on either a trend line or an average line under Graph Options > Trends to give your numbers context.
- Investigate Transactions: Play around with the “click to drill down” feature, which will show the underlying transactions that explain a graph’s values.
- Leverage AI Insights (Cautiously): Use the “Insights” feature for AI-driven analysis of your numbers. To date, it appears limited to verbalising what can already be seen on the graphs, but it’s worth experimenting with.
- Bookmark Everything: Bookmark your favourite views in your browser for quick access.
Credit: FastLane Global
Tackling Scorecards and Cash Flow
When starting with Analyse > Scorecards, which can be daunting:
- Start Simple: Focus on cash management and profitability metrics first, as they are often more approachable.
- Use Multi-Period: Consider the “multi-period” option—it’s simpleand clearly shows trends over time.
- Trim the Fat: Invest time removing any metrics that don’t make sense or help. Trimming it back to a core set of helpful metrics will make reviewing the dashboards more approachable next time.
The cash flow manager can be very helpful, but you must take great care to check the figures using the Manage cash in and manage cash out tabs. To sanity check the forecast, we’ve had success exporting the Overview > table view to Excel or Google Sheets, then using an AI tool like Gemini to quickly summarise the total cash in and cash out by month.
Our Wish List for Xero
As the features evolve, there are two key additions we hope to see soon:
- The ability to compare actual results against a budget (specifically one of the budgets in Xero’s budget manager).
- The ability to build and chart custom KPIs, such as a wage cost to revenue ratio, ideally incorporating external data.
