What is a XERO Health Check?

How Does it Help Your Business?

We all know that a key to staying physically healthy is to get regular medical checkups and modify your lifestyle routines. Similarly, these factors also apply to your business’s financial health.

It’s always better to be proactive about your financial health before problems set in. In fact, when it comes to bookkeeping, the longer a small underlying error exists, the more expensive and time-consuming it can become to fix.

Having setup and maintained the bookkeeping for many small businesses using Xero, we know what is required for each individual business. It is imperative to ensure the following:

  1. Setup – has the account been setup correctly to optimise the software functionality?
  2. Maintenance – is the file being constantly monitored and reviewed? How accurate and thorough is the bookkeeping that is being done?

That’s why we offer a service called a “Xero health check” for our new clients to ensure setup and maintenance is optimum. Existing clients benefit from ongoing checks to ensure data accuracy and integrity.

 

What the Health Check Can Offer

A Xero Health Check is a detailed review of your Xero file that identifies potential issues like unbalanced bank accounts, errors in the settings, old transactions, and security risks. These checks help ensure your Xero file is setup and maintained correctly.

At Centegrity, we use XBERT – a tool to help us get an overview of the file to begin our analysis. A Xero expert then rigorously checks your Xero file and bookkeeping setup in addition to ongoing use that could be costing you valuable time and money. Checks include:

  • General setup
  • Bank feeds
  • Unreconciled transactions
  • Invoice review including processing, overdue invoices, credits, quotes and templates
  • Bill review including Accounts Payable process, overdue bills, GST risks and expense review
  • Payroll setup and usage including leave, bank detail reviews, superannuation, workcover, and payroll process
  • COVID-19 business entitlements including JobKeeper and Grants where applicable
  • Manual journals
  • Currencies
  • Email settings
  • Expense claims
  • Reports

 

The Benefits of a Xero Health Check

The main benefits of a Xero Health Check include:

  • Ensuring your accounts are accurate
  • Identifying errors, duplications, and omissions
  • Identifying problem areas and fixing them before more issues arise
  • Making sure that any changes have been implemented correctly
  • Flagging training needs to ensure that errors aren’t repeated

 

Why Constant Monitoring Helps

Even if you’ve been using Xero for years, a Xero Health Check is still an important aspect of keeping your books in order. It’s similar to getting your car serviced to make sure it keeps running at peak performance.

We are constantly reviewing existing client files, identifying risks, and advising clients. These can include finding suppliers who are not registered for GST, overdue invoices, and bill risks. In identifying these risks we are able to help clients redesign their business processes which in turn helps improve cashflow and the financial viability of the business.

 

Who Will Benefit from a Xero Health Check?

Many of our new clients don’t realise that small errors accumulate in their Xero file or they are unaware of the software capabilities and features that could benefit their business. In most cases, a simple check can help alleviate many small issues and help to pre-empt the bigger ones.

To determine if your business could benefit from a Xero health check, ask yourself if any of these statements describe you?

  • You don’t know how much you can afford to pay yourself
  • You’re not sure you’ve set aside enough money to cover taxes
  • You’ve been making changes to your Xero setup
  • Your bookkeeping feels very time-consuming
  • You wonder what Xero add-ons and automation you’re missing out on
  • Your accountant charges you extra to ‘clean up your Xero file’ at tax time
  • Your books are generally in a mess
  • You are burdened with manual processing of invoices, bills and payroll
  • You are unclear of COVID-19 entitlements or grant eligibility

 

If you would like to schedule a Xero health check, we are happy to help.

Centegrity has over 14 years of experience assisting businesses with bookkeeping and business mentoring. Get in touch by filling in the form below.