Читать книгу Xero For Dummies - Heather Smith - Страница 36

The single most important part of setting up any accounting system is the chart of accounts — think of it as the backbone of the accounting system, because all transactions are coded through these general ledger accounts. Don’t get confused — a bank account is a type of general ledger account, but not all ‘accounts’ are bank accounts. Getting your head around some bookkeeping basics before you set up your chart of accounts in Xero — so you can get them set up correctly from the start — is a good idea. Of course, if you feel you already have a good grasp of these bookkeeping basics, feel free to skip ahead to ‘Setting Up Your Chart of Accounts’, later in this chapter.

Setting up your chart of accounts to reflect business operations allows you to easily identify the performance of all areas. Let me give you an example. A customer asked me to review their profit and loss statement. On this statement, they had one single line for income: Consultancy, $2 million. Nice! Underneath the lonely income line were many lines of expenses — and expenses had been broken down to such detail I knew they had spent $300 on office flowers that year. Fortunately, the customer’s invoices were very detailed, so it was an easy exercise of defining different types of income accounts, reallocating them to invoices and — ta da! — the owners now had details of the different income streams generated by the business.

Knowing the different ways the business was making money highlighted which streams were the strongest — for example, the owners could now identify that a steady stream of income was being generated from a support contract with a customer who was guaranteed a 48-hour response time. They promoted this support-style contract to other customers and — you guessed it — a few took them up. This generated additional regular income for the business, with minimal extra effort on their behalf.