5 Real Benefits Of Xero For Growing E-commerce Brands

eCommerce

5 Real Benefits Of Xero For Growing E-commerce Brands

Xero has transformed the way small businesses do their accounting. Where before entrepreneurs might have struggled to stay on top of their financial comings and goings, Xero makes it easy to manage.

If you’re an e-commerce business with sights on a bigger slice of the pie, then Xero is an option well worth considering. Read on to discover 5 real benefits of Xero for growing e-commerce brands in 2019.

E-commerce businesses aren’t the only brands that can benefit from Xero.Discover why high-tech firms run better with Xero here.

It helps you manage cash flow better and with greater accuracy

Strong cash flow is imperative for growing eCommerce businesses. Without careful, monitored cash flow management, your eCommerce business could develop financial black holes that, at best, stunt your growth, or at worst, force you to fold entirely.

For many small business owners, their business is borne out of a passion for something: fitness, food, arts, sustainability, or any other passion that one might have.

But while they have the passion, many entrepreneurs lack the financial skill necessary to keep their labor of love going. Keeping track of the regular debits and credits associated with running a business is often out-of-reach for many entrepreneurs.

But Xero does all the hard work for you.

The Xero dashboard is intuitive and easy to navigate. A single glance reveals the financial workings of your business, from monthly profits and sales to budget forecasting and outstanding supplier invoices.

Managing cash flow is an arduous but necessary part of growing an e-commerce brand. Xero does this for you with absolute accuracy, so you can better understand your business and guide it as it grows.

It does so much more than just your basic business finances

Small business finances are a complex thing. It’s about so much more than just the debits and credits that keep your business ticking along. It’s also about how you manage your inventory, payroll, overhead bills, personal expenses, tax, and so on.

There is a myriad of elements to consider when it comes to nailing your finances and preparing a solid foundation for business growth.

Take your stock management for instance. Knowing which products are selling well (and which ones aren’t) is vital for tracking profits and allocating your efforts. Xero provides real-time updates about inventory in an intuitive dashboard. It highlights the value of your stored products and offers useful insights into potential future orders.

But Xero even benefits your business beyond your e-commerce finances — it impacts your branding too. Xero provides branded, professional-looking invoices, receipts, and other financial documentation that speak volumes about your business. They’re slick and high-quality, showing customers that you are a professional brand that they can trust.

It syncs seamlessly with your business infrastructure

A scaling business requires a multitude of things to sustain its growth. Regular sales and a loyal customer base are the wind in your business’s sails, but the tools and apps that comprise its infrastructure are the rudders that guide it.

Xero is not just a separate addition to your business infrastructure — it also augments it. It syncs and integrates with virtually every tool you use in your business, slotting in as seamlessly as a round peg in a round hole.

Take your employee management system — Tanda is a good example that comprises payroll, HR, engagement, and more for small-to-medium businesses. This is a vital component of running a business and keeping staff properly paid, but it also impacts your business finances too. Xero takes your payroll information and syncs it with the rest of your business, so you can calculate with accuracy how your business is running on a holistic level.

And consider the e-commerce platform you use, for example. Every growing online e-tail store needs a scalable solution to get ahead. Shopify Plus, for instance, is a popular enterprise option that many entrepreneurs use to scale.

Xero seamlessly integrates with Shopify to help merchants track their financial impact. It syncs orders, creates invoices, and calculates financial balances from end-to-end, nurturing measured growth all the way.

Xero is a welcome addition that will suit virtually any small business, regardless of the tools, apps, and platforms they use.

It saves you time, effort, and stress

As a growing business, you rely on a lot of resources to help you scale. Staff, products, marketing tools, and so on are just a few examples of the absolute necessities a scaling business needs.

But perhaps the most valuable resource — and the most scarce — is time.

Accounting and other daily financial admin tasks eat into huge amounts of your time as a small business owner. Supplier invoices, bills, payroll, bank reconciliations — these are all necessary but time-consuming tasks that prevent you from completing other, equally pressing tasks.

Xero automates it all for you. It provides a single hub for all of your financial tasks. It’s easy to use, comprehensive and automates all the necessary calculations so you don’t have to.

But above all, Xero lets you manage these tasks in a user-friendly way. For instance, if you find yourself performing the same task over and over, Xero lets you save it as a template for quick completion later on. It’s a simple addition, but one that saves you time (and stress) into the bargain.

It integrates with a whole ecosystem of applications

Every successful business leans on a whole range of tools to help it work. Tax, inventory management tools, payroll — these are just a few examples of the things that every business needs.

Most companies use a range of third-party tools to manage these services. But they often have an impact on accounting, so it’s important that they are able to integrate with your accounting software.

And Xero makes it easy to expand the scope of automating your business processes by seamlessly integrating with a staggeringly wide ecosystem of third-party applications.

For instance, Xero works with the sales tax calculator Taxjar. It helps US e-commerce merchants easily calculate how much they owe in sales tax at the drop of a hat. It’s entirely automated too, helping free up merchants’ valuable time.

Xero also integrates with the inventory management tool Orderhive. It easily syncs to help e-commerce merchants accurately report their spend on stock on a regular basis. Such automation takes the stress out of financial reporting and guides them on their path to success.

And the same applies to your payroll. It’s important to stay on top of your payroll as a growing business. Xero integrates with payroll systems like Gusto to help you stay on top of the daily admin processes like payroll and HR with ease — saving you time in the bargain.

These are just a few examples of the many systems that make up a successful business that Xero connects with. From rental management software like Current RMS to bookkeeping automation like ReceiptBank, there’s a place for Xero is every growing e-commerce business to help you manage it seamlessly.

Xero offers a wealth of benefits for a range of businesses: hospitality, IT services, restaurants, healthcare, franchises, tourism — the list is virtually endless. E-commerce brands are no exception. As the points above illustrate, there are several benefits for e-commerce businesses seeking to scale. If you want to expand your online business in 2019, Xero will surely steer you true.

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Amazon Seller Accounting Xero

Amazon Sellers Accounting

Cloud accounting software 
for Amazon sellers

As an Amazon seller, you face very specific challenges in building a seamless, easy-to-use back-office infrastructure. Unfortunately, there isn’t an all-in-one solution that you can buy, configure and run. So you have to build an Amazon seller solution with the right components that work together seamlessly.

How Xero can help your business

Xero – the modern accounting solution – is at the heart of many Amazon seller businesses. We understand what it takes to run an online business. So that’s why we developed Xero in the cloud for the cloud – with the ability to seamlessly integrate with best-in-class inventory management, sales tax and other key Amazon add-ons. Plus you get powerful cashflow, bank reconciliation and payments functionality that are easy to implement and that will grow with your business.


How to create an efficient inventory management system

Inventory management can be hard for any business to do well. Whether you’re in manufacturing or retail, your business can suffer if you have too little stock – or too much. Here’s how to get it right.

Inventory is money

Inventory management can be difficult because it’s hard to predict demand. If you stock up on a particular product line but demand drops, you’ll have stock that you don’t need. And if products are lying in your warehouse for too long, that will affect your cashflow because:

  • unsold items don’t generate revenue.
  • warehousing costs money, and so does inventory accounting.
  • stored items take up space that could be used for something else.
  • stock may deteriorate or become obsolete.
  • items could be damaged or even stolen.
  • So the money tied up in excess inventory could be put to better use elsewhere.

On the other hand, if you don’t keep enough stock and demand then spikes, you’ll miss out on sales – and maybe even lose customers. You won’t be able to fill big orders and you’ll have to scramble to catch up with your competitors.

Either way you could lose money. So it’s important to manage your inventory as efficiently as possible.

Understand the inventory types your business has

Inventory usually falls into one of three main categories:

1.Raw materials

These are the basic materials from which your final product is made. Depending on your field of work, they can take up a lot of space.

2.Work in progress (WIP)

These are goods that are in the process of being manufactured but are not yet complete. Examples include toys to be painted and ceramics that haven’t yet been fired.

3.Finished goods

These are products that are ready to be sold to your customers. They may be sent to distributors or you might sell them directly to your clients.
Each category has different storage requirements, but each one is dependent on the other. If you don’t have enough raw materials, you can’t make finished goods. And if demand for your finished goods drops, you could end up with too many raw materials.

Improve your forecasts

The first step to efficient inventory management is to understand the demand for your products. How does it vary over time? There may be seasonal fluctuations or other trends that can help you work out how demand will change.

Quality accounting software will generate reports into past sales. These can help you identify which products are popular at which times of year. Then you can adjust your stock accordingly.

Understanding the market which you operate in is the best way to fine-tune your predictions. Once you’ve done that, you’ll have taken a big step towards more efficient inventory management.

Please contact us if you like to know further.