Xero has announced the addition of a new Assurance Dashboard to its popular small business accounting system.
The Xero Assurance Dashboard is designed to give advisors the ability to monitor the accuracy and integrity of their clients’ financial transactions with inspections that are now targeted, faster, and easier, saving time and hassle. The cloud-based system is used by about 600,000 small businesses around the world.
“A small business’ financial data provides important context and clarity over how it is performing,” said Craig Walker, Chief Technology Officer for Xero. “If the data is accurate, the business can make more informed decisions. But maintaining data integrity is an ongoing process. Limiting the risk of human error, bank transaction data flows straight into the platform via secure, electronic connections. Small businesses, their customers and their suppliers can transact directly with one another on the platform so the data stays clean. Xero’s Assurance Dashboard allows advisors to detect anomalies in their client’s data, at scale, and perform continuous assurance across their clients’ financial transactions.”
The growing importance of real-time data in businesses means protecting its accuracy and integrity is vital to determine a company’s true performance metrics and mitigate financial risk. Yet, it is labor-intensive and time-consuming. Accountants have to manually inspect every single transaction a small business makes, sometimes long after the transaction has occurred. The Assurance Dashboard is a new feature in Xero that allows advisors to:
- Monitor their client’s use of Xero to identify any errors or anomalies in their client’s financial records. Advisers can use this information to help identify and rectify errors in Xero, or potentially uncover activity which may not be in the interests of their client. Accountants and auditors can easily identify transactions that need to be investigated and can fix issues early, before they become a problem.
- Establish security best practice. The Assurance Dashboard provides a heatmap of user activity highlighting their client’s Xero permissions, last login date and a heatmap that enables advisors to check for bank account transactions that have been altered, deleted or manually reconciled.
- Complement the traditional audit. The advantage of the Assurance Dashboard is that it surfaces items that need attention in real-time, rather than months afterwards.
Cloud technology, along with the automated transfer of data, creates possibilities for automation and control that have not existed before. With automated bank feeds and coding rules, bank transactions can be processed in an accounting system without human intervention or error, improving the transparency and security for small businesses and their financial data.
“Data is vital, and with the Xero Assurance Dashboard, you can be sure it is correct,” said Jay Kimelman, Founder and Chief Information Officer of the Digital CPA. “With a few clicks you have access to security, data validity and audit trail all in an easy to read dashboard. As a Xero partner, this tool allows me to quickly get a view of my clients details and review any outlying transactions.”
Xero Assurance Dashboard does the manual work so accountants can provide meaningful, value-added advice and services. This means that Xero gives better quality data than small businesses have ever had access to, and accountants can provide continuous assurance and make decisions based on high integrity data that is secure.
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