Last year, we announced we were ramping up our investment in new reports. This work is all part of our vision to provide you with a custom suite of reports to help you get answers fast, and streamline your financial analysis. I’m now excited to share some new reporting features that have just landed — as well as a few that are coming soon — that will make our reports even faster and easier to use. I can’t wait to hear what you think.

Customise your management report pack

We know creating beautiful management reports is an integral part of your job as an accountant or bookkeeper. So we’ve created a new version of our management report pack that includes the features you love in the older version, including Executive Summary and Cash Summary reports with average and variance columns, as well as ratios and formulas to give you a high level overview of how the business is performing at a single glance.

The customisable management reports are available to anyone in the organisation with reporting access. You can add or remove reports, customise the settings and layouts, and save as many custom packs as you want, giving you an opportunity to reuse them and save time. The new management report packs will be available in the US to start and then rolled out globally in the months ahead.

Soon, you’ll also be able to build your own report pack from scratch by combining the reports you need. This will be particularly useful for those who don’t belong to a practice. It will have the same functionality as the new management report pack and will be released to all Xero customers globally in the coming months.

Check out the refreshed Xero HQ report templates

The next time you open report templates in Xero HQ or run them from the advisor tab in Xero, you’ll see a refreshed design that brings them in line with other new reports in Xero. The changes may take some getting used to, but rest assured there has been no change in functionality.

Here are some of the changes you may notice:

• The ‘edit’ button in the contents menu has been replaced with ‘reorder or remove reports’.  This link is always visible, no matter how many reports are in the template
• When you select ‘reorder or remove reports’ you’ll get a pop-up that will help you complete this task quickly
• You can now add a report to your template via the ‘add report’ button in report settings, rather than the contents menu
• The date range selector has been moved into report settings and renamed ‘pick date range’.  Changing this date range changes dates for all reports in the template
• You can select ‘more’ to switch between accrual and cash, show account codes and more
• When looking at report templates in Xero HQ, you can select ‘options’ to see publishing defaults, preview an organisation and rename a template

For Canadian advisors, we’ve also added two new report templates in the templates section of Xero HQ: ‘Company – Compilation Engagement Report’ and ‘Compilation Engagement Report, Notes, RE’. These will help you stay compliant with recently introduced Canadian reporting requirements.

Enjoy more flexibility in your Executive Summary report

Our new Executive Summary report is now available to all customers globally, following its initial release to US customers. Located in the new report centre, it includes more flexible date ranges, more comparative periods and the ability to add commentary text.

You can also save custom reports and can hide any rows you don’t want by using a filter. It includes all the features you love in the older version, including the variance column, ratios, summary and the ability to drill-down to other reports.

More reporting features coming soon

In addition to the reporting releases that are now live, here’s a sneak peek into some of the other exciting changes that are on their way.

Use report annotations to add life to the numbers

Report annotations can be used in conjunction with footers, text blocks and schedules to add commentary and life to the numbers. Similar to the older version of our reports, you can click on the ‘add note’ icon next to a cell and start typing. This will help you share explanations with your advisor or accounting and bookkeeping clients, so everyone understands what story the numbers are telling.

Add the invoice number and contact name to Account Transactions

Our team is working hard to build a feature that allows you to display invoice numbers and contact names on your Account Transactions report.

You’ll be able to filter and group by these columns, offering a more powerful way to analyse transactions in Xero. The contact column will be on by default, but the invoice number column will need to be selected if you’d like to have that data displayed. If there is no invoice number or contact name for the transaction, the field will remain empty.

Access enhancements to Aged Receivables and Payables reports

We’ll also be releasing some enhancements to our aged reports soon. You’ll be able to choose whether you’d like to display the period number (e.g. 1 month) or the date range (e.g. April 2022), and see the percentage of the total for each ageing period.

We also listened to your feedback and switched the total column on by default, as well as displayed whether reports are ageing by due date or invoice date. You’ll have the option to add the contact account number to your report from the column dropdown list, too (we’re planning to add this column to other reports, so stay tuned).

Keep an eye out for other updates to new reports

When it comes to new reporting features, there’s plenty more on the way. Keep an eye out for our new Account Summary report in Xero, as well as more flexibility in comparison periods in the Profit and Loss report too. We’ll keep you updated, but in the meantime we hope you enjoy all the value we’re adding to new reports in Xero.