Xero is widely recognized as the best online accounting software for small businesses. Similar to Google Ad Analytics, Xero is a lightweight and easy-to-use analytics suite lets you log in from anywhere, with any device, to get a real-time view of your financials. Here’s a few of the features that make Xero so popular among small businesses as accounting software
- Xero’s mobile app is available on both Android and iOS.
- You can create professional invoices and receive updates when they are re-opened.
- It manages your inventory while tracking sales and speeding up invoicing.
- You can create and email custom purchase orders.
- Xero helps you to schedule your payments and manage your cash flows.
- With Xero, you can do business with the whole world with multi-currency accounting.
- Finally, as a top-rated product, Xero has over 800 add-ons to improve its features.
However, this article is not just about Xero. Xero’s simplicity makes it easy to set up and get running, but when it comes down to it, when you are running a business, you need to use extra tools to use along with Xero to get the most out of it. The two main areas where you will need add-ons are reporting and advanced analytics. While reporting gives you great insight into your business, advanced analytics helps you to make better decisions.
We’ve put together a list of the best reporting and advanced analytics add-ons for Xero.
Simple Reporting and Analytics
1. Cenario
Cenario adds services such as forecasting, budgeting, and invoice management to Xero. Cenario’s Intelligent AI models help small companies to earn and save money more quickly. As a whole, it helps companies to understand their financial states, make profitable financial decisions and to plan their future easily with their platform.
Cenario simply integrates and plugs your data from Xero to its platform. They read the data and build a model according to that data to predict the future and get the correct decision scenario. When the data is populated, it uses AI and Machine learning techniques for forecasting and event management. You can receive real-time alerts and notifications about future predictions.
Cenario is more suitable for small scale companies. Furthermore, its features help founders, accountants, product managers, marketers, remote teams, and even freelancers. You can easily sign up with Cenario in less than 30 seconds and try it for free. A good section of questions and answers is provided by Cenario to get started with it easily.
Cenario has several plans for your service including a growth plan for fast-growing teams and a Multi Business Plan for established companies. To get started, you can try Cenario free for 14 days.
2. Fathom
Fathom is a fast and flexible tool to do financial analysis and management reporting. It’s great for assessing the performance of your business, monitoring trends, and identifying opportunities.
Fathom integrates with Xero seamlessly and helps you to get insight into your business by creating beautiful reports from your financial data. You can use these insights to track profit, cash flow, and the growth of your business. Fathom is ideal for accountants and leading advisory teams to automate the workflow and increase efficiency.
Integrating Fathom with Xero is a simple process that won’t take more than a minute. After setup, Fathom automatically syncs with Xero every day. You can start with Fathom with a 14-day trial account and work with a demo company.
3.G-Accon
G-Accon is a great add-on to integrate Google Sheets with Xero. With G-Accon, you can collaborate with your teammates and clients by live sharing spreadsheets in Google drive. G-Accon can create, update, and delete data directly from Google Sheets and import them to Xero in bulk. Data Monitoring, automatic alerts, and backup functions are also available for this service.
G-Accon can connect Google sheets with multiple Xero organizations. Once they are connected, you can schedule a time for an automatic refresh of reports and data queries. G-Accon is particularly good for accountants, business owners, bookkeepers, and advisers, allowing users to customize automated reporting, import data in bulk, manipulate data, consolidate data, and display it all in charts once it’s been wrangled. G-Accon has been awarded as the emerging app partner for Xero in 2018 for the great service it offered.
G-Accon provides good support for the newcomers with their documentation and product requirement portals. Moreover, customers can contact the G-Accon support service to clarify technical issues, give feedback, or even to request new features. A video tutorial service has been supplied for the customers who want to get started quickly.
Customers can try out a two-week free plan for G-Accon, after which G-Accon offers a lite plan and premium plan for your increased demand.
Advanced analytics and Business Intelligence
1. Panoply
When it comes to advanced analytics, Panoply is the best all-in-one ETL and data warehouse for Xero. Panoply makes it easy to collect all of your data in one place and automate your data management with advanced business intelligence tools.
Using Panoply and Xero together provides a complete view of your entire business by allowing you to easily combine and analyze data from a ton of built-in sources with your Xero data. It also allows you to collect data from any data source, which you can then then connect to any BI tool quickly and easily.
You can try Panoply for free for 14 days. After that, there are several pricing plans to fit your needs with both monthly and annual payment schedules.
2. Power BI
Xero has partnered with Power BI to provide a big data solution to small businesses. Power BI is a very popular business analytics tool, and now with the support of Xero’s accounting capabilities, they can come together to create great insights for small businesses.
Xero, together with Microsoft Power BI, allows users to analyze and access information to make smart and sustainable decisions by delivering powerful analysis and data visualizations. You don’t have to be an expert to use these tools, as it only takes a few clicks to link your data with Power BI.
Although these two packages mainly target small businesses, there are good options for anyone who wants to analyze and save time. Small businesses can easily obtain a 360 view of their businesses and use drag and drop pre-built dashboards easily.
Power BI has an enthusiastic community to discuss your problems, and you will be supported with guided learning, documentation, developer center, webinars, and blog articles. When it comes to pricing, Power BI has two options. The Pro plan is suitable for self-service BI, and the Premium plan is suitable for advanced analytics and cloud reporting options.
3. Zoho
Zoho is a business analytics tool that you can use to do reporting and analytics. With Zoho, you can create charts, pivot tables, and dashboards. These reports and dashboards help users to get insights from business data and make informed decisions. Zoho provides a set of default, user-editable reports and dashboards, but users can also create their own reports and dashboards.
Integrating Zoho with Xero is incredibly easy using the advanced analytics connector provided by Zoho. This integration is compatible with sales and marketing, email and collaboration, finance, human resources, IT and help desk, and custom solutions services. Zoho is trusted by more than 50 million users worldwide.
Zoho Academy has a great source of learning materials to get started with Zoho, where you’ll be able to find a wide range of readings, instructions, and guides on how to use the tool. In terms of pricing, Zoho comes up with multiple tiered plans called Free, Starter, Standard, Professional, Enterprise.
Conclusion
When it’s time to really level up your Xero financial analytics you have a few good options.
We like to think that Panoply is the best analytics add-on for Xero and for your business in general. Panoply’s easy to use data connectors, data warehousing, and integration with your BI tool of choice make it one of the best ways to level up your analysis.
