Sign up to the Decent Group newsletter.
Get monthly insights about how software can improve your business performance.
Subscribe now
When your business is small, it’s easy to key in the relevant customer and job details and raise 10 invoices a month. It’s not so easy to raise 10 or 100 or 1000 invoices a day. The task becomes a significant proportion of someone’s job. That’s throwing money away and storing up trouble down the line.
You use your FileMaker system to manage your leads, your prospects, enter your new customer details, and manage your flow of work. This includes recording details of purchase orders, credits, supplier invoices and customer invoices. But that’s not where HMRC needs that information. For your VAT and corporation tax returns, these details need to be in a compliant accounting software system such as Xero, Sage or QuickBooks. And there lies the problem. Someone has to re-enter that information.
Once your business is dealing with numerous jobs and customers each month, the duplication of information starts creating a drag on your business. Two separate systems working with much of the same data in parallel is clearly inefficient. It can also lead to errors like duplicated invoices, missed invoices or inaccurate invoices.
Think about it: you’re an accounts admin person, and your real job involves tasks like chasing unpaid invoices, issuing payments and assigning bank account receipts to invoices. But you also have to key in details for several hundred invoices each month. And you have to do it in a hurry, because it adds no value to the business and is not what you’re really supposed to be doing. And because you do it in a hurry, mechanically entering one set of details after another, you’re far more likely to make mistakes than, say, a project manager entering a single new customer’s set of details.
There are also irritating logistical complexities. How do project managers know if an invoice has been paid? They have to ask the accounts team, which is annoying for both parties. Or the accounts team have to remember to check the system and tell the PM if an invoice has or hasn’t been paid. This is a recipe for endless toing and froing in an attempt to end uncertainty. It’s not a good way to run a growing company.
It seems obvious. Create a link between your business system and your accounting software. But it’s not that easy. Your business system – if it’s any good – will be tailored to your business, while your accounting software will be completely standard, and needs to be. So you can’t simply plug one into the other.
Instead you need someone to build you a well-designed link that integrates the two systems – in specific, controlled ways. How would this work? Put simply, the relevant parts of the business system need to connect with the relevant parts of the accounting system.
When it’s time for a project manager (or client relations manager, account manager, even managing director) to invoice a client, they enter details in the FileMaker system. These details get pushed into Xero and the invoice is automatically raised and sent.
It’s not just invoices. When a new customer comes on board, their details are entered into FileMaker and are then pushed into Xero. The data is entered once and there’s no room for introducing new errors.
Crucially, the information flow isn’t one way – and this is where more efficiencies enter the picture, and the ability to do new things that weren’t possible with separate systems. Data can also flow from the accounting system into the business system. When an invoice is paid, the project manager can see this on their interface. If an invoice is unpaid and the payment deadline is tomorrow, the project manager can be sent an alert. You can set up as many alerts as you like.
At the same time, you can ensure that the right people have access to the right information for them, and only that information – which wouldn’t be the case if the project manager had a login to Xero.
The difference FileMaker-Xero integration makes is extraordinary. It’s not just that the burden on the accounts administrator is lifted, allowing them to focus on the things that matter. It’s that the project manager, managing director or client manager can instantly access important facts about the payment behaviour of a client – facts that could change the future of the relationship.
To sum up: an integrated system not only eliminates efficiencies and improves your workflow, it also means you can make better – and safer – business decisions.
Fill in your details and give us an idea of what you’d like to talk to us about, and we will contact you shortly.