Welcome to the Fit Small Business Xero training course. In this lesson we're
going to cover how to create an accounts payable aging report in Xero. To follow
along with me, log in to your Xero account now, or click the link below this video
for a free 30-day trial of Xero. You can also click this link to access our full
Xero course and other helpful resources. Let's get started. An accounts payable
aging report allows you to keep track of your unpaid bills. This report shows the
details of each supplier bill along with the number of days it has remained unpaid.
Based on the results of this report, you should take the following
actions. First: write a check for bills that are due in the next seven days,
second: set up an online payment for bills that are due in less than seven days,
and third: review the total bills coming due in the next few weeks, and compare it to
your expected cash inflow to ensure that you will be able to make payments on time.
Please note the accuracy of the A/P aging report is dependent on whether or
not you have entered all of your bills in Xero, and that you have marked them
paid manually, or printed a check directly from Xero. In addition to
identifying overdue bills, running your accounts payable aging report regularly
has the following advantages. First: it gives you the ability to forecast
outgoing cash flow. Second: it allows you to be proactive and notify your
suppliers to make payment arrangements if you are unable to pay a bill by the
due date. And third: it provides insight into how much money you are spending
with each supplier, and it ensures that there are no bills that appear which you
did not authorize. Please note, assuming that you have entered your bills into Xero,
the data for this report is already in Xero.
Make sure that you have set up payment terms for each supplier so that
your due dates are accurate. You can click here to access the how to customize
invoices lesson. You must also enter payments that you make to suppliers
online or via check into Xero, so that your bills will be marked as paid.
Otherwise the report will not be accurate let's go ahead and create an
accounts payable report in Xero. So go ahead and navigate to reports, and then
all reports, and then let's scroll down to the purchases group which is
right here. In order to view all of the reports available we'll go ahead and
click on the three dots here at the bottom so we can see all the reports.
Xero has redesigned several reports and that is the reason why some reports have
a new button and others do not. For the purposes of this lesson we are going to
focus on the new reports only. So we'll be focusing on the aged payables detail
report, the aged payables summary report, the payable invoice detail report,
and the payable invoice summary report. For any reports that you plan to use often,
you can mark them as a favorite by clicking the star to the left of the
report name. So we'll go ahead and make our aging reports favorites. And what
this will also do is this will put these reports directly on the reports menu
which is here. So instead of going to all reports we'll be able to go down to our
favorites and just select the reports directly. Alright so let's go ahead and
run the aged payables detail report.
The aged payables detail report displays the supplier contact, the due date,
the invoice or reference number, and whether or not the bill is current which means
that it has not become due yet. If the bill is overdue it will show in one of
these columns: the 1 to 30 days column, 31 to 60 days, 61 to 90, or older. As we
discussed previously you can use this report to determine what bills need to
be paid as well as to ensure you have enough cash flow
to cover the bills coming due. Please note that you can easily drill
down on a specific invoice by clicking anywhere in the invoice row. And it takes
us directly to that invoice. Now let's take a look at our aged payables summary report.
This report is a summarized version of the previous report, the aged
payables details report. It shows the total of all bills that are current or
past due for each supplier contact as well as outstanding expense claims.
This report is helpful if you want to view your total outstanding bills at a quick glance.
Please note that if you want to see the details of a bill you can simply
click on any of these totals in the report to drill down to the bills that
make up the total amount. The next report that we want to take a look at is the
payable invoice detail report. The payable invoice detail report shows the line
by line details of all outstanding bills, credit notes, overpayments,
and prepayments as of a point in time. Run this report when you want to see the details
of multiple bills without having to display them one by one.
Please note to drill down on a bill or credit note, similar to the previous
report, you can actually click anywhere on the row of the transaction that you
wish to see more details for. Last but not least let's take a look at our
payable invoice summary report. This report is a summarized version of the
payables invoice detailed report that we just looked at. It includes a total of
all outstanding bills, credit notes, overpayments, and prepayments by
supplier contact. It does not show the line by line details of each bill or
credit note, but it does show the original bill amount here in the gross
column and the current balance due here. Please note to drill down on a
or a credit note, you can click on the item that you wish to see more details for.
Please note that each of the reports that we've discussed can be exported to
a PDF, Excel, or Google sheets. All you have to do is click on the export button
and select the option that you would like to use. You can also save the report
as a draft, published, or custom report. If you click on the save as button here,
you can save it as a draft. The draft option allows you to create a report that you
or someone else can make changes to later on. You might create several draft
reports before you are ready to publish them. The published report is used to
save reports when you are finalizing the books for the month or the year.
A published report will not change if for some reason the information in the
system has been changed or updated in some way. You can only publish reports if
you have the advisor user role. Check out how to invite multiple users to learn
more about user permissions you can click here to access this lesson.
And finally the custom report: you can use this report if you want to save the
report format so that you don't have to recreate it each time you run the report.
This is helpful if you've made some changes to the report and you'd like to
always keep those changes each and every time you run the report. Xero will ask
you if you would like to make this template your default, and you can select
that option if you'd like to. You can easily modify any of the reports that we
have discussed. All you have to do is click on the report setting options here,
and then the selections that you can make will be listed. So let's start with
the date range. You can select the date range of the report from the drop down here.
The aging by: select the date that you would like to use to calculate the
age of the bill. You can select the due date or the invoice date from the drop
down here. Aging periods: you can determine the aging buckets to
set up. For example, in the aged payables detail report we discussed there are
three periods set up here. And they each have 30 days within each bucket. So you
can determine how many periods you'd like to set up and you can also change
the number of days here for this report if you'd like. You also have the option
whether you want to show decimals or not by including this check mark here in
the numbers field. The group by: from the drop-down you can actually select how
you would like to group the information on the reports. The choices here are
contact, contact group, due date, invoice date, invoice reference, and region which
is the tracking category. You can also control which columns show up on the
report by simply putting a check mark here or removing a check mark for
information that you do not want to show up as a column. Please note that the
columns available may vary depending on the report that you are running.
Region: if you have set up tracking categories they will be listed here. And then you
can select the appropriate tracking categories that you'd like to run the
report for, or have them all selected as you can see here. Once you have made all
of your modifications be sure to click the blue update button to save those changes.
That wraps up the lesson on how to create an accounts payable
aging report in Xero. To access our full Xero course or any of the other lessons
in this series, click this link. You can also find a link below this video for a
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