Welcome to the Fit Small Business Xero training course. In this lesson, we're
going to cover how to create an accounts receivable aging report in Xero.
To follow along with me, log into 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
receivable aging report allows you to keep track of unpaid invoices.
This report will show you the details of each customer invoice, along with the length
of time it has been outstanding. Based on the results of this report, businesses
will usually follow up with customers in one of three ways. First, resend a copy of
the unpaid invoices via email. Second, they may send a friendly reminder a few
days before the invoice is due or after the due date has passed. And third, they
may give the customer a call to remind them about their unpaid invoices.
Besides identifying overdue invoices, running your A/R aging report regularly
has the following advantages. It gives you the ability to forecast incoming
cash flow, it provides insight into trends regarding how long it takes the
customers to pay their invoices after you provide the goods and services,
and finally it allows you to quickly zero in on delinquent customers which may
require you to take legal action in order to collect payments. Please note
that assuming that you've created and sent your invoices via Xero,
the data for this report is already in Xero. Make sure that you have set up
payment terms for each customer so that your due dates are accurate. In our
lesson on How to Set Up Invoices, we covered how to set up default payment
terms. You can click here to access this lesson. Also be sure to enter customer
payments into Xero so that your invoices will be marked as paid. Let's run an
accounts receivable aging report. So let's go ahead and navigate to all
reports by clicking on the reports option and selecting all reports.
And then we are going to run reports in the sales group here.
By the way you can see that we've got six reports that are showing here. If you
click the three dots, it will also show an additional report here. So Xero has
redesigned several reports and that is the reason why some reports have this
new button. And so the four reports that are new or redesigned are the reports
that we are going to focus on for this lesson. Starting with the aged
receivables detail report we'll go ahead and click on that. And here is a sample
aged receivables detail report for our fictitious company Acme Web Pros Plus.
This report displays the customer contact, invoice date, due date, invoice
number, and whether or not the invoice is current. Which means that it has not
become due yet. If the invoice is overdue, it will show the number of days past due:
so 1 to 30 days, 31 to 60 days, 61 to 90 days, and older. As we discussed
previously you can use this report to follow up with customers whose invoices
are past due or coming due. You can easily drill down to a specific invoice
by clicking anywhere on that invoice row. And then that invoice will display as
you can see here. The next report, the aged receivables summary, will go ahead
and run that. And this is a sample of the aged receivables summary report for our
fictitious company Acme Web Pros Plus. This report is a summarized version of
the previous report, the aged receivables detailed report. It shows the customer
contact and a total of all invoices that are current or past due. Please note if
you want to see the invoice details once again, you can click on any row in the
report. So for example if we click this ABC Industrial, and it will drill down
to the aged receivables detail report where we can see the specific invoice
information. And if we wanted to actually display this invoice once again, we would
just simply click on it and there's our invoice. The receivable invoice detail
report is the next report we want to discuss. And here is a sample of this
report for our fictitious company. This report shows the line by line details of
all outstanding invoices, credit notes, overpayments, and prepayments. Use this
report when you want to see the invoice details for multiple invoices without
having to pull up each invoice individually. Please note to drill down
on an invoice or credit memo, very similar to our previous reports,
you simply want to click on the row to take a look at the additional detailed
information. Last but not least is our receivable
invoice summary report. This report is a summarized version of the previous
report, the invoice details report, that we just discussed. It does not show the
line by line detail of each invoice, but instead each invoice is summarized on
one row, and it displays a customer contact, invoice date, expected date,
reference information, the outstanding balance, source and whether or not the
invoice has been sent to a customer. Please note to display an invoice or
credit memo similar to the previous reports, you just want to simply click on
the invoice row for additional details. Each of the reports that we have
discussed can be exported to a PDF, Excel, or Google sheets. So at the bottom of
each report similar to this report, you want to click on the export button.
And then you can export to any one of these three options. You also have the option
to actually save the reports. And for this selection you can save the report
as a draft, as a published report, or as a custom
report. For the draft option, this 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 actually publish them. Published: this option 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 changed or updated in some way. You can only publish
reports if you have the advisor user role. You can learn more about user roles
in the How to Invite Users lesson. Click here to access this lesson.
And custom: use this option if you want to save the report format so that you don't
have to recreate it each time you run the report. Xero will ask you if you
would like to make this template your default. Each of the reports that we have
discussed can easily be modified. So let's go back to our age receivables
detail report. And to modify a report, you simply want to click on this button that
says report settings. So we'll click on that. And then there are several options
that we have in this particular screen, so let's talk about this. The date range
basically you want to select the date range that you would like to run the
report for. So you can do that by selecting a preset date range from the
drop-down, or selecting a specific date from this field here. Aging by: you want
to select the date that you would like to use to calculate the age of the
invoices. So in this selection here you can either age invoices based on their
invoice date, or based on their due date. Aging periods: you can determine the
aging buckets to set up. For example in the age receivable summary report that
we discussed previously, there are three periods set up
with 30 days each: 1 to 30, 31 to 60, and 61 to 90. So in this field this is where
you can indicate how many quote-unquote buckets or categories you would like to
age. And then this is where you determine the number of days to include in each
bucket. So for example, this is showing three categories and it's showing that
each category is 30 days each. Numbers: if you put the check mark here this will
actually show decimals on the report. Or you can just show whole numbers only
without the cents. Layout: so we've got group by here. And from the drop-down
you can 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,
invoice seen, invoice sent, and region. Columns: so you want to put a check mark
next to each column that you would like to display on the report. The columns
available may vary depending on the report that you are running. Region: so
region as we've mentioned is a tracking category. If you set up tracking
categories they will be listed here in this section. And then you can easily
filter your reports based on those tracking categories. Add a filter: if you
would like to filter on any column in this report, you can do so by clicking
this add a filter option and making your selections here.
Once you click update, Xero will save this information for the report. That wraps up
the lesson on how to create an accounts receivable 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
free 30-day trial of Xero. If you have feedback about this course
or if you have any questions, please leave a comment below. Also, don't forget
to subscribe