Most accounting programs can comfortably give you general accounting reports like the bank reconciliation, accounts receivable and accounts payable.

But unless you are 100% up to date with your bookkeeping (and lets face it, many small businesses aren’t), any profit and loss statement or balance sheet reports generated, usually won’t provide a fair or accurate picture – and this is  (yet) another reason why I love Xero.

You see, even if you don’t want to do full invoicing or run full accounts payable, if you process the bulk of your financial transactions through your business bank account or credit card, and you link that bank account or credit card to your Xero file, then you are never far away from having reconciled accounts!

So when you need finance, or you want to apply for a trade account with a supplier, or as and when you want to review your trading position – the profit and loss statement generated by your Xero file will be accurate enough to provide a good picture of your business to the recipient.

Xero also allows users to customise reports if desired, this might be by way of using colour in the reports so the look and feel of them ties in with your brand, or altering the format to summarise or group items together – lots of opportunities there!

Regards