Xero Problems and Solutions - Checks / Xero has very serious problems with checks

Mike Block @ Xero CPAs Blog writes: Unless you E-pay bills, it only imports things like Check #501 and Check 502. Some clients have more than a thousand unreconciled manual checks in a single account. It is time consuming, expensive and error prone to have clients consistently send us check stubs for this, much less do it on a frequent, current and consistent basis. That is why we often give remote assistants read-only bank account access, to research this. However, these assistants rarely know applicable accounts for most new payees. Supervisory accountants also may not know this for some payees, without doing web searches or asking clients. This Xero problem is especially bad because it only uses its rules to match imported entries to accounts (it ignores rules for manually entered payees). You also cannot record payees in Xero without accounts.

Our new 0CPAs program will soon provide solutions to the very serious Xero problems with checks. We will accumulate a web table of all such payees, accounts, contact data, identification numbers and related information. It will work the same way that QuickBooks does, with an incremental search, as you enter each letter of a payee name. If you match an existing payee, it will enter the payee and the account.

Unlike QuickBooks, if you do not match, it will save the new payee with the new date and check number. It will then notify a supervisor and do (or offer to do) a web search for items he does not know. For items the supervisor cannot code, it will notify the client. Once someone codes a payee to an account, it will batch update the payee. It also can batch update payee contact data, identification numbers and related information. Of course, QuickBooks does not use batch updates or aggregate this table for many clients.

This is how 0CPAs will soon provide solutions to the Xero problems with checks.