Xero in on Xero
HAPPY HALLOWEEN! Let’s discuss a rather spooky topic in Xero: the Assurance Dashboard. Have you ever wanted to spy on your team? Do you frequently lurk in the dark trying to see what is on their computer screens? Yes? Then the Assurance Dashboard is for you! All kidding aside, this feature is extremely powerful, especially when you are trying to figure out who is working on the bookkeeping.
You can find the Assurance Dashboard under the Advisor menu:
This dashboard shows you a heat map of users’ usage:
If you hover over the blue boxes, you get to see more information:
So on September 13th, I spent one minute making two journal entries in this file. Fantastic, right? Now you have the tool at your fingertips to be the ghost in the office, the fly on the wall, Spiderman hanging from the ceiling, or even Wonder Woman with the Lasso of Truth! If you are not dressed up for Halloween, then please ignore my terrible jokes.
Under the Assurance Dashboard, you can also find the history of transactions manually coded in bank accounts. Manual coding occurs when you force reconcile the item without a bank statement line item and when you manually delete transactions (most frequently in the case of duplicates).
You can also find the contact dashboard which shows contacts with the same bank account information, as well as contacts with edited banking information.
The final tab in the Assurance Dashboard is for Invoices & Bills. This tab gives you the ability to show when Invoices and Bills were backdated.
As you can see, the Assurance Dashboard is a creeptastic tool to know what is happening inside of your Xero file. Happy haunting!
XPT: Using the Assurance Dashboard on a weekly basis will help keep you on top of your team and how they are working inside of the files.
Liz Mason
Author Bio: Liz Mason is the co-founder and CEO of High Rock Accounting, a technology company, born in the cloud, that happens to do accounting. They focus on implementing next-level technology solutions, while providing services from CFO level down to basic accounting. Liz is also a writer, coach, entrepreneur and a National Xero Ambassador. When not in Phoenix, you can find her traveling the world, enjoying other cultures and planning world domination. Check out The Hot Accounts for more entertaining small business topics. Twitter Handles: @HighRockCPAs @LizzyNorMa