introducing the brand new feature - xero bill payments
Welcome to our Introducing Series - where we showcase the latest tools & apps in the Xero-sphere, including tips on how they really work, what to watch out for, and we'll let you really know what we think of them! 🙂
This time, it's the turn of the feature released at the back end of last year (and the one we predicted may land back in our October 2023 Product Updates) - the ability to pay suppliers without leaving Xero.
We've been trialling the functionality with a few of our clients over the past couple of months, and there are a few things that you need to watch out for...
The premise:
A simple and secure way to pay bills without leaving Xero (using the power of open banking).
in a nutshell:
a simple and secure way to manage, approve and pay bills, without leaving Xero (using open banking)
no need to pay each bill separately - batch them per supplier
select ‘Direct bank transfer’ as a payment method to pay bills from your bank accountauthorise each batch using multi-factor authentication directly from your banking app or online portal (you'll also need to authenticate the fee)
fee is 20p + VAT per batch payment
our top tips:
What to do FIRST: Add supplier bank details to the financial information fields within your contacts. This could be quite time consuming (especially if you have quite a few suppliers), but it'll save time going forward.
Use the 'group by' option to minimise the number of transactions for simplicity, to minimise the number of authentications, and to reduce the transaction fee (see "in a nutshell" above)
our thoughts:
Using your online banking app via the QR code generated for each payment batch is slightly quicker and easier than using the link to desktop online banking.
The process overall is not much quicker than manually using your online banking - but as bills in your Xero are marked as paid automatically, it minimises the risk of paying the same bill twice, and it makes bank reconciliation easier.
Generally, we'd recommend paying as many bills in one session as possible, to save time overall. The monthly or weekly 'payment run' will become a thing for the smallest of businesses, rather than just paying individual bills as and when.
Xero Bill Payments are powered by Crezco, which is available as a standalone product and could be faster and/or cheaper if you have lots of payments to make per month.
Click here to learn more about Crezco
need help with xero?
If you'd like to go over anything contained in this blog, or would like to cover any aspect of Xero that you're not currently using, please get in touch
Happy Xero-ing folks! 🙂