From the Xero blog today…

Last month I was at Xerocon Sydney where we announced some of the new Xero features being launched over the next three months. Well, it’s only a few weeks later and the first of these features are live – it’s how we roll.

Batch deposits

For those of you dealing with customers paying by check/cheque or paying multiple invoices at once, this feature will be a huge time saver. Hopefully it will also put a smile on the faces of those waiting for this feature on Community.

Batch deposit is the accounts receivable equivalent to batch payments. From the Sales dashboard, simply select the invoices to be paid and press the ‘Deposit’ button.

Once you’ve confirmed the batch, payments (or part payments, if you’ve adjusted the amounts) will be created for the selected invoices – no more need to drill into each individual invoice (yes!).

Deposit slips

If your batch deposit was created from a number of checks/cheques, you can choose to print a simple deposit slip to take to the bank.

Receipts (invoice payments)

Another much requested feature, receipts can be sent to thank your customers for invoice payments. These can be initiated from a batch deposit, where a separate email for each unique customer will be created, or from any single payment record.

Xero will attach a copy of the receipt to each receipt email. Receipt documents can have their layout edited – so you can easily apply your branding. You can also customise the standard text used for the email body from the email settings.

Note that we don’t yet support sending receipts on cash (Receive Money) transactions – this is something we’re considering for a future release. You can add your weight to the Community request for this.

More new reports

Head on over to the new, and growing, report centre, for all the latest reports. We’ve already talked about the new Aged, Depreciation and Account Transactions reports and today we’ve added a couple of new ones.

• Profit and Loss – this is the first release of the new P&L report and it includes a brand new way of controlling the report layouts. It also allows you to create your own formulae (gross profit percentage anyone?). I’ve asked Mark Blundell, who has been working hard on the new reporting framework, to write a dedicated blog on this to cover all the goodness. Stay tuned.
• Disposal Schedule – the best thing about the new Disposals Schedule, is that it exists! Previously there wasn’t a report which would detail fixed assets that had been sold or written off within a period. Now there is.
• Account Transactions – while some of you may have already seen this update, we’ve now finished rolling this out to all users. So if you haven’t had a chance, give it a whirl. One of the main enhancements is the option to report on multiple accounts at a time. A future release will add multi-currency support, for now, the report shows all values in base currency.

Other stuff

But wait, there’s more!

• Faster spend/receive transactions – a new button on the Account Transactions screen, “New Transaction”, lets you quickly create new spend/receive transactions on the fly. Really useful if you want to understand your cash position and enter the details of checks/cheques before they’ve cleared the bank.
• New inventory item fields – in preparation for more inventory features, we’ve added more details to each item,
  • Item Code – a short code to identify the item
  • Name – a human readable name for the item
  • Sales description – the description that will, by default, appear when this item is used on sales invoices
  • Purchase description – the description that will, be default, appear when this item is used on bills and purchase orders. This would be a good place to record a supplier part code, for example.
• Invoice export – a small feature, but with plenty of support on Community, you can now export sales invoices and bills in CSV format, making it easy to slice & dice the detail of what you’re buying and selling.
• Authorize.Net eCheck support – if you’re a US or Canadian customer already using Authorize.Net as a payment service in online invoicing, then we’ve added the ability for your customers to pay directly from their bank through the use of eChecks.

• Improved contact lookups – when searching for a contact on invoices and other transactions, Xero now displays the primary person’s name too. It’s also smarter at finding matches as you type, searching across the primary person as well as contact name.

As always, more details about new Xero features can be found in our release notes.

Bye for now.

This blog was republished with permission from Xero. You can see the original article here.