Today we’re releasing a new layout editor which allows you to customize nearly any aspect of a financial report, as well as a new report center experience. This brings unparalleled reporting power to Xero with the flexibility to suit any user.
Layout editor
A little over a year ago Xero released a layout editor to allow you to modify the key financial reports — the Balance Sheet, Profit & Loss, Movements in Equity and — for our partners using Report Templates, some very powerful schedule creation abilities. It was a huge step forward with powerful row level customization — grouping accounts together, creating formulas and ordering items exactly how you want them to show. Today we add the logical next step, column customization. Plus we’re making it available to all users of Xero reports — businesses and practices alike.
All the columns you could want
Prior to this release, columns were ordered in reverse chronological order, they were all the same time span, and they were all continuous. You couldn’t add budgets to anything, and you couldn’t define your own variance calculations. Now you can do all of those things!
You can define all characteristics of the date columns, what time frame they cover, what they are titled and in which order they will show.
You can add budgets to the Profit & Loss and also to reports that contain schedules like the Notes to the Financial Statements. You can customize where they show, the time frame, and the titles.
Compare anything
Formulas let you calculate variances between any columns on your report. Whether actuals vs budget, actuals vs other actuals, you can now compare anything.
As well as the new columns behavior, the user interface for accounts, groups and formula rows has been improved. As before, there is still an easy and intuitive drag and drop interface to move items around. You can now hide total rows to create cleaner layouts, or you can rename them. Lastly, the means by which you show the detail of all the accounts, or summarize them together to create a single line is now a simple toggle, which also keeps your layout page cleaner.
Report Center
The report center has been completely rebuilt. It brings all of Xero’s reports, both old and new, into one place. We’ve added some great new functionality that we think you’ll love – especially the ways you can very easily tailor a report to suit your specific needs.
Reports are now grouped into new categories that make it easier to find what you’re looking for. Just click the three dots to expand a group and see more reports.
You can still use the star icon to favorite any report (new or old) so those reports always display at the top of that group and in the Reports menu.
Better yet, we’ve introduced a new search function so that you can quickly find the report you need. This screenshot shows the results when you search for “Rec”.
Xero’s default report layouts are great — but sometimes you need to tailor them to your specific needs. Now after editing the layout and settings of any new report, you can save the layout to use again with one click. Simply click Save as Custom.
You can save more than one custom layout per report, so now you can create as many reports as you need to manage your business.
What’s next for reporting?
There are two pieces of work which are underway now, to be released in the coming months. Tracking Columns will allow you to set one or more tracking values to show in a column on a report. This will allow consolidation of multiple values into one column as well as showing more than one tracking value on any given report.
The To Date convenience picker option. (Year to Date, Quarter to Date, Month to Date.) Will allow even easier reporting up to the current day, taking advantage of the always online nature of Xero.
We’d love to hear what you think about the improvements to reporting in Xero and if you’d like to learn more head to the help center for a comprehensive guide of the new functionality.
