#XERO TRACKING CODES CODE#

Setting up the right structure from the beginning will save you a whole lot of problems in future.

And that should help to shape the structure that you set up. Think about your stakeholders, who you need to report to and what info they need. The structure of your chart of accounts needs to be driven by the outputs you need and want. If you’re going to go down this route then it’s worth putting some thought into whether you need to track “Fund” or “Funder” as they aren’t always necessarily the same thing.

Restricted Fund – relevant for our charity clientsįor a few of our charity clients we have set up the tracking categories so that they can track restricted/designated/unrestricted funds and this is incredibly helpful for the financial management and reporting.

Site – to track income and costs related to specific geographical sites.

a charity may conceptualize the key activities as volunteering, education, service delivery and support. brewery, bar, restaurant – three distinct segments of the same business

Department – marketing, sales, operations, fundraising, service delivery etc.But we do see our clients using the tracking categories for: The North, South, East, West example is probably overly simplistic for real life. In our example “region” is the category and “north, south, east and west” are the options. In Xero you can have two different categories each with a number of tracking options sitting under that category.

#XERO TRACKING CODES CODE#

You can then run reports on a total account code basis which ignores the tracking categories or you can filter your reports so that you can see the results for each region, or a combination of regions. Then every transaction that gets entered into Xero will have the relevant tracking option selected as well as the relevant account code. Overall, it’s a clunky solution.Ī better option would be to set up a Tracking Category called “Region” and then 4 tracking options sitting within that category called “North”, “South”, “East” and “West”. Plus, if you want to see the total printing cost for the organization you have to add 4 codes together. It also means that your reporting will be clunky as you can’t easily separate the “north” codes from the “south” codes to see the profit in the North and the profit in the South.

The problem with this route is that your 30 account codes is now 120 codes which is a bit overwhelming to work with. One option would be to create new account codes so that your “printing” code becomes “printing –North”, “printing – South”, “printing – East” and “printing – West”. Let’s also say that you have 30 expense account codes set up in Xero. As a simple example let’s say that your organisation works across the UK and you want to track your income and costs by region, North, South, East and West. These can give you additional analysis without having to create an overwhelming number of account codes. You can add another layer of analysis using Tracking Categories in Xero. A classic example is that you might have one code called “printing, postage and stationery” or if it’s useful in your context you could have three codes: “printing”, “postage”, and, “stationery”. You can choose to make the account codes as detailed or as summarized as is useful for you. You already have account codes in Xero, do you need another layer, or two, of coding?Įvery time you record a transaction in Xero you have to select an account code.

Xero tracking codes