Xero, the global small business platform, today announced at Xerocon London, a suite of product innovations to streamline key accounting tasks for UK small businesses and their advisors. The new tax, payments and payroll features will help businesses pay and get paid faster, while enabling UK accountants and bookkeepers to manage more of their clients’ compliance obligations seamlessly in Xero.

The new innovations include:

• A new partnership tax solution available soon in beta, expanding Xero’s tax offering in market
• A new beta of an integrated practice management and tax solution for accountants and bookkeepers in Xero Practice Manager (XPM), supporting seamless workflows
• A new client insights dashboard, giving advisors a snapshot of their clients’ key metrics and financial health, in one place
• Industry-first availability of Tap to Pay in the Xero Accounting mobile app, enabling UK small businesses to accept instant payments from their smartphone
• A series of investments in Xero Payroll, including the all-new payroll manager in beta, helping advisors manage payroll data easily from a centralised dashboard

Diya Jolly, Chief Product and Technology Officer at Xero, said: "We’re always listening to our customers and partners about the tools and workflows that are most important to them. Expanding our tools to include features like partnership tax and the new payroll manager will equip advisors to better support their clients with critical small business needs and move towards a more streamlined practice management experience.”

New partnership tax and client insights

Xero unveiled its new partnership tax solution, available from July in beta, enabling accountants and bookkeepers to automatically prepare partnership annual accounts and tax using Xero data and seamlessly file partnership tax returns with HMRC.

Adding partnership tax means Xero now handles the vast majority of compliance tasks needed to serve UK small businesses in one place, eliminating the need for multiple, costly practice tools.

Deeper integrated practice experience

Xero has opened the beta of its new integrated practice management and tax solution for UK accountants and bookkeepers in Xero Practice Manager (XPM). The new integrated experience connects tax compliance with practice management, enabling advisors to see all client obligations, manage workflows and improve job tracking and prioritisation, all in one place.

The experience brings together a single client record, or client database, across Xero’s practice tools, delivering a more unified experience for partners. Additionally, advisors will be able to add and manage their practice staff across Xero HQ and XPM, eliminating the need to manage staff access into multiple places in Xero. A full launch of the integrated experience is coming later this year.

Deliver more client insights to practices

Xero also previewed client insights, a new dashboard giving advisors visibility of their clients’ key metrics and financial health. Available in XPM and Xero HQ, it will show client data such as business health, profit and expenses across the practice, enabling advisors to quickly identify clients in need of support and better target advisory services. The feature is now live in beta.

Empower businesses with more ways to pay

According to Xero Small Business Insights, 50% of small businesses are paid late. This cost hit an estimated £1.6bn in 2023*.

To support businesses to get paid faster, Xero is helping in a number of ways. Xero will be the first major accounting platform to offer Tap to Pay in the UK and Australia, enabling businesses across these regions to accept payments on the spot, right from their Xero Accounting app, giving them more ways to get paid.

By partnering with Stripe, the new contactless payment method for Xero invoicing gives small businesses more ways to accept the types of payments their customers want. Tap to Pay will first be offered to UK Android users in a beta program in August, and available on more platforms in the following months.

Other ways Xero is helping includes:

1. New payment methods with Stripe: In addition to credit cards, debit cards, and digital wallets, businesses will be able to soon offer bank transfer and buy now pay later options
2. Single, one-time sign up: A simpler, embedded sign-up with Stripe makes it easier to get moving and get paid
3. Complete control and customisation: Businesses can learn more about available payment methods and enable or disable the payment methods they want to offer

Streamline pay runs in Xero Payroll runs

Xero showcased the first look at payroll manager, a new dashboard in XPM and Xero HQ, giving accountants and bookkeepers an easy way to view payroll data across a practice’s clients in one place. Currently in beta, when live payroll manager will help save time by providing a consolidated view of client pay runs, making it quicker and simpler to identify clients whose payroll needs attention for upcoming pay runs.

*The cost of late payments to small businesses for 2023 has been estimated as the time value of the outstanding invoice value of all small and medium businesses. This calculation is based on businesses with less than than 50 employees for the United Kingdom. This is calculated by applying current interest rates(for small and medium sized businesses) to aggregate small and medium business sales for the period equal to the average days late invoices paid.

Xero Payroll also includes a number of improved features designed to suit modern businesses with flexible workforces, enabling advisors to work with a wider variety of businesses and reducing the potential for manual errors. Small businesses can now easily manage employees' working patterns supporting non-traditional working hours, such as four-day work weeks. Employee pensions setup has also been simplified with additional guidance and increased flexibility to edit and update fields.

Soon, small businesses will also be able to align their payroll leave period to their financial or operational periods.

Xero is also making it easier for UK small businesses to switch to Xero Payroll anytime during the tax year, by simply uploading their most recent filing data and following a few simple steps.

“Xero is bolstering our payroll product, making significant investments to expand our ability to serve more types of small businesses, make crucial pay runs easier to administer, streamline multi-client tasks and reduce manual errors,” Jolly said.