In our last blog we looked at at using the Receiptbank and Xero to manage what we need to pay. But there is another little tip here that really does help managing your cashflow and speeding up the process of making payments.
It is important that YOU make decisions about your cashflow and not your suppliers. That means that just because they think it should be paid on a particular day, does not mean that you have to pay it on that day.
Now I am not saying that you need to squeeze suppliers unnecessarily – times are tough for everyone. Rather, I am advocating for a dedicated payment day. This can be once a week, twice a month, once a month on a particular day – whatever you feel appropriate.
Once you’ve chosen your payment day, you can use the “planned date” feature in Xero.
There are two ways to do this:
Option 1:
You can click on the “+” sign in the planned date column and add the date you intend making payment for each bill.
Option 2:
You can select multiple bills and hit “schedule payments” and choose the appropriate date.
This does two very important things.
Firstly, it shows you the amount of money you are planning to pay in total on each payment day, helping you to plan your cashflow.
Secondly, these payment lists can be quite long. But, if you click on the date total as shown, it automatically filters the list to show everything you are planning to pay on that payment day.
So, when you sit down on 3 March, you will only see the bills you are planning to pay.
This should help save time, and provide a simple tool for managing your cashflow better.