I am going to start my XERO Challenge.

I have already being playing around on XERO today, so I am going to restrict it to 15 minutes.

I have tried to link my XERO account to paypal. The instructions on the XERO home page were different to my own pay pal account aghh!

I have had a chat with my XERO account manager about this and he says paypal can take 3-5 days to start feeding through. (I think my XERO advisor is starting to melt down from the number of emails that I have sent him J)

I want to enter my conversion balances into XERO today. These are the balances as at the date you start using XERO, if you are using another system. If you are starting a new business the balances will be zero.

I go to MYOB and look at my trial balance for May I export it to Microsoft Excel, delete the monthly columns and print it out.

I open XERO and I click on Settings and on Conversion balances.

I click show all balances.

Entering the data is way too fiddly. It takes a double click to enter the data; however, it keeps flipping me out. This is way too time consuming and I am not enjoying it at all.

I guess entering data in Microsoft Excel is so easy, you get spoilt and when something looks like an excel table, you think it will behave the same way.

So I finished enter all my opening balances in XERO – it said I did not have permission when I went to save & deleted them all grrr.

I tweeted my frustration and @QuickBooksToday: tweet me @HeatherSmithAU I would suggest you try QuickBooks online – but realise you may not appreciate that advice! Try savinga small jnl 1st

[LOL]

There is a tab at the top and maybe I selected the wrong one, so I try again, and the same thing happens. I lose all the entered data. It tells me I don’t have the correct user privileges. I open up another tab on my internet browser log into XERO simultaneously, and change my user privileges so I am now a financial advisor status, save it, go back to the original XERO and this time I can successfully save it! Yeah!

I have to enter the detailed the makes up the balances of the accounts receivable and accounts payable.  I enter outstanding invoices and payments. They reconcile with my account balances, and I seem now to be able to save phew!

I would like to emphasize the importance of having accurate accounts receivables and accounts payables balances before entering conversion balances.

So that was way more than 15 minutes.

Tomorrow I aim to download the XERO app to my iPhone. Do they have one? I don’t even know if they do. I shall explore tomorrow.