Xero In on Xero; A Practical Approach of Find & Recode

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I am lazy. There, I said it out loud! I will do everything in my power to automate my life so I do not have to spend time on menial tasks. I am the “right” kind of lazy. Find & Recode is a tool built for me. I am the CEO of High Rock Accounting where we focus on using technology wisely to make our lives as efficient as possible.

We frequently have clients and staff coding items in their accounting software incorrectly. As a result, my team has to fix it. We used to have to go account by account and line by line to figure out what was incorrect and manually recode all of them. Now, we use Find & Recode. You can find this feature in the Advisor tab inside of Xero.

I recently decided to breakout our firm’s cost of goods sold account. We had everything grouped into one account! It was getting to be too much. I wanted to see software and payroll in different accounts and leave the general account for one-off items. To do this, I searched for everything in that general account this year.

There are many more options to search as well. Utilize these when you need to get very specific with your targeted line items.

After I prepared my search, I received a quick result with every transaction in the query.

There were 196 items. I quickly clicked through all the software transactions (it took me less than a minute). And clicked “Recode.” If you click the down arrow next to Recode, you get a few great options.

Generally, I use the “Recode source transactions” choice. This will recode all of the original transactions for you. However, I will use the “Recode with a manual journal” if we are doing it after reports have already gone out. If we need to be able to see the change on the financials clearly (after banks or boards review financials) we will use the journal entry option.

I chose to recode the source transactions.

The system gives me options to recode the basic information on the transaction. Additionally, if you click “+Add” you can recode tracking categories!

After you recode the items that you selected to the now correct coding, Xero will take you to the history page. Find & Recode keeps a detailed record of every time someone uses it. This is great for monitoring team members and ensuring they are accurately using the tool. It also makes it easy to reverse the changes if needed.

Below the summary, it shows you every transaction item that was re-coded.

If you are looking for the history directly, you will need to follow the breadcrumb trail (Xero uses this method to make it easy to navigate the system).

You can see the “Recode History” available from the Find & Recode main screen. All of the blue words are clickable links.

This example is a very basic-use case. There are plenty of more complicated ways to use this feature to help make your life more efficient. I would challenge everyone to consider using Find & Recode as an efficiency tool in everyday accounting life.

XPT: If you add a new tracking category to Xero, Find & Recode is the easiest way to move all of the old transactions to the new tracking category.

Author Bio: Liz Mason is the co-founder and CEO of High Rock Accounting, a technology company, born in the cloud, that happens to do accounting. They focus on implementing next-level technology solutions, while providing services from CFO level down to basic accounting. Liz is also a writer, coach, entrepreneur and a National Xero Ambassador. When not in Phoenix, you can find her traveling the world, enjoying other cultures and planning world domination. Check out The Hot Accounts for more entertaining small business topics. Twitter Handles: @HighRockCPAs, @LizzyNorMa