Moving Wholesale Business from Sage to Xero? Read This First
A wholesale business with a turnover above £1 million is highly likely to need an inventory app to get the most out of Xero – depending on whether they can fit inside the limits.
If you’ve decided that you need an inventory app to go along with your move from Sage to Xero, you’re ready to start thinking about the next steps.
Choosing an inventory app
The easiest way to get a solid understanding of the best options is by talking to a specialist, and you can speak with one of our experts today.
Here are some of the questions we usually ask to quickly get to the root of your situation:
1. How many different products do you sell?
How many product codes will you need? Some systems have limits on the number of products you can upload.
2. How does your pricing work for your customers?
- Fixed price tiers?
- Different prices for different customers?
- Quantity-based discounts?
- Or minimum order requirements?
3. Do you sell online – and which platforms do you use?
- Do you sell through an e-commerce platform that integrates with Xero?
- Do you use a dedicated B2B portal?
- What’s the proportion of your sales that comes through these online platforms?
4. Are most of your sales paid upfront or on payment terms?
An inventory app can help avoid the limits of Xero by consolidating groups of invoices and purchase orders into one transaction. But this consolidation can only happen for transactions that have been paid in full – which means the way your customers pay can make a huge difference to how you fit into those limits on Xero.
If your wholesale business has too many transactions to squeeze into Xero – or it’s not possible to use an add-on to fit inside the limits – you might need to take a look at a completely different accounting system.
A product like Accounts IQ is a fully customisable accounting software package that comes with no limits on your transactions. But it also comes with much higher costs. While Xero usually starts at around £22.50 per month, a move over to Accounts IQ could cost in the region of £700 per month.
Training your users on Xero
If we could only say one thing about training to the businesses we speak to, it would be this:
Your users need to be fully trained before the system goes live.
When businesses try to implement a new system by themselves (without the help of consultants like us), they underestimate how important this pre-launch training is.
Don’t assume users can learn on the go because errors quickly start to stack up. Once they start to realise their mistakes, they’ll have to spend time going back into their historic transactions to correct them. And this extra time spent moving backwards makes it even harder to stay up to date with their current and future transactions.
Before you move to a new accounting system, complete a fresh stock take so you can start from a clean slate.
Without it, you’ll have to start making adjustments in your new system further down the line – which is an unnecessary extra hassle that you can easily avoid by keeping your stock data as recent as possible before you make the move.
Checking your data in the first few weeks and months
Most businesses will go live with a new system at the start of the financial quarter.
Unfortunately lots of businesses won’t think to perform checks on their new system until it’s time to report their VAT for that quarter, and in most cases, this is far too late to have time to fix any issues.
So instead, we recommend weekly and monthly checks in the first period after moving over to a new accounting system.
By taking the time to check over your new system at an early stage, you’ll be able to avoid the stress of rushing to fix a huge number of errors in time for your VAT return.
Next Steps
By now, you should have a solid understanding of the most important stages of moving your wholesale business over from Sage to Xero.
If you still have questions you can take advantage of one of our free consultations to get the answers you need.
We’ll talk you through all the important information and questions, and we’ll give you the unbiased recommendations you need to make the best choices for your wholesale business.
Speak to an expert and get the advice you need – we’re always happy to talk with a wholesale business that cares about its future.