Telleroo is a payment automation platform that helps organisations gain greater control over their payment process and reduce the need to provide direct access to their core bank account. This additionally streamlines the process, saves time and significantly reduces the risk of errors associated with other payment methods.

Here are some reasons why we use Telleroo:

Increased Controls

With Telleroo, there are a large number of additional controls, these include; Checking bank details of beneficiaries against previous payments, against the record in Xero, and against the beneficiaries bank account; Management of approval permissions from within the app; clear audit trail of approval; securely transferring data from Xero with no ability for files to be edited or amended.

Removes need for Bank Access

All access that is required by the ExcluServ team can be managed directly in Telleroo. This removes the need to setup ExcluServ staff to have online access to your main account, reducing the time this requires to manage and the additional exposure to cyber-attacks that creates.

Scheduled Payments

It is possible to setup payments and set them to be made on a specific date or time

Easy integration:

Telleroo integrates seamlessly with Xero, which can make it easy to manage your payments from a single platform.

Cost-effective:

Telleroo charges a flat fee for an agreed volume of transactions per month (then only per transaction if exceeded, with the option to upgrade for future months), which can be significantly cheaper than other payment methods, such as wire transfers or checks.

Secure:

Telleroo uses bank-level security protocols to protect your payment data and prevent fraud.

Transparent:

With Telleroo, you can track the status in real-time, which can help you stay on top of your payments.

Easy reconciliations:

The payments are integrated back into Xero which also then facilitates the reconciliation of the payments with Xero.

FinTech cards – Soldo

We highly encourage use of the new fintech cards available to streamline card payments and reduce expenses / petty cash while improving controls. Our current view is that Soldo is the best of breed for integration with Xero and we have built our internal processes around this solution.

Reporting and Planning

We adopt various reporting solutions depending on each client’s needs, ranging from Xero for basic reporting to Power BI & Acterys for enhanced reporting, budgeting and forecasting.

Xero

When it comes to reporting, Xero has built in reporting functionality that is customisable to some extent and easy to set up and use. It also provides easy drill down to transactional level, access to file attachments and view of the audit trail.

In general, reporting in Xero is designed to cater for the requirements of small and medium commercial organisations and would be sufficient for running basic Profit and Loss, Balance Sheet and cashflow reports and filter them by departments, projects and funders, depending on the system setup.

Xero also handles multi currencies quite well as it links directly with XE.com and uses live exchange rate data from there.

Challenges

Xero reporting is not sophisticated enough to replicate more complex reporting requirements like those of charities. We would evaluate on a case-by-case basis if Xero alone is a viable reporting solution. Some of the main reporting limitations of Xero when it comes to reporting and planning are:

Inability to restrict what data report users can see

Limited flexibility of report designer

No dashboard design functionality

Very limited budgeting module which requires the use of spreadsheets for multi-dimensional budgeting

No consolidation

Regardless of the limitations of Xero’s built in reporting module, there are more than one hundred reporting applications available in the application store that seamlessly integrate with Xero.

Excel

We love the familiarity and flexibility of Excel!

Xero has easy data export functionality and there are also various tools available that seamlessly integrate with Xero and Excel. This allows our clients to build custom Excel reports in a familiar Excel environment.

Challenges

The flexibility of Excel can be its biggest disadvantage when it comes to budgeting. Having multiple spreadsheets distributed to various stakeholders and then consolidating them back into the reporting software can be a nightmare for finance teams.

Also, Excel reports are generally static, so end users would not have access to live data unless a data refresh is done within the Excel template. Although dashboards can be developed in Excel, unlike other business intelligence tools, these are not interactive.

We would normally use Excel to complement Xero reporting to some extent and for simple budget templates where top-down budgeting is done. However, when our clients require live reports at a click of a button, insightful interactive dashboards, automated consolidation, bottom-up budgeting etc. we would look at a more sophisticated solution.