Xero Practice Manager Practice Settings: Job and Task Order Settings

This article is an extract from the book 'Everything you need to know about Xero Practice Manager'
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There are some settings in XPM you need to get right. In this section we’ll be reviewing the essential settings to ensure your practice is set up to succeed.

To get started, go to ‘Business > Settings > Practice Settings’ in your XPM.

Ordering

The below settings relate to the display order of jobs, and tasks within jobs. We want to organise these so we can quickly find similar jobs and tasks. This allows us to view our tasks chronologically within each job.

Set 'Job Order' to 'Client'. This ensures that when you have multiple jobs open for a client, these jobs are grouped together in the job manager. This allows your team to group their work related to the same client file a lot easier.

Ensure your 'Task Order' is set to 'Job Order'.. This ensures that when your team is entering time sheets, the order of the available tasks in the time sheet are in the order they appear on the job (chronological). We typically organise our tasks within jobs to occur in the order they need to happen. Having this set to alphabetical (the other option) will only confuse and delay time sheeting for your team.

Set 'Job Task Order' to 'Custom'. This setting determines the order of events inside your jobs themselves. As discussed above, it is best to organise your tasks on your jobs in the order they occur, eg. ‘Annual Accounts – Preparation’ followed by ‘Annual Accounts – Review’. Where tasks occur concurrently, organise them with the task that would typically be started first. 'Due Date' is your other option here, however 'Task Due Dates' need to be manually set for each job, which isn’t always relevant.

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