One point of being associated with Xero as their customers' data is online, are they do provide a service for anonymous statistical information on the current state of the accounting information.

This point was interesting if a typical business sends a 30-day invoice, how long will it take for them to get paid?

Well, it depends where you are:

By state these are the results that their clients provided:

ACT 30.6 days
New South Wales 37.7 days
Northern Territory 32.5 days
Queensland 33.9 days
South Australia 36.3 days
Tasmania 32.2 days
Victoria 37.1 days
Western Australia 33.7 days

The overall average was 36.3 days.

So if you send out an invoice for 30-days, budget that about half of them will be paid within 36.3 days.

What point that often I find stunning is the comparison of when I talk to the chiefs in large organisations compared to owners of small businesses (SMB). The leaders know less, much less but what they do know is relevant and essential to the problem at hand. The owner of an SMB, often does not know anything. The owner has all the details in their head, the pixels that they know little of the big picture.

I do not believe that retail business has ever had access to such a wealth of information as they do today.

A conversation might start, what is your top seller? The owner often gives a blank stare, well we sell a lot of this and that what is the top seller, it could be.... Yet the information is available in their POS system here.

If you are seeing that you need to discount a lot to sell stock you are overstocked, it is a sure sign that you need to do something. As a punt what is happening is that you are overordering on some items and probably underordering on others. What often we see in retail is that our memory is by definition the past and the memory remembers old top sellers but what we need is the top sellers today. Here is how to identify what is selling well now to check that you have enough stock for tomorrow and it is very easy in our point of sale system.

Go to Register reports

Select the "Top N Stock Sales for a Given Period"

Now out pops the following.

Now select a day, as it is an old database I put in an old date. Usually, you would put in yesterday or today, just make sure you get close to a full day of trading.

Now you get a report with the top sellers now