What FMI loves about Rise and Xero:
- The high-quality user experience and interface
- Multiple hours are saved each month by eliminating manual processes
- Rise and Xero are seamlessly integrated, and journal entries are now completed in a single click
As the Director of Finance for FMI, Lydia Jay knows how much time it can take to prepare and manually enter journal entries based on a wealth of detailed financial data. From data entry to reconciliation to checking balances, it’s often a time-consuming endeavour—but not so with Rise and Xero.
Before Rise and Xero
FMI has been using Xero and Rise separately since 2020, so Lydia, in her own words, “was very excited when the integration was announced. The push from Rise to Xero is completely seamless. You just press a button and the manual journal entry is prepared from the data and sent into Xero. The system even does a check, so I don’t have to myself. It’s great and the user interface is clean and logical,” she explains.
Before Rise’s Xero integration, Lydia remembers that there was a lot of checking (and double-checking data) before submitting it. “Before Rise was truly integrated with Xero, the Rise JE tool would shoot out a pivot in a workbook and it was very difficult to reconcile and see what was going on because the total payroll costs didn’t match the invoice showing how much money was taken out of the bank. So it required doing numbers and notes on the side of the spreadsheet to get things to reconcile. Part of the reason it was confusing was because of the tool used to map the payroll accounts to the GL accounts. It was very simplistic and not user friendly,” she describes.
What FMI needed
It was important for Lydia and the team at FMI to have a truly integrated solution for their journal entries. Any extra time spent checking over data, waiting for files to download, or uploading documents into another platform, or figuring out why something was not reconciling when pieces are missing due to system limitation mapping issues, was time wasted.
As Lydia explains: “When you’re a smaller company, with say less than 50 employees, the people in those administrative functions such as HR or Finance are doing multiple roles and various things within those jobs. Because of that, everything has to be very streamlined, fast and very logical… And the tools have to work correctly or you can really get bogged down”.
Lydia also explains that accuracy is essential for FMI. She says: “We needed a solution that we could trust to flag any discrepancies in journal entries and eliminate errors. We now get that with Rise."
What Rise and Xero provide FMI
Prior to Rise’s integration with Xero, FMI was using Rise’s built-in JE solution. Although it provided basic capability to get a JE done, it didn’t meet all of FMI’s expectations. As Lydia mentions, “everything is very fast and very smooth now. We don’t have to look at things piecemeal because it’s all integrated straight through to Xero. It’s saving our bookkeeper lots of time; I’m really very happy with it”.
Having been with Rise for several years now, Lydia reflects that, now, “it really seems like a different Rise. Before, everything was solely HR Operations focused, but now there’s technical support to ensure payroll numbers will be accurate when transferred to a financial system. We are now able to depend on the integrity of the platform and its ability to perform”.
The benefits of a true integration
The Rise and Xero integration has made things much easier for Lydia and her team. She comments, “I love that it’s a true integration. The GL mapping is very straightforward and the built-in check gives me assurance that everything is working as it should be”.
Lydia also notes how “the integration has allowed FMI to focus much more on our data rather than processes, which, as a financial modeling organization, is crucial”. She explains that “the platform allows us to just focus on doing the financial work and analyzing the numbers instead of trying to figure out why payroll didn’t go into the books easily”.
“I feel confident about the data I am sending to Xero. It’s easy to read and clear.”
Lydia is also very excited about the way that the JE solution looks, as well as its functionality. “The way that everything is set up is very nice. It’s logical in its presentation of the elements of payroll. It lists earnings, hourly earnings, salary earnings, contributions, the invoice charges, and then the benefits and deductions, and the taxes. It’s very clear and such a nice-looking solution too. Before it was not laid out as cleanly,” she says.
Lydia was one of the first people to test the integration during our beta release and provided Rise with a lot of valuable feedback that went into making the solution that other clients rely on today. Lydia comments how what she really loved about working with Rise through the initial steps was “that Rise was just so easy to work with and you all spoke my language and really seemed to understand the needs of the user”.
Lydia also notes that the Rise and Xero integration is very intuitive and “even without the walkthrough I had with Rise, the solution is easy to understand and use”.
Want to learn more about Rise and Xero? Visit the Xero app store for more details about the integration and how it can streamline your journal entries.
