A new feature in the cloud accounting system alerts accountants when their clients make suspicious changes to transactions and other records.
Xero's new Assurance Dashboard provides real-time monitoring of various types of transactions that may indicate mistakes or fraudulent behaviour.
This allows accountants to promptly investigate and correct the situation instead of relying on periodic labour-intensive examinations of all transactions.
The dashboard highlights a variety of transactions that deserve scrutiny, including changes to contacts' bank details, multiple contacts with the same bank account, backdated invoices, and manual adjustments to transactions generated by bank feeds.
It also presents a summary of users' activity. Unexplained changes in habits with no change in duties could call for a more thorough investigation.
"If my client's accounting data isn't 100 percent correct, I can't trust it and I can't use it," said Timothy Munro, director and CEO of Change Accountants.
"Xero's new Assurance Dashboard helps me to instantly confirm on one screen that all of the data I use is correct and can be relied on. This means I have more time to help my clients grow their business instead of checking numbers."