Overview
Invisible costs sap the energy of agencies and businesses, lurking behind every project and whittling away at profits through untracked time, scope creep, missed invoices, and work duplication. Magnetic provides an all-in-one solution for businesses looking to consolidate their tools into one place and manage their employees, their time and their finances at once.
At the core of Magnetic’s offering is the task management suite, which enables easy, fine-grained control over your timesheets and project maps. Higher-level jobs and opportunities provide a strong foundation to process briefs, work through reverts and approvals, and issue tasks to individual employees to fit into their existing capacity. Jobs and sub-jobs come together to ensure that even the most complex of projects can be broken down into easily completed chunks that can be followed in real time.
Financial documents, like tax and supplier invoices, can then be issued or recorded and linked to customers or suppliers, which are managed in the client management suite. Convenient email integrations with Google Workspaces and Outlook makes managing these contacts easy and automatic. Magnetic offers automatic or on-request integration with Xero, pulling your invoices and credit notes into their system instantly.
Employee resource tools are also available in the form of leave management, performance reviews, organizational charts and profile information. Leave is automatically factored into a user’s capacity: you’ll never again find out that someone booked for a critical task is actually away on holiday at the last minute! Employee management also offers a varied set of security permissions, letting you determine which users have access to accounts, which users are only available for time tracking, and which users will be controlling jobs and contacts. More specific security permissions are also available in the form of per-job access being granted to selected users.
This all comes together with Magnetic’s extensive reporting suite, offering detailed reviews of money coming in and going out, user time metrics, customer and job profitability, and invoice churn. Customizable reports also offer fine-grained control, splitting data along any desired dimension to provide exactly what you need at any given moment.
With these tools, it has never been easier to keep an eye on the state of the business, identify top performers and strong returns on investment, and ensure that everyone is able to work effectively and unhindered by unnecessary obstacles.
Magnetic + Xero
The Magnetic-Xero integration brings contact and item type information across from Xero, and pushes invoices and manual journals into Xero from Magnetic. Upon connecting with Xero, mappings for tax, sales and cost of sales codes will become available, allowing you to set up all your settings in Magnetic for perfect export.
At the same time, codes from Xero will become available for selection on item types – products, services, inventory, and supplies. This provides a clear one-to-one link between listed items in Xero and their types in Magnetic, and will also synchronize changes to the item name and other fields. Contacts in Magnetic will also be linked to customers and suppliers via Magnetic’s accounting platform reference, providing the same kind of link and synchronization as item types.
With these entities connected between the two platforms, it’s now a simple matter of turning automatic exports on for the account types you wish to export – most commonly tax and supplier invoices – and add them in Magnetic. Once they are saved, an export job will start running in the background, checking the data and sending it to Xero before updating the document’s export state in Magnetic. In the event of an error, Magnetic will show a clear indication of what went wrong and what you can do about it. Once an export has been executed successfully, a deep link is created between the invoice in Magnetic and Xero, enabling status updates in Xero to reflect in Magnetic, and further updates in Magnetic to pull back into Xero.
If a billing entity in Magnetic is set up to allow WIP reporting, and a job has billing accrual set up, Magnetic will also create and export manual journals to Xero. This will happen when a tax invoice is created, or when individual manual journal adjustments are created in Magnetic.
Finally, expenses may also be exported in the form of Xero bills. Unlike invoices, which are linked to contacts, expenses are exported from Magnetic using the details of the user who created them. This enables internal billing to be tracked in the same way as external costs, ensuring clear visibility into cashflow at every stage of a project.
Getting started
If you’re interested in getting better insights into your company finances, having better control over task scheduling and timesheets, tracking project progress in real time or just making life easier for yourself and your employees, click the “Get this app” button in the Xero App Store to get started! This will redirect you to a signup page where you can complete the setup of your company account.
The next step is to import any users, tasks, projects or contacts through the use of our Import Suite, which is accessible through the “Import Data” option in the top right menu. This lets you quickly bring data across from your previous solutions and get other users up and running quickly. Finally, step through to your company’s billing entity by clicking the “Company Settings” option in the top right menu and scrolling down to the “Finance” section. Editing this billing entity will let you set your mappings up correctly and prevent unexpected errors when you try your first export.
Jobs, tasks, contacts and item types can be accessed from their respective links in the menu on the left of the page. You will need to set up at least one job in order to make an invoice – but don’t limit yourself to one! Jobs and sub-jobs are the bedrock structures in Magnetic and it’s a great idea to familiarize yourself with them early on. They can be linked to contacts, rate cards, specific currencies and exchange rates, and they are the thing that groups collections of tasks together for tracking and monitoring. Once you’ve got a job, some contacts and some item types, you’re ready to add your first invoice!
Invoices are managed through the Finance section on the left-hand menu. The document types which can be exported to Xero are tax and supplier invoices, their respective credit notes, and expenses. If you create one, populate it with a job, a contact, and some line items, and hit Save, it should reflect in Xero shortly. Easy as pie!
The final key part of the Magnetic experience is the Reports section, which can be found under the “Analytics” section in the left-hand menu. Here, you’ll be able to find any reports your heart desires: time summary breakdowns, recon and work-in-progress assessments, ageing and revenue summaries, and employee performance reports.
