Overview
Socket’s mission is to empower accounting and bookkeeping firms to effortlessly convert prospects, seamlessly onboard clients, banish scope creep and do this while truly understanding the profitability of each service for each client.
Our intention with Socket is to provide value out of the box with our initial offering and take you on an exciting journey towards our expansive future vision.
We’re starting with Proposals and Letters of Engagement - it’s where your client journey begins.
The proposal should define the scope of all the services an accountancy or bookkeeping firm agrees to perform on behalf of a client. This might sound like common sense, except that right now, from what we have observed, there are several things that are preventing this from reflecting reality:
- Only a small number of people in the firm are involved in managing proposals - part of a process that is often underinvested in
- The journey from prospect through to onboarded client involves lots of manual steps
- Vendor price increases and inflation are eating at profits as proposals are not kept up to date
- The client and the wider team have little visibility on what work is in scope and what isn’t
- Managers are unable to tell which client services are profitable and which ones need attention
After really getting to grips with the challenges in this space, it seemed like an area where we could have a really positive impact - so we've set out on a mission to address these challenges!
Socket + Xero
Socket's Xero integration allows you to take full advantage of your firm's Xero invoicing and payment collection facilities.
A full 2-way sync keeps your clients and Xero Contacts up to date and maintains an accurate picture of your portfolio. Clever matching across a number of attributes prevents accidental duplicates and ensures accurate records.
View your full monthly billing plan in Socket, driven by the active proposals. Quickly review changes across new clients, expansion and contraction.
Then tweak your configuration like invoice line item detail, account codes and branding themes per client.
Finally, post invoices to Xero on a monthly basis so they can be sent out to your clients.
Getting started
After creating a practice account, configuring your services and pricing, and reviewing your practice settings, you'll be ready to hook up your Xero integration.
From the sidebar menu, head to Settings -> Practice Settings and click on the "Integrations" tab. There you'll find a "Connect to Xero" button. Clicking this will take you across to Xero for authorisation - choose the Xero file you want to use for invoicing, and then you'll be redirected back to Socket. You're now connected!
Once connected, you can edit the Xero settings to specify a default account code that you'd like to use for monthly-recurring services and one-off services.
Optionally refine your configuration further by going into the "Services & Pricing" section of Socket and assigning a Xero account code to any service that you would like to override the defaults on.
Finally, in the "Clients" section of Socket, review your settings for each client to ensure you any special non-default branding themes have been applied, and decide how much line item detail to include on the invoice in the "Invoicing" tab of the client.
