Xero Accounting Tutorial for Service-based Businesses (2026)

Zero is a leading fullfeature accounting solution for all types and sizes of businesses. However, for service providers, Zero really stands out. As a service-based business, you can leverage Zero to automate and quickly create invoices and quotes. You can easily manage expenses, income and your reporting, as well as automate bank reconciliation, engage in project management, and a lot more. So today, my focus is to get your service-based business up and running and familiar with using Zero for day-to-day accounting activities. All right, with that quick intro out the way, let's go ahead and dive into Zero. Now, what exactly will I cover in this tutorial? Well, we'll first look at setting up your account and all the important settings that you need to configure. Next, we'll look at understanding your account and dashboard. And then dive into how you can actually use Zero for your day-to-day bookkeeping activities like generating invoices, quotes, bills, managing contacts, items, and services, as well as how you can leverage projects inside of Zero. Following this tutorial, you'll be completely familiar and confident with using Zero for your service-based business. Okay, so before we launch into our Zero account, what exactly is Zero? Well, Zero is an all-in-one global cloud-based accounting software founded in my home country, New Zealand, and has now become a leading global accounting solution for businesses all around the world. I personally use Zero for three of my businesses that I operate, two service-based businesses and one e-commerce brand. Zero accounting has actually made my life a whole lot easier over the last 5 years. So, for the purpose of this tutorial, I'll walk you through Zero from the perspective of a fellow service-based business owner that uses Zero on a daily, weekly basis. All right, so with that quick note out the way, let's go ahead and dive into Zero. Now, if it's your first time using Zero, simply head over to your browser and type in zero. com or simply click on the first link in the description, and that will take you here. Now, as of this publishing date, Zero currently offers a 90% discount for 6 months when you use the link in the description below. This promo may have changed if you're watching this video at a later date. Okay, so take your time to sign up if you're new to Zero or jump into your existing Zero account and I'll meet you inside. Okay, so once you've signed up or logged into your Zero account, you'll be taken over to the homepage. Simply click on your company up here and you'll find your registered organization down here. You can also connect and add other organizations if you run multiple businesses. Now, for the purpose of today's tutorial, I'll be using a demo account. That way I can briefly cover everything that you can do inside of Zero. Okay, so before we navigate through our Zero account, simply locate settings and let's take a look at some important settings. First, jump into organization details, then enable this option here. This will allow us to choose the business details we want to display on our invoices. This is important for branding. So here we want to take the time to add business details, your contact information, and then choose the business details you want to automatically add to your invoices. Take your time to do that now. Okay, so I've quickly added a logo and my business details and included the details I want to add to my invoices. If you're following this video and setting up your account, make sure you pause the video here and make sure you add your correct business details. Okay, so once you've done this, navigate down to the bottom and click on save. Let's jump back up to the top and click on settings. Under users, this is where you can add, delete, and manage all your users. If you have an accountant, this is where you want to add your accountant. Then we have connected apps. And here you can search for specific apps that you use. For example, for the purpose of today's tutorial, I'm using a service-based business called Stew's Consulting. What I can do is search for and connect a third party app that I want to sync with Zero. This could be a CRM. Let's say I use this CRM here, Prospect CRM. I can connect this CRM app with Zero. These app integrations allow you to streamline setup workflows and automations between thirdparty apps and your Zero account. I'll add more details about app integrations down below in the description. Okay, let's navigate back over to settings, then navigate down to email settings. Here you can take the time to customize the emails sent from zero. You can also customize the templates here. We're going to leave this as default for the purpose of today's tutorial. Let's navigate up to settings again and then navigate down to sales and purchases. In regards to your invoice settings as well as branding, this is where you can customize your templates for invoices, quotes, purchase orders, and more. Again, depending on the nature of your service-based business, take your time to add your branding and preferences here. Now, let's jump into online payments. This is where you can set up online payments. Essentially, how do you want to be paid? Navigate over to add a new service, and this is where you can add a new payment service. This means by connecting these payment services, you'll make it easier for your customers to pay you. For example, if you enable cards and digital wallets, your customers can pay invoices online with debit cards or digital wallets like Apple Pay and Google Pay. When you create a new invoice or set up a reoccurring invoice, you can add these different payment options to your invoices. For my service-based business, Stw Consulting, I would enable cards and digital wallets, direct debit, and PayPal. Depending on your service-based

business and the payments that you accept, take your time to add a payment service. You can always come back and do this later. Okay, let's navigate back over to settings and jump down to purchases. With zero to0, you can connect to your customers and suppliers that use zero for their accounting. This allows for a seamless interaction when it comes to invoicing and billing. Then we have expense settings. Here you can take the time to manage your accounts for expenses as well as other expense configurations. Then down here we have reporting and payroll. Again, every organization is different. You may want to spend some time setting up your reporting preferences and adding payroll details. Again, feel free to pause this video and take your time to set up these different options. You can always come back and set these up later. Then we have accounting. You can add your custom tax settings, ensure your financial year end is correct based on your country and other things like the currency that your account uses and more options that you can spend time on when it comes to your accounting preferences. We'll take a look at chart of accounts soon. Then we have tax settings. Again, depending on your country and requirements, contact settings and project settings. We can leave these as default for now as these are not vital to jump into right away. Okay, let's click on chart of accounts and this is where you can manage your chart of accounts. This will ensure that every transaction is categorized correctly. Now to arrive here, we can also navigate over to accounting and then click on chart of accounts and that will take you here. To manage an account, simply click on the account. Here we can change the account type, add a unique code identifier as well as the account name. I'm going to call this sales B2B businessto business and I'm going to update this description income from local businesses in New Zealand. We can add the tax type. For my example, Stu's consulting. This business is based in New Zealand and we need to charge 15% GST on all income. We can also add the account to the dashboard watch list, which we'll dive into shortly, allowing you to see a snapshot of your different accounts. Let's click save. We can also manually add a new account, and we can import and export. Now, if you're new to Zero and you want to import your accounts from a spreadsheet or a third-p partyy accounting app over to Zero, what I'll do is link a tutorial down below in the description that will show you how to move your accounts from a different place into Zero. Feel free to watch that video after this tutorial. Now, if we click on add bank account, then here under add bank account, this is where we can add our business bank account. This means when there is a transaction cash out or cash in that transaction will be automatically added inside zero and that will look something like this. An income or expense transaction will automatically be added and logged inside of zero. And you can simply reconcile by clicking okay if zero has picked up an exact match based on previous transactions that you have reconciled. Or if there's no exact match simply add the contact connected to that transaction. This is the contact. Select the account the category. I'm going to select consulting and accounting and add a description for this transaction. New strategy for paid marketing. I can add other details down here like the tax type. And then when I'm ready to reconcile, click on okay. Pretty cool, huh? As a service-based business owner and depending on the volume of your daily transactions, you want to jump into this reconcile interface on a daily or weekly basis. That way, you can stay on top of all your transactions. Now, to quickly arrive here, what you can do is navigate over to home. And inside your dashboard, you'll see the option to reconcile your items. And that will take you to that previous interface. You can also navigate over to accounting, bank accounts, and then reconcile to reconcile your transactions. Zero makes it incredibly easy and straightforward to stay on top of all your transactions. Okay, let's jump back inside the interface for connecting our bank account. Okay, so again, to allow manual and automatic account reconciliation, you want to find your business bank account and connect your account feed here. Okay, so now that we've discussed some fundamental accounting settings, let's now touch on adding contacts and your products and services. To add contacts, navigate up to contacts, select all contacts or customers and suppliers. Let's click on customers. And here we can manage all our customers. Let's navigate over to new contact and quickly add a new contact. Okay, so I've quickly manually added a new contact. Let's click on save and close. Here we have the new contact. We can add financial details. These can be previous notes, files, invoices, or something else. You can also add files here and then we can also add notes. Okay, so if we navigate up to contacts again, you can do the same with suppliers and you can manage all contacts here. Now let's jump over to sales and click on products and services. This is where you can add and manage all your products and services. This will allow you to save time when generating invoices and quotes. For example, let's navigate over to new item. Add a product or service code and then the name. And for example, this service that we provide is a human resources software implementation. We go to physical local businesses and help them set up their HR software and systems. Okay, so this is a service that we provide. If it's a physical item, simply click here. Now, is this an item or service that you purchase from a supplier or is it a product or service that you sell? For us, it's a product and service that we sell. I'm going to add the sales price, sales account

sales B2B, and then we have the tax rate. We can come down and save and duplicate if we offer a similar service and we just want to make slight changes. If your service-based business offers many services, this will help you save time when creating all the services that you provide. I'm going to click save. Now, we can also navigate up to import, and we can import a spreadsheet of all our products and services. Again, this is ideal if you have hundreds of services or products. Okay, so now our account is set up. Let's navigate over to home. Hey guys, just quickly, did you know that over 90% of you that enjoy our free educational content have not yet subscribed? It would mean a lot to me if you drop a comment or hit subscribe if you love what I'm creating. This helps us grow the channel and motivates me to create bigger and more impactful tutorials for you to consume for free. Okay, so that happy note, thank you in advance and let's get back to the video. As a service-based business, this is where you'll spend a lot of time. Your homepage is a snapshot of everything happening within your account. Recently, Zero updated this dashboard. This is the re-imagined homepage, which in my opinion is a lot more visually engaging than the previous dashboard. Let's quickly have a look at some of these account widgets. We have our business bank account, the bank account connected with zero. Again, like I mentioned earlier, you can reconcile those items here. We have our business savings account, invoices owed to you, tasks, bills to pay, and more widgets down here. Now, you can customize any of these widgets. Simply navigate over to edit homepage. Let's close this, and let's move some of these widgets around. For example, I'm going to place that here. Maybe I want to see cash in cash out up here. This is important to me. And we can also make these widgets smaller or larger. For example, make larger or make smaller. If we navigate up to add widget, we can choose the widgets we want to display. I'm going to remove the business savings account. Recent invoice payments. I don't need to see this. Basically, I don't want too much clutter on my dashboard. So, take your time to enable, disable, and customize the different widgets on your dashboard. I'm going to close this for now. And I'm happy with this. Now, we can also add other custom reports and accounts to our dashboard. For example, if we navigate down here to chart of accounts watch list, we can add additional accounts that we want to keep an eye on. Simply navigate over to accounting, then chart of accounts and then locate the account that you want to add to your dashboard. Simply click on show on dashboard widget and save. Okay, let's jump back over to our home and navigate down and you'll see that account has been added here. We also have these quick actions like create new expense, view all bills, view all expenses, create a new invoice, or we can click on a task for example to take us to the specific interface within our account. Now, if we jump up to this plus icon, we can use this quick action button to quickly create a new invoice, payment link, bill, contact, and these other options down here. Now, let's navigate over to sales and create a new invoice. Here, we can preview all our invoices. Here we have the invoice details and then the invoice status. Remember earlier in settings we talked about connecting a payment service allowing you to collect payments faster from your customers. Simply click on add online payments and that will allow you to add those payment options to your invoices. Okay, let's jump back over to invoices and here we can quickly create a new single invoice or we can create a repeating invoice. This might be for a reoccurring service that you provide to your customers. Let's create a new standard invoice and add your invoice details like the contact. Remember we added this contact earlier. Issue date, due date. Add that due date in here. Invoice number reference. If we navigate over to branding and you've set up different branding types within settings, you can add the branding here. Add the online payment type as I mentioned earlier if you want to collect payments online. Then add the invoice product or service. Here is the service we created earlier. You can also add additional items down here as well as other attachments. Maybe you have a proposal presentation you want to add here or really anything else that's relevant to this transaction. Then navigate down and here you can add notes. We can preview what this invoice will look like. As you can see, our branding and business details are automatically added. Let's close out of this. And when you're ready, simply click on approve and email. And that email will be sent to your contact. If we click here, we have a few other options that are important. For example, we can approve and create a reoccurring invoice. Like I mentioned before, this could be a service that you provide on a reoccurring basis. Okay, let's save and close. And back here, I suggest turning on invoice reminders. Your contacts will get a payment reminder if they haven't paid for an invoice yet. Okay, let's jump back over to sales. And you can also follow a similar process to create quotes. Let's click on payment links and click on create payment link. This allows you to create personalized payment links to send to your contacts. Okay, now let's move over to purchases. Sales is everything to do with money coming in and purchases is money going out. Here we can manage your suppliers, business expenses, purchase orders, bills as well as an overview of all your purchases. Let's click here. Here you can see a snapshot of awaiting payments as well as your payments that are overdue. If we navigate over to purchases and then come down to bills, here we can preview all our bills. Draft, awaiting approval, awaiting

payment, paid and repeating bills. Let's click on new bill. And down here, we can manually create a new bill as well as set up repeating bills, similar to reoccurring invoices. If you have a monthly bill, maybe a supplier that you pay on a monthly basis for their service, then you want to save time by adding a repeat bill. And as you can see, this is a similar interface to creating invoices. Simply add the billing details here. Okay. Next up, let's jump over to reporting. Here we can view all reports, view your starred reports, and analytics. Let's go ahead and click on profit and loss and have a look at the profit and loss statement. With each of your reports, you can add the date range as well as a comparison timeline and then view your statement. For example, maybe you need to send a specific report to your accountant. Simply navigate down to export and download as a PDF and share that with your accountant. Okay. Again, access all your reporting here. Let's click on all reports. Simply star the reports to add them to favorites. And you'll see those reports down here. Next, let's navigate over to payroll. You can manage your payroll directly inside of Zero. Here, we can manage our employees as well as leave and time sheets. We also have our payroll overview, allowing you to keep on top of your payroll. Now, let's jump over to accounting. As I mentioned earlier, you want to connect your bank accounts here. You can also manage your different accounts. Earlier, we discussed chart of accounts. You can manage those here. And then we have other accounting tools like manual journals, find and recode, and other accounting activity. Now, many of these tools and features you will not need to use until the end of your financial year or when you're engaging in your reporting. Also, most likely you'll have an accountant that will take care of the nitty-gritty when it comes to bookkeeping and accounting. Okay, next we have tax. Here you want to take the time to set up your tax settings. Again, every country, region, and business type is different. We've mentioned contacts, and then we have projects. Here, you can manage all your projects directly inside of Zero. Now, as a service-based business, you may find that you just need a simple project management tool rather than a third-party project or work management platform. You can simply manage your client projects within Zero. And this is something I love about Zero for service providers. Simply click on new project draft, add your project details. And then once you've added your project details, come down and click on create. And you can manage that project here. For example, if we click on add, we can add a new task, add a task name. For example, 3-hour meeting. This is part of the HR implementation, the service that we provide. Estimated hours three and the hourly rate for this is $250. Save. Now within this project, we now have one task. If we click here, we can edit, add time, and let's say that we've engaged in the 3-hour meeting. And then click on save. Again, we have the project estimate, invoiced, time, and expenses to be invoiced, and the deadline. We can manually use a timer here for internal time tracking. If we click on add, we can add a new task time entry, estimated expense, expense and expense from bill. If we click on quote, we can generate a quote for tasks and estimated expenses. And we can also generate an invoice. If we navigate over to assign, we can assign this project to a team member. Then if we navigate across, we have time, how much time has been allocated to this project. You'll see all quotes and invoices related to this project here. And then profitability. Pretty cool, huh? So again, as a service provider, you can simply manage all your projects and tasks within Zero. This helps with the accuracy of your invoicing as well as work and team productivity. Okay. Again, if we navigate across, we can use this quick action button. We can search allowing you to search for anything within your Zero account. And then next to that, we have this AI functionality called Jax. This is essentially your AI powered financial assistant. You can use Jax to automate tasks like creating invoices and quotes, reconciling bank transactions, and you can access personalized information and insights from your financial data. This is a great addition to your Zero account to quickly find the insights that you're after and for automating specific activities. Next to that, we have help. Here you can search for specific helpful articles. Then we have notifications. Here you'll see all notifications related to your account. Then next to that, we have apps. If we jump into Zero App Store, you can locate and connect the apps that you're after based on your organization's web stack and all the different online tools that your organization uses. Okay, let's close out of this. And then we have your account. Here you can view your personal profile and account as well as log out. Just quickly, if you're interested in using Zero on your mobile device, I will add a tutorial down below in the description that will show you as a service-based business how you can manage your bookkeeping and accounting on the go from directly inside the Zero mobile app. However, that is everything that I wanted to cover in this tutorial. If you want me to dive deeper into anything that we've talked about today, let me know down in the comments. And there we have it for this Zero tutorial for service providers. Now, if you have any questions about using Zero, make sure to pop them down below. And with that said, thank you so much for watching this video all the way through to the end. If you got value, make sure you leave a like and subscribe. And that way, I'll

see you in the next video. Take care, everyone.