Teaching my son personal finance using Xero

Setting up a bank account

Personal finance is a topic that every parent wants their children to learn. The problem is that finance is never talked about in school and there’s hardly any advice on how to teach your children to manage money. My son’s twelve and he isn’t bad with money. But because I recently started giving him an allowance, I wanted him to learn about the value of money from a young age. We even went to open a POSB bank account. (It’s the most “kid friendly” bank account in Singapore with the best interest rates and restrictions that parents look for.)

We live in Singapore and he gets about $50 a week. This includes the fare for taking the bus to-and-fro school which costs about $1.50 for each trip. This allowance is also for his breakfast and lunch that he buys at school.

Learning finance at a Xero accounting course

Recently, I brought him to a Xero bookkeeping training. This accounting course is meant for adults but both the trainers and I agreed that young kids should be exposed to bookkeeping and accounting and managing money at a young age too. They even offered a discounted price for him since he’s so young but I passed on the goodwill. I appreciated the action but also know that the value from this course is far beyond its price. I’m an accountant and have been passionate about money since I was a teen so I’m just doing what I wished my dad would have done for me.

The Xero bookkeeping training was pretty fun. The trainers went over mundane bookkeeping and accounting topics with excitement and asked a lot of questions to keep the class engaged. They played a lot of games with my son and kept things interesting with school-related examples that he could relate to. My son got some chocolates so he was really happy during the course too! There was another Xero online training for experienced accountants course but I decided that that might be a bit too challenging for him. Maybe in a year’s time when he’s familiar with the basic accounting concepts and wants to take on a more challenging task.

How these courses ended up helping me and my workers too

I’m pretty familiar with Xero’s accounting software since I use it in my job where I work as an accountant for a small company in Singapore. I’ve been using Xero for a few years and thought I knew everything I needed to know about Xero. But even I learnt a few new things about Xero. Seems that Xero updates their software every other month and there are tons of new features that aren’t announced. I think I might sign up for the Xero online training for experienced accountants since there might be other new things that I could learn and use at my job.

A lot of my coworkers have found these training sessions helpful too. “I’ve been in the industry for over twenty years and there’s a new popular tool that pops up every year or two. I don’t know what I’d do if not for these company-sponsored training sessions. Xero seemed really confusing at first but now that I’ve used it for three months, it seems like the easiest thing in the world!” That’s a quote from my colleague Benjamin who’s a 45-year-old veteran in the accounting industry. While he’s not the most tech savvy person, he understands why it’s important to keep up with the changes and boasts about how much more informed he is compared to other accountants his age, “It’s like email. You can’t fight it and expect others to write to you in pen and paper.”

How this Xero course has changed my son’s perspective on finance

My son now uses Xero to track all his expenses. When he receives his allowance at the beginning of each week, he enters it into Xero as an income transaction. He records all his expenses at school on his phone’s Notes App and notes everything down in Xero when he gets back.

My son has started asking me to explain the intricacies of financial statements and how the three statements correlate with one another. Something that makes me proud is that he has started self-learning by reading on Investopedia, “How do companies use accounting for financial fraud? I don’t understand this section in Investopedia.” I never expected to hear this from him!

His income statement, balance sheet and cash flow statement are now his favourite things to look at! Definitely worth a try for all parents who want to teach their kids about personal finance from a young age.