We’re growing
Next week is a huge event for us, our local #XeroCon where we have over 400 accountants and bookkeepers joining our team in Auckland. As a public company we’re subject to continuous disclosure of material information, so in order to talk freely next week we’ve just updated the market on some key metrics.
You can see the release here.
The key points and some additional commentary are as follows:
- Operating revenue for the full year ended 31 March 2012 will double 2011 (which was $9.3m).
- Committed Monthly Revenue (CMR) is now $1.75m or $21m annualized. We’re delighted that 50% of CMR is from offshore markets showing that we becoming a truly global company.
- Paying customers using the Xero business software worldwide exceeds 60,000. There are 240,000 user accounts.
- There are over 3,300 accounting firms now using Xero. The accountant and bookkeepers channel model, proven in New Zealand, is showing similar early signs of success in offshore markets.
- The company now employs 170 staff across four countries. The US sales office has been established with six staff in San Francisco.
We know we still have a lot to do, but we’re firing on all cylinders – and still hiring. We still think we’re just at the beginning of this ride and we have so much more we want to do.
Huge thanks to our customers and especially to our hard working team to continue to deliver such outstanding growth.
Any questions please fire away. We’re always happy to share experiences and we’re still learning.
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Technology as a strategic asset
Team USA is not long back from “the practice management event of the year” Winning is Everything in Las Vegas. It was great to be among partners, managing partners, and technology professionals from the top 500 accounting firms across the USA and Canada. Having run for 11 years, it’s a really slick event. Xero had a booth and I hosted a breakout session called the Cloud Accounting Era.
A key theme at the conference was that technology should be seen as a strategic asset. Keynote speaker Gary Boomer, who has been named in the top 100 most influential people in accounting for the past 10 years, talked about some outdated paradigms in the accounting profession, one of which is that “technology is an overhead”. He suggested that technology should be seen and used as a competitive advantage. Improving efficiency through technology can free up valuable time so that firms can offer more value-add services.
Read more about Accountants, United States
Streamtime and Xero
Having been subjected to some pretty awful software when working at agencies myself, I am a little jealous of people who get to use Streamtime. This studio management software and new Xero add-on Partner takes care of CRM, resource planning, time sheets, quoting and calendars – all in a beautiful interface.
Integrating Streamtime with Xero lets creatives track what’s important. You can keep notes of your first contact with a lead, manage projects to make sure they’re delivered on time, then send and account for the client’s bill when the job is finished. It’s a true end-to-end solution.
If you have an iPhone or iPad, there’s a Streamtime app for both devices.
Signup to try Streamtime for free.
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The UK taxman cometh
At the end of January every year the UK goes into tax return meltdown and by the stroke of midnight on the 31 January deadline, more than nine million individual tax returns will have been filed for the year. If you’re a high rate UK resident taxpayer or company director, you must file a Self Assessment tax return every year and many people, me included, opt to enlist the services of an accountant to do this.
While we Brits might like to arrange ourselves in orderly queues for many things, filing tax returns isn’t one of them. The ingredients of bad record keeping and procrastination combine right around this time every January to form the practice efficiency equivalent of a dirty bomb in pretty much every accounting firm in the UK.
Meanwhile, being skint and also being conveniently in possession of crown appointed tax raising powers, the UK government’s revenue department, Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC), recently toughened the penalties it levies for late or incorrect filing and stands to further boost its inflow of taxes with cash derived from late filing penalties.
All of which makes January every year quite angsty if you’re an accountant in the UK.
While Xero doesn’t yet calculate or file personal tax returns, I decided to conduct an informal survey last week with a handful of Xero Gold Partners to enquire if their Xero clients’ tax returns were any less onerous owing to the data being online and bank feeds mitigating the chance for financial records to get out of step. Continue reading ›
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Xero USA doubles …
…. staff. That’s right, we’ve gone from 3 to 6. Woohoo!
Despite the aggressive hiring climate, we’ve been able to recruit top talent because we all believe in the same thing – making the lives of small businesses easier.
Please welcome the new members to Xero Team USA. Spencer, Deborah, and Michael. They are awesome.
From left to right: Deborah, Michael, Spencer, Catherine, Craig, Jamie
Throughout the hiring process we were lucky to find out that they all have a love of numbers. And being an accounting software provider, that’s important to us : ) I thought I’d dig into their backgrounds on some things that aren’t commonly known about them.
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New year, new calling
In the past few days, applications to join Xero’s mobile team have really picked up. It’s heartening to see the enthusiasm out there. People get it. Mobile is nothing less than the next wave of personal computing.
In the ’00s there was a shift from desktop to web, and Xero was part of that evolution. The term start-up is now almost synonymous with some sort of web-based application, even if it’s just a website to take orders. All of our competitors are web-based or getting left behind.
Mobile is the next transition. People are visiting websites and searching application marketplaces on their handsets and looking for mobile equivalents of the online services they currently use and enjoy. They’re using their mobiles as personal way-finders and memory banks, as high-tech extensions of themselves. Eventually, the mobile experience, by necessity, will be on an equal footing with the web experience, and depending on the business it may eclipse it. We’re already starting to see the first cloud-connected businesses where mobile is the primary mode of interaction. Path and Instagram are two recent examples.
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Toasting 2012 with a glass half full
With a new business year ramping up, it’s time to crystal ball the year ahead for a sense of how the economic landscape will play out.
The bad news
You’d certainly be forgiven for feeling some sense of caution given the doom and gloom forecasts that appear in newspapers and our inboxes everyday. As the European debt crisis continues to loom large, we are reminded each day about the troubled retail sector, which here in Australia grew only 0.3% in 2011 – the worst result in nearly 30 years. Domestic tourism and manufacturing is still being hit hard by a strong Australian dollar and the continued weakness in the housing sector is seeing a slump in construction and associated industries. Together with continued volatility in our financial markets and the real risk of a slow down in China, it’s no wonder business and consumer confidence is suffering. But it is not all bad news.
Read more about Accountants, Australia
The new Google: what does it mean for your business?
Google has long been a friend to small businesses, making it much easier to market services and products. Just think about the game-changing things Google has done in the advertising space:
- Introduced pay-for-performance advertising to the mainstream (ie. charging per action rather than for exposure), forcing traditional media to become more transparent in terms of the ROI they offer
- Created a PPC model combined with infinitely flexible ad targeting that allows even the smallest ad budget to be effective
- Created a search relevancy model that evens the playing field, potentially giving the little guys just as much exposure to prospective customers as the big global brands
- With Google Places, every business in the world can have a strong, easily self-managed online presence, for free!
The benefits of these innovations are well documented. I want to look at what Google has done more recently, and how this could change how businesses promote themselves online.
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Accelerate 2012
The 3rd annual Accelerate event is all go for February 13 in sunny Hawkes Bay, New Zealand.
Accelerate is an event for HiTech entrepreneurs and investors to get to get together in a relaxed environment and share stories. This year we’ve timed it so we can finish the day with Gin Wigmore and friends in the Black Barn amphitheater.
In the first session I’ll kick off with a Xero deep dive covering such things as our funding, building the team internationally, approaches to marketing and hopefully pass on some useful things we’ve learned over the years. We’ll then have another 5 companies doing rapid fire presentations of their businesses and experiences. We have a couple of slots left for those sessions.
So this years program should be useful for companies looking at expanding internationally and/or planning an IPO especially.
You can register at http://0to60.com
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A chimp ninja just stole my car
It struck me the other day after downloading, installing, sighing deeply to myself and then uninstalling the latest version of Skype for Mac, how much the principles of software product marketing have changed with the arrival of (effectively) zero cost of software distribution on the web.
I’ve written on here previously about my discomfort with the way that Twitter seems to unilaterally and utterly change its user interface at what seems like the slightest whim, and how such behaviour runs entirely against the way that software you pay for is updated and improved. There aren’t many software product managers who would spring a complete redesign of their app’s UI on a paying customer base without warning, never mind protracted consultation.
Imagine you’d paid for a Ford Focus only to wake up one morning six months later to discover that a crack Ford spec ops team had sneaked in under the cover of darkness, with night vision goggles and everything, and replaced your much loved Focus with a completely different colour and model of car. AND in the process they’d taken your Bee Gees greatest hits CD. Now, if on the other hand Ford had given you a Focus completely free of charge and then done the overnight ninja switcheroo on you, you’d find it understandably hard to find any basis upon which you could really complain.
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- Diane_Blackman: @OptimalPlanning @Xero We so need to get out more! And with Xero we can as it takes just seconds to do our Accounts now! Easy - peasy!
- OptimalPlanning: Want to give @Xero a big kiss! @Diane_Blackman and I are having fun (yes, fun!) with the accounting system on payday.
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