Xero Accountants Edition

Yesterday we formally announced a new product line that we’ve been working on for a while.  Xero Accountants Edition.

You can read the market release here: Xero presents Xero Accountants Editition.

So what is Xero Accountants Edition?Over the last year we’ve been working on building the world’s best accounting engine.  With feedback from accountants we’ve focussed on the small business owner. How can we make their life easier, save them time and money, and help them grow better businesses. In the short time since our IPO last July we’ve covered a huge amount of ground and over the next few months we will have most of the features we planned in the core accounting product.  We’ll always improve things but the core breadth will be there. 

Now we can focus on making life better for accounting professionals.  With Xero today, accountants are connected to their clients continuously, creating an exciting opportunity for an entirely new set of products than can help making accountants more efficient, proactive and profitable.  

Installed desktop accounting software (used by small businesses) and practice management systems (that accounting professional use) are disconnected. For the accountant to see their clients data requires the business to email the file to the accountant. Once received the accountant has to schedule time, find the right software, load it up and fix up transactions. The data is always out of date.  The time taken means there has to be a fee. The old technology forces a barrier so that the accountant might only see the data once a year or at best, bi-monthly when a tax return is due.

It is really hard for the accountant to add business value after the fact.

With Xero the accountant can quickly check out what’s happening as it’s happening.  We are seeing accountants cost effectively providing monthly management reports which are essential for many businesses in this cash constrained time. Small clients can be processed more efficiently and all clients are candidates to be grown to higher value clients as the accountant provides advice that can really help the business.

Xero Accountants Edition isn’t just one product, it will be a whole family of tools to help accountants.  Our first product  is a cashbook version of Xero designed for accountants to bundle with other services. We find a good number of these end up upgrading to a full version of Xero as the small business starts seeing regular reporting. Over the next few months we’ll have a whole new interface just for accountants to manage their clients and their relationship with staff.

In the above example the accounting practice can set contact details to be displayed in all of their clients help menus in Xero. We can promote Client contact to our accounting partners directly inside the Xero application.

In the following example you can see the Practice Administrator can assign a Client to a particular Staff member.

How does Xero Accountants Edition work with Practice Management?

As in the top graphic above, Xero Accountants Edition is the interface between Client Accounting and Practice Management.  We’re working on exporting to the standard accountant practice management system, and with Acclipse we’re building deep two way integration. Xero is the Practice Ledger in Acclipse Practice Management.  Isn’t it crazy there hasn’t been an accounting system for accountants before?  One of the reasons for this may be that desktop accounting software doesn’t usually have much of a security model and so partners have been reluctant to give staff access to the Practice Ledger. Xero solves that problem with user roles.

To drive this initiative we’re very happy to have Stuart Bale on our team.  Stuart was a Global Product Manager at MYOB and he’s absolutely passionate about the opportunity to make accountants more effective and profitable. You’ll be hearing a lot more from Stuart as he masters WordPress

More information for accountants is available here: http://www.xero.com/accountantsedition