Happy new year

For us in public company land we’ve just finished another year. It’s been huge. Building a new business is exciting but really hard work. Being a public company puts a whole other dimension on it.

Thankfully, due to all that hard work from our team and fantastic support from our partners, we’re very proud to give you an update of how its going.

Here are the highlights:

• Xero will report operating revenues in excess of $3m for the 2010 financial year – a tripling of revenues earned for the 2009 financial year.
• Paying customers exceeded 17,000 in more than 50 countries compared to 6,000 in 25 countries at 31 March 2009. This excludes the just released Xero Personal product.
• The focus on recruiting and building a channel of accountants has resulted in 980 firms using Xero Partner Edition.

You can read our full update here: Xero Operating Update 31 March 2010

Selling to small businesses in a scalable way is tough. Not that many companies have cracked it. We’ve tried a number of approaches and continue to learn. Last year we began to gain traction with accountants and bookkeepers. Our strategy this year was to focus on partner recruitment. Our teams have hit the road tirelessly and we now have almost a thousand partners with Xero customers. Some of the early adopters are already 100% Xero practices. Some are having their first Xero experiences with their first few customers. We’ll continue our focus on recruitment, but we can now also focus on lifting our penetration inside those firms. We’re thrilled our approach is working.

In order to handle this much growth we continue to do a lot of work on our internal systems. We have to make the servers run the business. There has been a lot of late nights from our team. Our customer care team has delivered outstanding service to our customer base. We get so much positive feedback. Our QA team are also the unsung heroes, making sure that our complex set of interrelated applications just work.

Steve Job’s once said ‘Real artists ship‘. As a software guy that is probably what I’m most proud of. We have an incredible machine at Xero where we design and build great software that real people use everyday. And we’re humbled that so many people enjoy using our software and actually now look forward to doing admin tasks that they used to dread.

Thanks again to our fantastic team, our partners and valued customers. We are so excited that Xero is making a difference and can’t wait for you to see what’s in store for this coming year.