Hi Anna, It’s business as usual for now. WorkflowMax will stay as it’s own brand and website. They are two quite separate code bases.

We also don’t want to discourage other solutions like WorkflowMax that target specific vertical markets. We want to see good innovation and competition in the Job Management space. We are very conscious of providing a level playing field for partners.

We will be doing a lot of work behind the scenes for WorkFlowMax for Accountants specifically.

Rod

@braden we demo’d working remittance advices. Have to get a few things tweaked and into testing with some related work. On their way.

@Phil, no need to be concerned. Simply we had substantial interest from new, sophisticated, institutional investors to get on the register. That helps all shareholders as it’s a great validation, provides better price support and assists liquidity.

There are very few chances for founders to take a little bit of risk off the table. The percentages were very small but do make life a bit easier so we can continue to focus on Xero.

Of course the media will do what they do but we checked with our major investors if OK and they were supportive. Doing this at the same price as the SPP etc seemed very fair as well.

So at a personal level we are no less fired up and so excited about the business and building a fantastic global team. I hope it’s obvious we’re having a huge amount of fun.

Having raised significant additional funding with such sophisticated new investors you can imagine the business has been through the microscope by some very smart people.

Here is the main feedback we had

- if anyone can build a global business in this space – it’s Xero
- Great progress in NZ, AU and UK
- Current markets supports value
- Big mid-term upside is traction in the USA
- We need to deliver a few features for the USA market (which we are well through working on)
- Need to show we can win against Intuit (already we are winning awards in the US accounting media so we’re having good early success http://digital.accountingtoday.com/accountingtoday/201202#pg7)

As I’ve said many times before but we really are just at the beginning of the journey. With 50% of CMR now offshore we’ve proven we can execute in other geographies so let’s see how big we can make it.

I can promise you it will not be boring to watch.

Rod

Hi Anna, yes we were conscious of that. At our annual meeting mid last year (2011) we publicly changed our strategy to continue to grow rather than chase break even.

Break even is something we are 100% focussed on and personally it will make my life a lot easier when we get there. But the right thing now is to grow – even though we still take a lot of flak for that decision.

On balance, and after taking advice, we decided this was the best thing to do for the us and the company for the reasons explained above. It’s very important we build our institutional investor support and we are thrilled to have those investors on board.

Decision was not taken lightly and we would not have done it if it wasn’t in the best interests of the company.

Rod