Workpapers in the cloud

The Xero ecosystem is becoming more active as the customer base of Xero grows. It’s where accountants connect with clients and developers offer add-on solutions.

Richard Francis, from boutique accounting firm Francis Consulting, has blurred the lines of these two groups by swapping his accounting visor for a text editor to produce add-on solutions that are specific to accountants.

I caught up with Richard at one of our favorite coffee spots, Nikau Café. Over one of their world famous plum donuts we talked about Richard’s latest project – Spotlight Workpapers.

Accountants make businesses better by working alongside them as a trusted advisor. Anything that helps accountants get compliance work out the door faster and lets them get back to helping clients is good for the profession and great for SMEs.

Spotlight Workpapers is now available globally with regionalized versions due for release over the next 6 months.

Podcast : Richard Anning of the ICAEW

One of the upsides of locating our UK office a stone’s throw across the road from the ICAEW meant that on Monday I was able to grab thirty minutes with Richard Anning, head of the Institute’s IT Faculty. With a membership of more than 130,000 accountants, the ICAEW is by far the UK’s largest professional body for the accountancy profession.

Notwithstanding Richard’s graciousness in tolerating my rookie-podcast-host style of interviewing, we clambered over a range of topics from general technology trends in accounting, information security, changes in attitudes among accountants towards the adoption of cloud technologies, and whether accountants will ever get over their love affair with spreadsheets.

You can listen to the podcast free now in the iTunes store.

Thanks to Richard for trusting me in agreeing to be my crash test dummy.

Behind the scenes : UK practice update

Accounting industry analyst Dennis Howlett stopped by our new UK office yesterday to film a short panel debate with three online accounting advocates; Pearson Buchholz, Andrew Smith Bookkeeping and Prime Chartered Accountants.

Dennis was keen to get an update on the progress online practices were making in the UK since his last check-in. Dennis filmed the entire session which will he’ll publish himself in a few weeks, but we grabbed a few behind the scenes shots and threw together this short preview. The discussion was far ranging and touched upon how online accounting and bookkeeping practices were driving the shift away from basic compliance and adding real incremental value for their clients with some illuminating examples of how Xero was making life easier for both the professionals as well as their clients.

Reputation by association

Every day business owners sign up for Xero through our website. Many are looking for a Xero expert who can advise them on their business. To make it easier for small businesses to connect with our accounting and bookkeeping partners, we created the Xero Partner Directory.

Since establishing the directory a few years ago it’s proven to be a really useful tool for all parties. About a year ago we added LinkedIn profiles to the partner listings so the business owner can see the people behind the firm. This has been really popular!

The next step is adding industry association information to listings, allowing you to see what industry affiliations Xero partners have. This includes a pop-up explanation of the benefits of working with a member of that association as shown below.

Adding association links gives business owners more information when making a choice and helps validate the credentials of the firm. We’ve listed a few associations already and there’s more to come. We’re also excited to see new associations listed, like the New Zealand Bookkeepers Association, which already has lots of its members on the directory.

So if you’re a partner and you’d like to add an association to your profile, or you want your professional association to be in our Partner Directory, let us know and we’ll make it happen.

Report Packs – next big step

Report Packs make the task of preparing reports for clients much more efficient. For accountants it’s a fundamental change in the way they work.

Instead of creating individual reports for each client from scratch, Report Packs allow you to build report templates at the practice level, then run these across different sets of clients. We think this is productivity game changer for accountants.

All of this is made possible by Xero’s single ledger architecture and a layer of database smarts we call Report Codes.

As you know we’ve been working on the full development of Reports Packs in stages. Today we’ve released the next significant update. This major release includes the ability to edit text in places like summary blocks and notes. You can also paste in schedules from Excel (yes really!!!) and play around with rich text editing.

And that’s just some of the new enhancements. Check out the video for all the other goodness.

Developing the core functionality of Report Packs is a massive project. We’ve spent time with partners in our local market of New Zealand to get it right. We’re already working with Grant Thornton for Australian reports and work will start soon for the UK, then the US shortly after.

We’re so proud of our R&D team. Not only have they been working for a long time on getting the base architecture right so we can do this magic, but some of the drag and drop and other UI features we believe are breaking new ground for web applications. Also a huge thank you to our tireless testing team. This has been a huge and complex bit of work.

We’re excited to know what you think.

Let’s get reporting!!!