Providing subscriber flexibility

It’s always been possible to change the subscriber of your Xero Business account but now we’ve made it dead easy. Changing the subscriber can be required, for example, if someone is leaving an organization or if an accountant is assuming responsibility for the subscription from their client.

Previously, changing the subscriber involved contacting Xero customer support, but as part of our feature release this week we’ve made it a self-service option, which will save a lot of people a little bit of hassle each.

To initiate a change in the subscriber away from you, simply click on the organization’s Info in MyXero and select the Transfer subscription option as in these instructions, entering their name and email address.

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Financial doctors and nurses

Guest post by Kirsten Hawke of Business Buddy

At Business Buddy we like to think of accountants and bookkeepers as doctors and nurses. Both are extremely valuable to our clients, and neither would be as effective without the other.

Bookkeepers are like nurses. They take care of daily tasks and have great “bedside” (or deskside) manner. Accountants, on the other hand, are like doctors who diagnose the patient and recommend treatment options. The bookkeeper makes sure the accountant has the best-possible view of the patient’s symptoms while the accountant makes sure everyone’s doing the right thing to make the patient stronger.

How it works

When we bring a new client on Xero, they work with a bookkeeper first. Like a nurse, the bookkeeper does a first assessment and gets clients stable and comfortable. Or, in our case, gets them up and running on Xero. They get bank feeds set up and keep a close eye on our clients for eight weeks to make sure everything’s ticking along the way it should.

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Bookkeeping in the aftermath of Sandy

Guest post by Ean Murphy, Moxie Bookkeeping, New York

Hurricane Sandy and its aftermath provided a stark reminder of just what a huge role technology plays in our lives – and how helpful it can be in times of crisis.

Having grown up in California, where earthquakes happen with no warning, knowing the storm was coming felt like a luxury. I made sure my insurance was up-to-date, I safeguarded important documents and phone numbers (I keep originals in a mini fire/water proof lockbox and copies of docs in Evernote, for example), and made plans to contact and check in with staff post-disaster to make sure everyone was safe.

Fortunately, this was a smaller job than it has been in the past because most of my data is now kept in the cloud – which is automatically backed up on a regular basis, storm or no storm.

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Accountants and bookkeepers key to Digital Economy

Over the past six months, we’ve been in close contact with Australia’s Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy (DBCDE). As we’ve grown exponentially in Australia, Minister Conroy’s department has shown increasing interest in our leadership role in the uptake of cloud technologies amongst SMEs.

So it was an honour to be invited to attend the Prime Minister’s Forum on the Digital Economy in Sydney, where 40 business leaders presented to Prime Minister Julia Gillard.

Taking the stand, the first part of my pitch to the government was to highlight the opportunity to engage accountants and bookkeepers as a potential channel to reach and educate small businesses on the merits of cloud computing and the NBN. In the same way that Xero has been able to grow our business, I wanted to highlight the critical role that the accounting advisor can play in small business. Here is my appearance in the video (9 minutes) or you can watch the original full length video:

I then urged the government to increase investment in development of web services across the many government departments that small business owners need to engage with, rather than simply building compliance websites.

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