Harvest – less time tracking and more time doing
The Harvest team have taken the pain out of tracking time so you can concentrate on the important things. With Harvest, you can track your time from the web, from your smartphone or even from another app. Time tracking is just the tip of the Harvest iceberg though. It also has reports to help you keep projects on time and budget and invoicing that lets you invoice and receive payments online — along with expense tracking.
Who is it for?
Any business that needs to track time could find Harvest useful. It’s popular with creatives, freelancers and small business.
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Solve360 – CRM that doesn’t suck
Solve360 from Norada is more than just a traditional CRM – it works both as a contact management or CRM tool, and also as a project management application. It is organised around three key things:
1. Contacts – the people you work with such as leads, prospects, clients and suppliers
2. Project blogs – not blogs in the traditional sense, they are a place to organise important transactions, projects or anything else you might be working on that requires organizing.
3. The activities window pulls together milestones, tasks and events that are happening across contacts and projects – so everyone knows what is going on and what they need to do.
Who is it for?
If your business sells or provides services, then Solve360 may be worth checking out.
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Shut up and code
Earlier this year, Mark Zuckerberg infamously stated that using HTML5 in their mobile app was a mistake. While most developers in the mobile space understood Facebook’s problems with HTML5 to be one of poor implementation rather than a lacking in the technology, it set back the HTML5 movement across the wider IT community. How would CIO’s react when Zuck says HTML5 sucks? (He didn’t really say that – but that’s what a lot of people heard)
The last few years has seen lots of vigorous debate on web vs native (including internally at Xero). Unfortunately the debate tends to be just talk and for many on the HTML5 side they think the problem is that HTML5 doesn’t have a marketing department. Thankfully it doesn’t need one if developers start to showcase what’s possible rather than just talk about it. Which is why it’s fantastic to see Sencha (the company that builds the HTML5 development frameworks we use to help build out the Xero product suite) has built a demo app call Fastbook that replicates some of the more advanced features of Facebook’s re-imagined native app in pure HTML5 (built upon Sencha Touch).
The video below shows a side by side of the official native Facebook app versus Sencha’s HTML5 Fastbook app:
What’s great is that they’ve not only replicated some of the more advanced features of the native experience, but they’ve also added in some additional capabilities that the native app doesn’t even have. It’s especially impressive to see the Android version – the native app looks clumsy next to the HTML5 app – I’m sure that’s not supposed to happen 
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ServiceM8 – smart job management
ServiceM8 is software that lets you manage your service business, ideal for jobs in the field. The ServiceM8 dispatch board is your mission control to keep jobs on track from booking to invoicing – locate staff in real-time, instantly dispatch urgent jobs and communicate with clients and staff without resorting to phone calls.
ServiceM8 looks after all aspects of handling jobs from standard features such as bookings, , quotes, invoicing & payment right through to SMS & email messaging, file attachments, photos and customer signatures.
Who is it for?
If your business has staff in the field such as electricians, cable installers, locksmiths, cleaners, plumbers, builders, computer technicians, HVAC technicians, driving instructors or anything else like that, ServiceM8 and Xero could make your life easier.
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Developer update – reports and lots more
We’ve been so busy shipping API code that we haven’t blogged about it for a while now. So we thought it was time we told you about some of the goodies we have been working on. You could say Christmas has come early….
Reports by tracking
In our 2.19 API release on October 30th, we released the ability to profit & loss and balance sheet reports by tracking categories and options. We have full details in our 2.19 release notes.
1099 Report
The US version of Xero now has a 1099 report generator, and the 2.20 release of the Xero API exposes this functionality for external developers.
Australian Payroll API
Work is underway to expose the Australian payroll functionality via the API. This is currently in active development, and we are inviting developers to register their interest by adding a comment to our developer forum discussion – we may open this to beta users in advance, so let us know if you are interested.
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API Developer of the year – Wayne Robinson
Since we announced our new global award to recognise the person that has contributed most to the Xero API developer community this year, we have been hearing about some fantastic integration projects – from Add-on developers that have built world class software that connects seamlessly to Xero, to amateur developers that have built their own custom integrations to streamline their business. The talent and imagination out there is just fantastic.
As we sifted through the names suggested to us, one kept standing out – Wayne Robinson. Wayne has been in contact with us for many years now, and his Xeroizer ruby/rails library, just approaching its second birthday, is used by over 100 applications that integrate with Xero – from Add-on partners to custom applications.
API Developer of the year, Wayne Robinson, receiving his award from Jason Forbes, Senior Account Manager in Movember garb
Thanks to Wayne releasing his work as an open source project, other developers that want to connect to Xero using this programming language have had a far easier time doing so.
Wayne is based on the sunny Gold Coast of Australia and has been using Ruby for over 8 years and open source for even longer. As he says himself: “In the last couple of years I’ve helped SMEs integrate a number of third-party products with Xero and have enjoyed helping them achieve greater automation day-to-day. Letting humans focus on what we are good at and letting machines handle repetitive drudgery is why I decided to develop software in the first place and it is still my major motivation today.”
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Summertime tech talks
I know a number of our readers are actually in the northern hemisphere, but over here on the top of the world it’s summer time (I still can’t get used to Christmas being a summer vacation). Summer at Xero HQ means two things – Gelato and Interns.
Yes we get nice gelato delivered and available to purchase without having to leave Xero HQ on a Tuesday, but that’s a whole other post about how awesome it is to work for a company that respects its employees. Rather, I want to talk about interns.
We’re proud members of an internship program that runs here in Wellington called Summer of Tech, we’ve been accepting interns off the program for the past 5 years and we’ve always found them incredibly valuable, both for growing the tech talent pool in Wellington and also for getting some of the smaller projects done, tasks that we usually can’t prioritize over bigger pieces of work but are very valuable. Our interns get a truckload of experience and get to build things that get used in the wild. They can show their friends and future employees what they’ve done. We’ve also kept a couple of our interns on as they’ve shown such great aptitude.
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Design methodology under the Long White Creative Cloud
It was our pleasure to host the inaugural Long White Creative Cloud event at the Auckland office yesterday. We had an amazing response from WorkflowMax and Xero creative industry clients with close to a hundred inspired, creative-minded souls packing into our theatre, some from as far afield as Christchurch.
Earl Tipene from Adobe introduced the new Cloud services suite, highlighting the transition that one of the world’s largest boxed software vendors is making towards a cloud focused model. Their new monthly pricing model is hugely compelling. Following Earl, Daniel Scott from BYOL discussed some of the awesome features available in the cloud services suite and the benefits to creative businesses.
The main speaker was our very own Philip Fierlinger, who brought a depth of insight into the processes that the Xero design team use to create undeniably beautiful software, and how that same philosophy is now being applied to the WorkflowMax user interface rewrite.
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XO Cashflow – making accounts receivable fun
XO Cashflow is out to make managing accounts receivable fun. That might seem a tall order, but they achieve this by streamlining the process of following up on overdue invoices.
The focus is not just on automation and bulk email invoicing, but also on the personal connection and the communications back from the customer, for example if the customer wants to question or request a copy of the invoice.
These interactions are all recorded in XO Cashflow and you can add notes to an invoice also, so you know where you are with each debt.
Who is it for?
If you find managing your overdue sales invoices time consuming, but you still want to maintain a personal touch, then XO Cashflow may be for you.
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Developers to meet for Code Retreat
Xero is proud to be supporting this year’s Global Day of Code Retreat, where on December 8, groups of developers around the globe will get together to practice the craft of software development.
For those lucky enough to live in Wellington, New Zealand, you get to both meet with like-minded developers and check out Xero’s fancy new offices.
For the rest of you, with over 110 events planned around the world, there may be one planned in a town near you (Kiwis should visit Kiwi Code Retreat MeetUp).
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