Inventory Items in the App Store

Some great news! The latest version of Xero Touch has been approved and is now available through the iTunes App Store.

Xero Touch 1.2 lets you use Inventory Items when creating invoices on the run.  See my post last week for a demonstration video and a full run down of the new features.

Download it now and let us know what you think.

NZX Master Class

As many of you will know Xero took the unusual step of becoming a public company almost from day one.  Over the near 5 years we’ve been listed we’ve learned a lot and we’d like to share that with other listed companies and those considering significant fund raising over the next year or so.

So, in conjunction with the NZX we’re holding a workshop to go through our experiences. Here are the details:

NZX IPO Masterclass – The Xero Listing Story

Wednesday 23 May 2012 Xero – 3 Market Lane – Wellington (opp NZX Centre)

NZX would like to invite you to attend the NZX IPO Master-class: The Xero Listing Story, to be held in Wellington on 23 May 2012.

Many of you have watched the Xero story. Xero raised growth capital and listed in 2007 as a start up. Since listing Xero has built a global team, carried out a number of subsequent strategic placements raising growth capital in excess of $85M, and seen their market cap increase significantly in a short time frame.

The Xero team are keen to share their experiences in an open and interactive masterclass format. This session is targeted at directors and senior executives of any company, in any industry, that is considering raising significant growth capital over the next two years.

Specifically the Xero IPO team will cover:

• Reasons for accessing the public equity markets over other types of funding
• Pre IPO process and key decisions
• IPO process and the role of advisers
• Life after listing
• Investor relations, communications strategy and the role of social media
• Post IPO capital raising – Strategic Placements and Share Purchase Plans
• Acquisitions
• Growth capital raising landscape in 2012; some new opportunities

Presenting will be Rod Drury, CEO, Xero; Ross Christie, Partner, Cameron Partners; Dean Oppenhuis, Partner, Bell Gully

AGENDA

9.45am Arrival & Coffee

10:00am IPO Masterclass

12:00pm Light lunch, discussion and networking

RSVP

By Friday 27 April 2012 to John Fernandes on john.fernandes@nzx.com

For further queries, please call John on 04-495-2808 or email: john.fernandes@nzx.com

Small business marketing: Introducing The ‘Four Ps’

Sometimes it’s better to go back to the start so I’m going to take you back to a simple, founding marketing principle: the ‘Four Ps’.

It seems really basic but it’s important to redefine what we are talking about when we say ‘marketing’.

When most people talk about marketing they are usually only talking about advertising or, the ‘promotion’ aspect.

Collectively, the ‘Four Ps’ make up the ‘marketing mix’ for your business. Here they are:

Marketing Mix 4Ps

Product: An item that satisfies a customer need or want

Price: The amount a customer pays for a product or service

Promotion: Communications used to tell customers about your product or service. Includes advertising, public relations and personal sales and promotion.

Place: Broadly defined as distribution. Place is where transactions take place and how customers access your product or service.

From experience, the most common mistake people make with marketing is not putting enough thought into the Product and Place part of the mix.

Let’s say you develop an amazing coffee blend that you want to sell. It’s tempting to rush out and spend a lot of money on packaging and logos and websites without stopping to think about your supply chain and how you are going to get your coffee in front of customers so they will buy it.  Can you sell through a large retailer or pay money to a distribution company? Can you sell directly online in a marketplace like Etsy? Should you consider a franchise model? All of these decisions determine your pricing and margin and therefore, impact on your cashflow.

In a service business, one of the biggest challenges is scaling the Product. If you are known as being a brilliant architect, customers want to deal with you and you only. Personal branding and PR (Promotion) can create demand that is challenging to fulfill other than continuing to put your hourly rate up.

Discussion: Think about your business in the context of the ‘Four Ps’ model. What are your biggest challenges and parts that you need to give more attention to?

Who amongst your competitors is doing well and what are they doing different?

Leave Promotion out for now and think about the other three ‘Ps’. What can you do today to strengthen these areas of your marketing mix?

I’ll be over in Xero Community chatting over the next few days and I would love to hear your ideas. Join in the conversation.

Next in the series, we’ll be talking about competitor positioning and differentiation. Feel free to direct any questions below in the comments or over to Xero Community.

Invoicing on the run

Today we’ve released the latest version of Xero Touch, available now on your touch-enabled smartphone at https://m.xero.com. We’ve also submitted a bundled up iOS version to the Apple App Store, which may take a few days to get approved, but fingers-crossed it should be on your iPhone by the end of next week.

The new release includes a host of improvements and a great new feature: Inventory Items. You’ll now be able, while on the go, to quickly choose previously entered Inventory Items when creating invoices. It drastically cuts down on data entry and avoids mistakes when entering invoice line items as any defaults against that Inventory Item are automatically applied. Inventory Items will either autocomplete as you type them in, or if you prefer, you can pull up a full list of Inventory Items to scan through and choose from.

Watch this video for a walk through.

If you haven’t used Inventory Items before, check out our earlier blog and how-to video. Once you’ve loaded your Inventory Items into Xero, they’ll be available to be used on Touch.

We’ve got some great stuff in the pipeline and you can expect to see more frequent releases of Xero Touch in the future.

Ministerial visit

We were thrilled that our first official visitor to the new Xero HQ is New Zealand Minister of Revenue Peter Dunne.

Peter is a good guy and was impressed by how far cloud computing has come in New Zealand. He could see that having government connected to small businesses and their advisors is a game changer.

Specifically we talked about

1. How cloud is the next generation of small business software and the opportunities around business to government connectivity.
2. Cloud security.  The Government is of course very concerned about that.
3. Our strong desire for web services to post GST returns online directly from Xero.
4. Special Purpose Financial Reporting  – we can easily support this with Xero.
5. Single Business Numbers. Why these are so important.
6. Our thoughts on that $1.5B project to redevelop the core IRD engine.

Another of the great things about being in Wellington is easy access to the Government and we appreciated being able to share our experiences directly with the Minister.

Live from #SXSW

Xero’s US President Jamie Sutherland and Account Manager Spencer Christeck have been at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas this weekend. We gave them a quick Skype call to see how it’s been going:

Jamie: There are all kinds of people here, from startups pitching at the side of the street to established enterprises who make great apps for small businesses. The best thing about SXSW is meeting these people.

Networking champ Spencer agreed:

Spencer: SXSW is ALL about meeting people. You can strike up a conversation with anyone. And whenever you do, you’re going to meet someone who is doing something incredibly fascinating.

Spencer and Australian Xero Gold Partner Steph Hinds with some new friends.

Continue reading ›

SPP completed

Our Share Purchase Plan was completed this morning. We were thrilled to raised a further $15.6 million from existing shareholders. The full announcement is here.

SPP takes Xero capital raised to over $35m

Online accounting software provider Xero (XRO) has raised a further $15.6m through its Share Purchase Plan (SPP), bringing the total capital raised in recent months to $35.6m.

Following a $20m private placement in February, the SPP was initiated to enable existing shareholders to increase their shareholding at the same price of $2.75.

The SPP exceeded the company’s expectations – more than 50% of eligible shareholders participated, investing on average in excess of $10,500. Following the SPP, shares issued will be 103.6m.

“This is a strong endorsement of our growth strategy from shareholders,” says Xero CEO Rod Drury.

“Xero is emerging as the leader in global online accounting. There are over 30 million small businesses in our current markets. Having achieved over 100% annual compound growth for the last four years, a million customers looks attainable. With substantial funding in place the company is uniquely positioned to support large scale growth which will see Xero become a significant global company.”

Xero is also pleased the NZX has provided an efficient mechanism for raising growth capital from domestic and international investors.

It was very important to us that all shareholders had the opportunity to participate on the same basis as our recent placement and we again thank our valued shareholders for their support.

Can I ask you a few questions about marketing?

The Xero marketing team often get asked marketing-related questions when we’re out and about so we thought we’d capture some ideas and share them with everyone in a little web series.

We scribbled all over a whiteboard with real-life accountant and Xero co-founder Hamish Edwards, and we’ve come up with all sorts of ideas to grow your business.

There will be blog posts here, podcasting on iTunes, threads in the Xero Community and some little video interviews on YouTube so you can see who you’re listening to.

Everyone is at a different level, from understanding the basics, through to advanced media planning and activation, so we’ll get the ball rolling with some marketing 101 stuff then build up from there.

Topics will be accounting and bookkeeping flavoured but most of the ideas translate across industries so stay tuned if you want to find out more. If you have any topics you’d like to see us cover, be sure to let us know in the comments section.