New Dashboards for Sales and Purchases

In our next major release we’ll be introducing some updates that will start us towards delivering some larger features due out next year. In particular, these changes will help us deliver functionality like purchase orders (currently sitting at 9th equal in community voting) and quotes (at 4th equal).

Firstly, we’ve replaced the terms Accounts Receivable and Accounts Payable with more generic names, Sales and Purchases, respectively. We had a lot of feedback those terms were not commonly heard outside accountant and bookkeeper circles and we think most of our business users will find the new names a lot more natural.

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New video by Adam Lisagor

We’re very proud to present a new video, directed by Adam Lisagor.

It’s featured on our new homepage. Please have a look.

Adam Lisagor makes the best online promo videos in the business.

One reason he’s the best: he’s choosy about his clients. He makes sure his clients deliver fantastic products that people love. His videos for AirBnb, Square, Flipboard, Rdio, Zipcar among so many others, are renowned for being as innovative as the products and companies they promote.

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Wrapping up Xerocon UK

Well, what a week and what a conference the first ever Xerocon hosted in London turned out to be.

We jammed 230 delegates into the ICAEW’s Great Hall inside their central London headquarters where the irony of our hosting an online accounting conference in a building constructed in 1890 did not escape the notice of one of our guest speakers who playfully renamed it the ‘Hogwarts of Accountancy’ much to the amusement of the audience and ICAEW staff present. Alongside the locals and the Xero UK team we had intercontinental ballistic Xeros flying in from our global HQ in Wellington, our US headquarters in San Francisco, one guest presenter all the way from Christchurch, New Zealand and another from Spain and delegates from as far afield as South Africa and as close by as Ireland. We even had a nice chap called Neil from Intuit UK’s marketing department along to pick up some tips on how to be awesome.

Social Mediation Across The Nation

XEROCON BY THE NUMBERS

• There were precisely 1,002 tweets mentioning #xerocon
• Exactly 223 individuals mentioned #xerocon at least once
• #xerocon popped up in 414 RTs
• Our audience (local and distant) tweeted a grand total of 16,535 words, the most popular appear in the word cloud shown below.

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#xerocon London live!

What a day! We’re in London at the ICAEW Chartered Accountants’ Hall, surrounded by buildings like the Royal Exchange to host our 6th Xero Partner Conference (#xerocon).

We’ll be live blogging throughout the day with speakers from Xero and special guests and you can follow along here so bookmark this page or the already very busy #xerocon Twitter stream.

9.35am: And we’re off! Gary’s on stage welcoming and introducing the day. Let’s move that needle!

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Apples & Androids

iOS 6

Apple released the latest version of their iOS operating system yesterday – there’s a few exciting additions – I like the VIP inbox, which lets me easily surface mail from my wife, our CEO, and my trouble-maker friends. iOS 6 Maps has been an interesting change for Apple to make – the street that Xero HQ is on in Wellington has disappeared – hopefully to return very soon. We’re very keen to see how Passbook evolves.

Unfortunately, iOS 6 appears to have caused some problems with the most recent version of Xero Touch, which is affecting access via the iOS app and via the browser. We’ll be submitting an upgrade to fix the problem as soon as we can and it will be available as soon as Apple approves it.

UPDATE: The problem is now resolved. iOS 6 unexpectedly changed the behaviour of its browser. In short – this caused things to break quite badly. We were able to do an update that didn’t require a release to the App Store, but if you experienced problems with the Xero Touch app in the last 36 hours, you may need to reinstall Xero Touch to resolve the issue.  If you haven’t updated to iOS 6 yet – thankfully you should have no problems with Xero Touch when you do.

Android

Meanwhile, we are coming to the end of testing our Android release for Xero Touch, and we aim to have it in the Google Play App Store within the next few weeks. It’s been an interesting experience creating an Android app for the first time, a lot of lessons have been learned, not the least of which is that different combinations of hardware, OS versions and browser can result in a markedly different experience – and some very tricky device-specific bugs. Developing for Android is certainly not yet the polished experience that iOS development is.

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UK team bake-off

This morning, to mark the six month anniversary of moving into our new UK office, we held a team bake-off competition. The rivalry was fierce and the different forms of baking practiced over this weekend were evidently diverse; spanning the likes a demure coffee cake, through to a classic sponge cake.

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