Report Fields are a key part of Report Packs, and our Development team have managed to launch a major Report Fields update off the back of the big release on Monday: custom Report Fields.

Custom Report Fields let you insert placeholders that are automatically replaced with data when the report is run – like a mail merge. This latest release means you can now create your own fields to be populated with any data you want.

Practice Fields, such as your firm’s address, can be instantly applied to any report.

Client Fields are specific to a particular client, like their banker’s name. So once the field is setup at a practice level, the banker’s details can then be entered on the client side.

We’re continuing to make progress on Report Packs as Australia prepares to be the next cab off the rank in time for FY12 reporting. Report Fields will be available when we release Report Packs in each region.

If you’re a Partner in New Zealand you can find out all about Report Packs by registering for our Report Writing training course here.

All too often Elizabeth Pitu hears people say that accounting and other subjects at school did little to prepare them for the practicalities of running their own business.

A teacher of accounting for 26 years, Elizabeth has always suspected the subject matter was a little too academic and theoretical. Now, with exposure to small business owners, she’s convinced the school curriculum for accounting in New Zealand (and she suspects other countries too) needs a rethink.

“In my experience accounting at school is not as real or practical as it should be in terms of running a small business,” she says. “Understanding the concept is quite different to doing things like working out what to cost your work at, making sure you get a market price and allowing for the advertising you might need to do. Most business owners end up learning the hard way.”

In the hope of convincing policy makers to consider changes to the way accounting is taught in schools, Elizabeth has embarked on a research project through Waikato University titled ‘Financial Skills for Small Business Owners’.

This involves interviewing small business owners about what financial skills they think would have been useful to learn in school. Here are the most common gaps Elizabeth has identified so far:

• How to price products/services/concepts
• Coding bank statements
• Using accounting technology beyond entry level
• Better ways to manage debtors
• How to forecast cashflow
• Doing a GST/VAT/Sales Tax return
• Allowing for the vagaries of tax and other deductions when paying wages
• The need to put money aside to pay taxes

Elizabeth says being able to access technology such as Xero that’s easy to understand and use, has been acknowledged by several research participants as key to their achieving business success.

We’d love to hear what you think would be useful for prospective business owners to learn in school in the comments section below. Or you can let Elizabeth know on her Facebook page.

Budgets

When it comes to budgeting, Microsoft Excel is the best tool in the world. You can create all kinds of customised reports and graphs, run ad-hoc queries, and even do some fairly complex forecasting. Now you can export your  actuals from Xero, do some heavy lifting in Excel, then import the results as your budget line.

We looked at developing smart budgeting tools ourselves. However, Excel really is best-of-breed, so it made more sense to connect the two.

We teamed up with Deloitte to test this feature with Microsoft Office 365. Check out the video to see how the data round trips from Xero, to Excel, and back again.

Checks

If you’re a US customer, you can now print professionally styled checks right from within Xero. Xero manages check numbering, voiding, deleting, styling and a full audit history of any changes – perfect for managing bill payments. You can see it in action here:

And yes, we will be rolling this out to other regions as soon as we can. We’ve had lots of interest from Canada especially. In the meantime everyone can have a play with the new functionality by changing their Xero Demo organisation to the US. It would be good to hear what sort of check stock you’d like us to support next or whether the US voucher format in this release does the trick. Jump in and have your say on the Xero Community.

Tracking and tax from bank reconciliation

Your core data processing just got faster. We’ve added a feature that lets you add tracking or change the tax rate on a transaction from the main bank reconciliation screen – no need to drill in!

We’ve also released:

• A new centered look
• New partner bank feed from NZ Home Loans
• New report codes to support additional reporting for non-company entities (in New Zealand for now)

For all the details, head on over to the release notes.

So what is Pocketrent?

Pocketrent gives property owners and managers all the tools they need to manage their rental property and get the best from their investment.

Who is it for?

For those who need to manage tenants or keep track of rental payments, property inspections and building maintenance. Pocketrent works for single units or the management of entire buildings/multiple complexes.

How Pocketrent works with Xero

Pocketrent can monitor your Xero bank statement for payments and create bank transactions as rent money is received. There’s also the option to create an invoice as rent falls due.

Where you can use Pocketrent

It’s been customised to support New Zealand, Australia and UK customers. Pricing is in NZ dollars.

Check it out

Pocketrent is free for one property and there is a one month trial for all property levels. Find out more here.

(UPDATE) We are back online as of Tuesday 8th 18:55 GMT. We are still completing an review of what occurred but it appears to be a network configuration issue with the system’s database servers. We are not expecting any further problems.

(UPDATE) Confirming that the extension to the maintenance outage was caused by a network configuration issue between two of the underlying database cluster nodes. We choose to delay bringing the system back online until the network issue had been resolved so as to ensure the fault tolerance within this database layer was functioning correctly.

Highly successful entrepreneurs live more in their balance sheet than their Profit and Loss. The P&L is a short-term view of the operating status of the business. The balance sheet tells you where the future is and how to resource the business for growth. Pre-empting where your cashflow will be 6 to 12 months out is critical. All too often entrepreneurs grow their business, run out of cash and end up raising funds under desperate circumstances, which can be expensive.

I caught up with a friend recently who is helping investors from offshore find solid businesses to support. The businesses will not only receive $10m but the investors will use their skills and networks to open up opportunities in foreign markets. Strategic investors such as these can be a huge help to a business. While a cash injection is one thing, having doors opened for you can’t be underestimated.

Funding your business can take several turns and you should always be thinking ahead to the next step. Take Xero for example. Initially the founders funded the business; a second funding round involved employees, directors and strategic investors; the next step was a stock market listing; further capital has since been raised through strategic and retail investors as well as institutions offshore.

So how do you find strategic investors? This is much harder than finding good customers and it needs to be part of your business strategy. Here are some suggestions:

1. Start with those closest to you. While I don’t recommend taking money from family unless they are already experienced investors, they may be able to help you find the next person to speak to.
2. Look to your team or your customers. Quite often your employees will be interested in investing because they know the business. In my experience people with ‘skin’ in the game tend to push harder to make the business a success.
3. Find an Angel Investor to mentor you and fund you through to the next stage. These people will invest in people not ideas. Build your networks and ask for 30 minute coffee meetings to do a pitch. But do your homework first. The person you are approaching needs to be the right fit.
4. Move onto VC or Strategic Investors. Generally your Angel will help with this. But don’t worry, as you execute your business, pick up momentum and build your PR, you will get approached. That said it pays to seek these guys out 6 to 12 months before you need the money. Presenting your story and then coming back six months later and demonstrating you have achieved what you said you would is gold for investors.

Most important of all is to have an ongoing KPI around your equity story.

We’d love to hear your insights or questions about equity in business.

No doubt, he was a musical trailblazer, but he was a pioneer in more ways than you probably knew.

Nathanial was the first “customer” of Xero. If you look closely, you might notice the name Nathanial Hornblower in our screenshots and demo videos. When I designed the first screens for Xero we needed a fictitious customer name. To make sure long names didn’t break the design I used Nathanial Hornblower.

It was also a nod to my first real customer, the Beastie Boys.

Skills to Pay the Bills

In 1994, I quit my first job, bought a computer on credit cards and lived on unemployment checks while I worked on a business idea. I designed and coded a prototype of an online music store, based on my local record shop Groove Merchant. I flew to LA and pitched it to all the major labels, who promptly laughed me out the door. Still laughing?

Unphased, I found a way to get in touch with my heroes, the Beastie Boys. I pitched a concept for a multimedia project: an interactive video and audio CD-ROM packed with rarities, home movies and bootleg material. As soon as they saw my Groove Merchant prototype, they sent me a check along with a box of videos and outtakes from their archives.

I immediately hired my brother, another friend, and founded my first business, Turntable.

Gratitude

Looking back, I am eternally grateful to the Beastie Boys for having the vision and courage to experiment with a new medium – not just hip hop. They also took a gamble on an unknown geek with some wild ideas. They hired me when nobody else would. It didn’t just change my life when I was starting out, it helped influence and define a new design, technology and business medium.

Going through my closet, I found a copy of the original CD-ROM that still plays on my ancient Powerbook. Nearly 18 years later, here’s a video I shot on my iPhone of the work we did. Finding this has been a great way for me to remember and celebrate everything that was brilliant about the Beastie Boys.

Thank you for everything, Yauch. You had a huge impact on my life and career. My heart goes out to your family and friends.

In general terms, the smaller you are, the easier social media is.

Most social media technologies such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn have been designed for individual humans to talk and connect with each other.  So if you are the owner of the business, it’s generally pretty easy for you to log on to an account and chat with your customers the same way that you would at a business breakfast or if someone called you on the phone.

I highly recommend that you post from a personal account with your face on it in first-person rather than off a company account (or as well as). Most big companies would love to have the freedom to connect online the way that small businesses can so use this to your advantage.  Be yourself and don’t try to sound corporate. Corporates are all desperately trying to sound small and personable!

It pays to not overthink it and just have a look around at what some other individuals and businesses are doing and learn from them. Play is a very important part of developing engagement and learning how to come up with creative ways to get people talking about you and your business.  So don’t feel guilty about spending some time looking at silly cat videos on Youtube and commenting on them. It’s the best way to learn new features and to see what people are drawn to online.

I’ll do a full post on the benefits of blogging but the main thing to remember is that blogging is the cornerstone of any social media strategy.

Blogging is often overlooked as the nerdy older brother of cool kids like Pinterest and Instagram but it is absolutely essential to hold all of your different online accounts and channels together.  Blogs can also serve as the top end of your sales funnel to drive customers through to transacting with your business so its worth putting the effort in.

Again, spend some time discovering successful bloggers that really interest you and read and comment to learn how they drive engagement.  What posts get lots of ‘likes’ and comments? What do you like reading and when do you read blogs the most? Where are you reading this blog now and how did you discover it? Who are some of your favourite bloggers?

If you were to spend more than five minutes chatting with Denis, it would quickly become evident that he just gets where the future of accounting advisory services is going.

So, I went into Kubrick Mode and grabbed a few minutes with him on camera.

As you’d expect from an Irishman, Denis tells it straight about why he believes the traditional accounting services model is flawed, and how the aftermath of the Irish financial crisis has created an acute commercial context in which businesses need to know where they stand financially month to month, sharpening the commercial senses of Irish business owners.

So what is Peoplemine?

Peoplemine is a customer intelligence and CRM tool designed for retailers. It gives you insights into your customers and their behaviour so you can target different groups or promote special offers tailored just to them.

Who is it for?

Anyone involved in retailing. If you have customer and sales data in Xero and want to use this to drive repeat business, Peoplemine is worth considering.

How Peoplemine works with Xero

Peoplemine extracts and uses key data such as contacts, inventory items and invoices from your Xero organisation for detailed reporting and analysis. It automatically synchronizes at regular intervals to keep the data up to date.

Where you can use Peoplemine

Anywhere and pricing is available in all the same currencies as Xero.

Check it out

For more details on Peoplemine and to sign up for a free 14 day trial, check it out here.

You might like to view this in full screen mode to more easily see which links are getting clicked.

I’ve been involved in a number of rapid growth and new business start-ups including Xero and more recently an online system for managing foreign exchange and interest rate risk called Hedgebook. I’ve learnt a huge amount through the process. Here’s the top five things I recommend you do if your aim is to hit the accelerator.

1. Dragons’ Den it:  Get 30 minutes with the most wildly successful entrepreneur you know. Tell them about what your plan for growth is and get their feedback. It’s likely they will rip it apart and this will help you know whether to pursue or not.
2. Know your customers:  Speak to your existing customers about your aspirations. Remember ideas are cheap and execution is expensive. Don’t be afraid to let people see what you are doing. You need the direct feedback from those who use your product.
3. Know your markets: You need to understand your growth markets, especially if these are off-shore. Visit them.  Nothing beats being in-market, meeting with the people who could help with your business and getting their understanding. Hedgebook has been looking to expand beyond New Zealand and recently invested in a four day trip to Australia where we attended 23 meetings!  This was well worth it because the net result was a very clear first phase go-to-market plan.
4. Get some funding: Getting someone else to help fund your idea is an excellent endorsement. It shows what you’re doing makes commercial sense. In almost every market there is a government funded inward investment organisation. You need to meet the people behind this, see what they think about what you have to offer and find out what research they can do for you. Most of these organisations will have a fairly solid review and selection process. Going through this process will help make sure you have done everything you need to.
5. Write a market research paper: Before Xero entered the UK market I spent six weeks doing research. Then I presented my findings and recommendations to the board as part of the approval process. This was an excellent exercise that validated our go-to-market plan and provided a time-frame (in this case six months) for reporting back.

We’d love to hear your experiences in scaling up a business and if you have any gems to share.

We’re often asked about the bookkeeper accountant relationship. Generally we see the two offering different services and by working together the client gets the best of both worlds.

Australian based Toni McCulloch from Accounting North (left) and Briohny de Vere of Bees Knees Bookkeeping  are case in point that collaboration works.

For Toni the best outcome is achieved when the incoming information her accounting practice receives is accurate and fully reconciled. “This gives us the scope to focus the real issues at hand for the clients such as growth of the business, profit and cashflow,” she says.

Taking the bookkeeper perspective, Briohny says: “Whenever I get an accountant to review work for end-of-year, I always ask for feedback (yes positive and negative). Having an open relationship between the accountant, bookkeeper and client makes everyone’s life easier”.

How it can work

To explain how the bookkeeper accountant relationship can work, Melanie Morris of Bookkeeping and Beyond Ltd offers this overview:

• Generally day-to-day accounts functions can be undertaken by bookkeeper at a more cost effective rate than accountant such as Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable, GST/ BAS returns.
• Bookkeepers can notify and defer to an accountant on tricky transactions that require a higher level of expertise and which may have tax implications.
• Accountants have a better understanding of the tax returns and get the best  outcome for clients in terms of company set up, large purchases and depreciation.
• Bookkeepers will bring any issues to the accountant throughout the year rather than wait until year-end.
• The year-end work (undertaken by the accountant) should be more streamlined if accounts have been prepared by a good bookkeeper rather than someone without specialist knowledge in this area.
• Accountants can outsource their overflow accounts work to a bookkeeper.
• If the bookkeeper is taking care of the day-to-day accounts and base compliance,  the accountant’s time is freed up to undertake the trusted financial advisor role by working with the client on business growth, strategic planning and cashflow budgeting.

Sometimes we hear about friction between the two groups but I believe this stems from the lack of visibility and transparency inherent when using desktop accounting systems, resulting in a lag in completing a client’s accounts. Products like Xero are paving the way for better collaboration between bookkeepers and accountants because both sides can now be working on the same set of data for their mutual clients.

We have always tried to support the relationship between bookkeepers and accountants beyond providing the software that allows  it, so it was gratifying to hear Toni’s perspective on this. “Xero has a hands on approach to working with both partners and the events, webinars and Xerocon not only provide a collaborative environment but both parties are encouraged to attend which is great for networking. Account managers also invest in both for success.”

We’d love to hear how you’ve found the bookkeeper accountant relationship – as a client or as one of these professionals. What works and what doesn’t?

So what is Cin7?

Cin7 is a web based inventory system that can be customised. It has all the features needed to manage manufactured goods and stock, combined with sales and order processing.

Who is it for?

Cin7 fits a variety of businesses including general manufacturing, made-to-order manufacturing and those with advanced inventory requirements. Cin7 is modular and can be customised to a range of business processes.

How Cin7 works with Xero

Purchases and sales are seamlessly integrated with Xero and customer and supplier contact records are kept up to date.

Where you can use Cin7

Cin7 is fully web based and can be used anywhere.

Check it out

For more details on Cin7 and to request specific requirements, check it out here.

Integrating payroll into a much broader Xero platform has certainly presented some new challenges. The project has involved some 40 people at varying stages; work on 4 different apps in the Xero platform that payroll touches; the involvement of 4 dedicated testers who are the guardians of a high quality outcome and 2 weeks of final migration and performance testing before we are ready to roll it out.

All these factors combine to mean that we will be a little late and won’t be releasing at the end of April as we had hoped. However, we are still committed to delivering payroll well before the end of the financial year in Australia so you have plenty of time to conduct migration from your legacy systems. We’ll let you know more about the expected release date in the 2-3 weeks.

In the mean time, please don’t forget that a Paycycle account is now free and all your data will automatically appear inside Xero on the day of the integrated payroll release..

There seems to be a proliferation of the little thumbs up competitions rolling through and some small businesses are excited that they are finally ‘doing social media.’

The promotional mechanic is not new. It’s the modern version of putting your business card in a bowl for a $50 bar tab draw and, as customers, we all know how this goes down. The company will then add your details to their database and send you offers via email or text.

If companies continue to treat Facebook as a loyalty database they will end up with the same problems that direct marketers have fought with since the old paper catalogue days.

Getting the balance right between engagement and spam requires people driving the accounts to understand their community and have a sense for what they will tolerate (in commercial messaging) versus fun and frivolity. The general rule I was told by a Facebook rep was ‘one-to-four’: one sales message to four chatty conversational messages.

You need to keep an eye on the stats running in the background of your Facebook Pages including exit and hide rates; not just your engagement rates (likes and comments). Watch your campaign flight planning and make sure you aren’t fatiguing the community with stuff that is too ‘sales-y’ and not interesting browsing for your customers.  The main reason people go on Facebook is to look at photos so it’s also a good idea to take some snaps and let your customers see the humans behind your business.

In the tips for new players category, read the Facebook competition terms of service and stick to them. Big brother is watching you and they will kindly send you a warning email that you must comply with or your Page will be disabled. ‘Comment to enter’, ‘upload to enter’ and ‘like to enter’ have to be setup a certain way to meet Facebook legal requirements and it pays to educate yourself on what’s in and what’s out.

There are lots of good examples out there of companies that do well. Are you on Facebook for personal or business and what do you use it for? Feel free to add your business page in the comments so people can connect with you. You can also have a chat in Xero Community.

About me

My career spans 15+ years creating, marketing and supporting software solutions working as an engineer, architect, product manager, designer, and marketer. Close to nine of those years were spent at Intuit where I honed my marketing skills (marketing everything from QuickBooks Enterprise to Simple Start to Customer Manager to Mac) and developed deep domain expertise in small business financial management (QuickBooks). Most recently, I led the QuickBooks ProAdvisor Program, which taught me how important accounting professionals are in the success of a small business. I’ve also become passionate about design and user experience, believing from the moment you consider a product it must be drop-dead simple to understand and use.  That brings me Xero.

Due diligence

About a year ago, I took Xero for a test drive to understand what everyone was talking about.  From the moment that I saw my Xero Dashboard, I was impressed.  It was like a Mac – a balance between simplicity and elegance.  Everything I wanted to see, and only what I wanted to see, was in one place.  It wasn’t cluttered, bloated, or confusing.  As I dove in further, it got even better. Reports, tools for accounting professionals, anytime and anywhere access, an open API and award winning add-ons, multi-currency, and more recently, a better mobile experience with Xero Touch. The list goes on. Instantly I wondered how did they do this?

I’m sold

It was only a few weeks ago that I decided to leave Intuit for Xero. I’ve made the change not only because I believe in the product but the team, the company and the vision.  During the process I’ve had the opportunity to talk to Rod, Jamie and others leading Xero.  They’re smart, resourceful, dedicated and inspiring – the type of people that you want to be associated with.  And as I dug in and evaluated Xero further, I realized they’d created an amazing company.  Wherever I looked, they had the answer – product, design, people, strategy, financial backing, partners, platform, and, most importantly, growth.  Wow.  I feel really fortunate to have the opportunity to join something that will change the industry that I’ve spent a decade working in.  As they say, the rest is history.

Hear first hand how he went from being in a boring job that paid the bills to growing his company Paycycle through partnering with Xero.

The audio podcast is available for free download in the iTunes store and makes great listening while you’re commuting to work or getting things done around the house.

Stuart now leads the Xero Payroll team in Melbourne and is not far away from having full-featured payroll integrated into Xero for Australian customers.

We’re at the halfway stage on our UK road show fortnight, and so far it’s been a great experience for the Xero road crew and we’ve had positive feedback from many of the 270 delegates we’ve met so far this week.

Apart from the buzz of sharing our strategy and roadmap, one of the biggest things I’ve taken away from this week is that the attendance levels contrast so positively with the last series of UK road shows we ran in May 2010, and what that says about the UK’s maturing attitude towards the cloud.

This time two years ago, our road show events series in the UK averaged around twelve people per venue. At one event only four people showed up. It was tragic.

In the intervening 24 months a lot has changed and today our UK customer count is close to the size our global customer count was in 2010, interest among accountants and bookkeepers in working online has blossomed in the UK and we’ve continued to work hard to build momentum and trust among UK practices.

I’ve heard evidence of the fruits of that effort coming through loud and clear this week.

In fact, I’m confident that had we correctly anticipated the strength of demand this year, we’d have booked bigger rooms and instead of having to turn accountants away from over-subscribed events – or putting on extra dates – we’d have had 1,000+ UK accountants and bookkeepers through the doors instead of the still impressive 450 we’re due to finish on next week.

It’s certainly a nice problem to have.

So, we’ve put on another extra date – this time in Southampton – and if you’re in the south and missed out this week, then head over to the Xero Roadshow page and get booked on for May 9. And we’ll be shortly opening registration for the UK’s inaugural #Xerocon conference for accountants and bookkeepers in London this September.

So what is Quotient?

Quotient lets you present your quotes and proposals online so they look professional. Tracking, communications and workflow features are included in the quotes and customers can ask questions and accept quotes instantly online.

Who is it for?

Quotient is great for any business where quotes or proposals are an important part of the sales process and need their own workflow, or if you want to streamline the process by bringing it online. Also, if you create a high volume of quotes, managing these separately to your Xero invoices may make sense.

How Quotient works with Xero

An accepted quote can be instantly converted into a Xero invoice. Line items that have been accepted, including quantities and costs, form part of the invoice and there’s a link back to the Quotient quote in case details need to be cross-checked.

Where you can use Quotient

Quotient is available everywhere and has pricing in several currencies including: New Zealand, Australia, United States and the United Kingdom.

Check it out

For a free 30 day trial or to learn more about Quotient, check it out here.

We’ve been impressed with the way ASWA members do more than just pay their fees – they regularly participate in forums and events. One great thing that sets it apart from other professional organisations is that members don’t have to be CPAs. ASWA attracts a cross-section of accountants, bookkeepers, and accounting students and this diversity brings lots of unique expertise to the table.

ASWA was founded in 1938 when “professional woman” was something of an oxymoron. The Society had two functions: to grow a community of women accountants and to keep women accountants up-to-date on the complex US tax code.

While the status of women in accounting and other professions has dramatically changed over the past 70-odd years, there’s still a need for the ASWA and the networking and mentoring it offers –  100 chapters are now spread across the USA.

ASWA seminars and discussions cover a wide range of topics, such as the basics behind being a sole trader; negotiating salaries and learning how to succeed in a large organization.

After Seattle we’ll be attending a couple more ASWA conferences in Arizona and San Diego. If you’re interested find out more here.

And if you’re a man, don’t feel left out. You’ve been able to join the ASWA since 1974.

How we work is really important to us at Xero, and at a time when we are growing rapidly there’s a lot of emphasis on creating environments where staff feel comfortable, creative and connected (oh and good coffee is essential too). We’ve recently extended our sales office to add a development hub in Auckland, New Zealand.

Situated in the creative quarter of Parnell, above the French Bistro La Cigale, (lots of parking!),  Xero Auckland is a lovely place to work.

Our Auckland team is working on a diverse set of projects, including Xero Personal; the recently acquired WorkflowMax, job costing and practice management product, as well as our internal service delivery applications which are pivotal to supporting Xero staff working around the world. There’s a big queue of projects to get in to.

We’ve had some great talent join us in Auckland recently but we still need interaction designers, developers and QA Testers. So if you’ve been attracted to Xero but didn’t want to leave the City of Sails we’d love to talk to you.

And if you’re outside of New Zealand we’d love to chat about how we can get you into a world class job in our beautiful country.

Check out our careers page or get in touch at careers@xero.com.

Developers can now enter POSTED Manual Journals via the Xero API in addition to DRAFT Manual Journals. We’ve also added support for URL links on manual journals via the Xero API so you can add a convenient link back to the relevant source data in your system — just like you can with invoices.

The Xero API Team

This has been a heavily requested feature, particularly from developers looking to integrate inventory and payroll type applications where journals can be really useful.

There are quite a few validation rules that need to be satisfied before entering posted journals in Xero, and we’ve detailed all of them in our API Reference.

This release also has a number of improvements and fixes – see our latest release notes for full details.

Coming soon

• Support for attachments on Accounts Payable invoices
• Mark invoices as sent to a contact

Stay up to date

Subscribe to our developer mailing list for release notifications, important announcements about the API and upcoming events, such as the Partner workshop and developer meetups in Melbourne this July.

Xero is proud to support the new Accountants’ RePublic set up by New Zealand industry expert and mentor Viv Brownrigg.

The RePublic is a free community based membership of accounting firms keen to collaborate, innovate and develop their practices. As well as providing support and insight, immersion programmes offer a deeper dive into the issues.

At Xero we see this as a great initiative for accountants who are ready to accept changes brought about by technology and new ways of doing business.

I was lucky enough attend the launch of the RePublic recently and it quickly became clear that this will provide a valuable forum for accountants to learn from peers.

Some excellent examples of firms embracing change include ReSolve Accountants, which has seen huge growth in its business after introducing agreed fee packages to clients based around Xero and our ecosystem of Add-on partners.

BW Chartered Accountants has also had success with an agreed fee structure, citing marketing and technology as key. And DJCA’s Side Kick product is considered the poster child for the ‘future of accounting’.

Kicking off the RePublic schedule of events for the year is The Financial Coach programme in May, which is designed to help accountants raise financial awareness and improve business acumen among their clients.

If you’re interested in finding out more about this programme or the RePublic email Pippa.Russell@arepublic.co.nz.

It’s always a little intimating attending JSConf. Not only are the speakers invariably amazing, but almost everyone attending could probably speak just as well. Therefore the talks can never be just about JavaScript (how does “this” work?) – they have to be more aspirational – moving beyond what we use and know and love into an entirely different way of thinking – something that can then turn into a discussion between sessions, whether that’s while sipping a Mojito in the beautiful Scottsdale, Arizona sun, or over a beer at one of the nightly parties.

This year started with fireworks. Now it wasn’t actual fireworks (a little disappointing actually) – but instead an Oprah-style giveaway by Mozilla of the very first batch of Boot 2 Gecko phones. B2G is an open source project from Mozilla with the goal of building a standalone mobile operating system that is entirely web based: all the apps are written in HTML5 (HTML, CSS & JavaScript) – even down to the screen you use for dialing a phone number! It’s a very ambitious project – but one that is right in the wheelhouse of developers attending JSConf. Needless to say we immediately brought down the usually very impressive JSConf WiFi by swarming the network with 200 new devices (I’ll save my review and my thoughts on the B2G platform for another post).

After the fireworks had died down we got into the talks. A lot of the early talks were really around performance – in fact performance in general was kind of a theme from a technical standpoint. We had Andy Wingo from Igalia talking about JavaScriptCore (the JavaScript engine in WebKit); Stephan Herhut from Intel talking about the RiverTrail parallel extensions to JavaScript which can enable parallel computing; Vyacheslav Egorov from Google talking about V8 (the JavaScript engine in Chrome); and, Jarred Nichols from Sencha talking about running JavaScript on the GPU (because he can – kind of).

It’s really amazing how low-level and deep developers are going to make JavaScript as fast as native. There’s a reason we recommend browsers like Chrome – there is a constant effort in the industry to enable heavy JavaScript applications such as Xero run faster and faster. The big problem is how these different engines actually optimize the code. As a JavaScript developer I can’t think about the virtual machine interpreting my code – which is why V8′s observe, adapt and optimize approach is the most appealing.

Was nice to see some familiar faces presenting at JSConf. Paul Irish, who presented at last year’s WDCNZ, was there to talk about web development tooling (tools are what aid us in our development lives such as JavaScript frameworks, build & deploy systems etc). In many respects modern web development is still in it’s infancy and some of the tooling is quite immature. At Xero we use a mixture of some open source tools as well as some we’ve built ourselves (sounds like yet another blog post in the making!).

One of the big themes that ran through JSConf this year was one of play. This idea that a lot of what we achieve as developers happens when we think outside the box – both in terms of how we write software and in terms of the software we deliver to end users (in some cases those end users may well be other developers utilizing your library or API).

Probably the best talk on that concept was by Dan Ingalls (one of the pioneers of object oriented programming and one of the inventors of Smalltalk). He was there to demo the Lively Kernel – a new approach to web programming that’s almost a web development version of Fabrik, the visual programming development environment designed by Ingalls at Apple Computer in the mid-1980s. Essentially it’s a drag-and-drop development environment built entirely in the web browser. Everything you do (whether it’s connecting to a web service or animating graphics) can be manipulated in real-time. It’s really quite amazing and has to be seen to be believed. I doubt it will have usefulness in general web development – but for teaching the possibilities of the web to younger developers it could be very powerful.

Jacob Thornton from Twitter probably gave my favorite talk of the conference regarding libraries (as in JavaScript libraries such as jQuery). While you really had to be there, the crux of the talk was that libraries or API’s shouldn’t be written without a test specification in place first – not just for test driven development purposes, but for the purposes of sharing that specification with other developers who may want to implement that library in another language or build just a subset of that library. So instead of someone trying to recreate jQuery by heart – they would take the jQuery test specifications and build against that. It’s an approach that Mustache has used very successfully. It’s a fascinating and simple idea.

My other favorite talk was by Jake Archibald from Lanyrd. He gave an amazing presentation on the pitfalls of using the browser application cache. It’s a fairly dry subject – but one that’s important for any web developer thinking about offline support. Not only was his talk excellent but his slides were a master-class in HTML5-based presentations – combining a beautiful mixture of HTML, SVG & CSS3 transitions and transforms. He writes about building the slides here. I urge anyone interested in the bleeding edge of web development to take a look.

The whole conference ended with something a little different. Rick Falkvinge, the founder of the first (Swedish) Pirate Party, was invited to speak on how he founded the party and what political activism really means. His message was about the power of the vote – even taking a few percentage points can upset the balance of power and make the larger parties take notice. It was an inspiring talk – however I believe a lot of the power in the vote that he talks about has more impact in a proportional representation system (like in Sweden) than it does in the US (where there is a distinct, two-party system).

To be honest I could probably write a synopsis for every talk I went too – the conference was that good! Thanks again to Chris Williams and the JSConf team. Can’t wait for next year!

Oh – and JSConf isn’t just for the US. JSConf EU will be on October 6/7th, JSConf Argentina May 19/20 and for those of you downunder JSConf is coming to Australia! There aren’t a lot of details yet – but it shouldn’t be missed!