Online is the key enabler
Last week – with my video camera in tow – I met up with Catherine Davis, managing director of London based firm Urban Ledgers who came on board as a Xero Partner earlier this year. Here’s what she had to say…
Release no.55
Today we’ve clocked up our 55th release of Xero!
There’s some amazingly dedicated and talented people behind the scenes who make this all possible – analysts, developers, designers, document writers, database dudes… In fact, an army of people working to help you worry less about accounting and more about what makes you get up in the morning – running your own business. So here’s to another 55 releases!
For our NZ customers this release marks our first step to help you prepare for the upcoming GST rate change. Today we simply included the new 15% tax rates but we’ve written up an overview of what to expect over the next few weeks in Help Center.
If you’re in the UK you’ll love the ability to make manual adjustments to VAT. This has been on our to-do list for a while so we’re especially pleased to be able to get this out into the wild. In fact, we’re so pleased we made a video about it.
No matter what region you’re in there’s also a few other things to enjoy:
- Spend/Receive Money Updates – more editing options on unreconciled spend and receive monies, and reconciled transactions
- Report Updates – with the Journal Report we’ve introduced a new parameter to show only manually posted journals and Reconciliation Reports now include the Journal Report
- Ledger Plan – a new offering for organizations which need end-of year reporting primarily
You can see a full list of all the changes in our release notes.
Reducing fraud
Front page of our local paper this morning was the story: Police inquiry into missing students funds
It’s very distressing that organizations that should be doing so much good in the community are put at risk because of the dishonesty of a few. Unfortunately we see this occur far too frequently.
Desktop accounting software, where just a few people have control of financial records, makes it very easy and tempting for fraud to occur. It’s relatively easy to cook the books or just not provide them. It could be months later when fraud is discovered.
Online accounting is the ideal control for reducing the temptation and ability for fraud in community organizations. Here are some of the ways.
- Multiple people can see the books at any time. Xero even has a read only view for trustees to sort through the numbers.
- Direct bank feeds allow anyone authorized to see the bank balance, without needing access to online banking.
- Expense claims and Accounts Payable have to be approved. There is workflow and multiple user roles to ensure proper segregation of duties.
- Reports are easy to generate and can be done and circulated within days of the end of month
The benefits in terms of cost and continuity (if your treasurer resigns you can simply give the new person access with no downtime) are obvious enough. Simply for good governance reasons, online accounting is compelling.
Listen to the teacher
We had a nice email in from one of our new schools on Xero.
“Xero has totally ‘revitalised’ our school accounting and financial practices! We can now make better decisions based-on accurate, up-to-date information. The biggest surprise is how easily staff have made the transition – they have found it straightforward and intuitive! Now we are spending less time but getting better outcomes. Changing to Xero is one of the best decision we have made.”
Roy Sye Principal – Tamatea Intermediate School, Napier
Our team was just stoked to get that message. Thank you Roy. One of the verticals we plan to target next year is the school market. We’ve been working with our accounting partners to understand specific school requirements. (You can join the conversation at on Linked In: Accounting for Schools)
Update August 16: Here’s another note just in …
“Xero has made a significant difference to our school in a very short time. With the introduction of Xero have reviewed our internal financial systems and we now have efficient and highly effective systems in place. Staff have found it very very easy to use and understand, very easy to navigate around and have said it requires less work on their part while giving us very up to date financial information. In a word we believe it is brilliant!”
Rohan Pearse – Mayfair school
The reason we’re so interested in schools include.
- Our accounting partners have asked us to. If you’re an accountant with school age kids and the board of trustee’s ask you what you do – the standard answer is “fireman!”. Accountants do not want to get dragged into the pain that has been school accounts.
- Cloud based accounting can save tens of millions in Education spend. No servers, no customization, remote working and auditing etc etc. As taxpayers and parents that is important to us.
- Schools are more complex than most small businesses in few key areas. If we can solve reporting for schools we know we have fulfilled our vision of a relational accounting system. What does that mean I hear you ask?
Design for mobile
We’ve been exploring some design enhancements to our mobile version of Xero. Our plan is to build it in HTML5 using Sencha. We also plan to make device specific versions available for Android and iPhone that will offer some additional functionality.
Obviously the form factor and touch interaction of phones is radically different to standard web design, so I’ve had to adapt my design process slightly.
I found a really excellent prototyping tool called LiveView (it’s free) that let’s you display whatever is on your Mac screen on your iPhone. It even lets you tap on the phone to trigger mouse clicks on the Mac. That way I can simulate real app navigation and interaction.
It’s so effective that I managed to fool Craig, our CTO, into thinking I’d actually built a working version of the app.
Considering the uproar about iPhones and Flash, it’s pretty ironic that I’m using Flash to design our iPhone app and thanks to LiveView, technically speaking, I’ve got Flash running on the iPhone. In all the bashing Apple has dished out regarding Flash (most of which I agree with), I wish there was some acknowledgement about the influence Flash has had on the design language and interaction experience of the iPhone. The iPhone’s animated interfaces and massive success with casual games owes a huge debt of gratitude to the extensive history and evolution of Flash mini games from the likes of Orisinal, Miniclip and the early generation of animated interaction design experiments by Praystation.
Also, thanks for your feedback on our direction with the mobile version of Xero Personal.
Read more about Mobile
The bigger they are, the harder they fail
As a long term observer of the technology business I’m enamoured of the Long Tail theory of internet era market dynamics where the almost zero cost of distribution enables lots of tiny market share holders to make enough money to respectably keep the lights on with some profits to spare.
In the ‘old world of business’ – as a side observation; five years ago that phrase used to be wishful marketing-think, but not so much these days – the costs of distributing products (even software) were so huge that unless your market share was a healthy double digit percentage then your market share was soon to become no digit percentage. The internet has blown that reality to smithereens.
Why Android is more interesting
Wouldn’t you know it, on the day my new iPhone four arrives and I can ditch the BlackBerry, I get to play with a Dell Streak running Android. Suddenly I’m not excited about my iPhone anymore.
And it’s all about Widgets. Look at the screen of the Streak. You see information.
Continue reading ›
Read more about Mobile
Ignite
Ignite events have taken off around the globe (now in more than 50 cities) and follow a fun format, where each speaker gets exactly 5 minutes for their 20 slides, so each slide displays for only 15 seconds.
I was part of the team that organised the second Ignite Wellington (New Zealand) event on Tuesday night, and the guy up the front introducing the speakers.
I’m a senior developer at Xero and enjoy getting involved with events like Ignite and giving something back to the local community. Wellington has a very active tech community, but Ignite is about more than just technology, it’s about all the things that are great about Wellington.
I was truly inspired by some of the topics presented:
Read more about Fun
Internet Industry Awards 2010
Recently Xero attended the second NZ Internet Industry Awards banquet and ceremony established by the Liz Dengate Thrush Foundation in recognition of companies and organizations using the internet to make a difference in New Zealand.
There are five categories and we were proud to win the Best Business Application award last year.
This year’s celebration was a very slick and glamorous affair held in the Parliament Banquet Hall again. We didn’t enter but our CTO Craig (pictured left) who accepted our award last year, was called on to hand out certificates and the award to finalists in the Best Business Application category – won this year by StarNow.
It’s great going to these events and seeing how others are building businesses online. What’s rather humbling is the growing number of people who know what Xero is and hearing them say how great they think it is. We were also really chuffed to realize that in four of the five categories, the winners were Xero customers!
The New Zealand Internet Industry Awards website has loads of photos taken on the night and the full list of categories and winners.
P.S. Linda Clarke was a great MC and the mini pavlovas and lemon meringue pies for dessert were delicious (hmmmm, not the first time I’ve mentioned dessert at such an event – I go for more than that, honest)!
Read more about Events
Best of Breed v. All In One
I’ve been on the road for the last couple of weeks. Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne last week and Silicon Valley this week. It’s been fun and very stimulating meeting with lots of partners and having a good look at the state of the small business web space in different countries. It’s clear that it’s still very early days but the small business web is becoming more interesting as new services and vendors emerge and connect.
We’re starting to notice some implications and new market dynamics as the industry is maturing.
When we first thought about doing Xero, we’d have assumed that three years in, we’d be doing all sorts of value added services over the accounting platform. Even though we’ve shipped more than 45 major updates, we’re now very aware that accounting is a broad minimum feature set – there’s always more to do. So we’ve stayed focussed on that.
As adoption of online services for small business has gained traction we’ve seen a number of new services arriving that link to Xero. Because these companies connect to Xero they haven’t had to write an accounting engine. They’ve been able to focus on improving specific business processes, often in a very elegant and high value fashion.
