To wit, the following is an overview of our agile design and development process, focusing on how rapid prototyping fits into our product development cycle.At Xero, we’re building a robust SaaS platform at lightning pace. To make it happen, our design and development process, along with our documentation, is extremely lightweight.

These days, many developers have adopted some form of agile development. One of the core tenets of agile development is that you only scope, plan and build what’s absolutely necessary to produce working software.

WorkingSoftware != UsableSoftware

One big problem with this approach is that too many people define “working software” in purely technical terms. That’s like making food and judging it by whether it’s cooked, not whether it’s edible or delicious.

If nobody wants it, it’s useless. You end up wasting days/weeks/months of effort.

Design is key to making things that people want. At Xero, we’ve taken the approach that design must come first. We make sure our software is easy for people to use before we build it.

Our design approach is also key to building software quickly with minimal documentation. We don’t waste time writing use-cases and specifications. We design and rapidly prototype our use-cases. It allows us to communicate, evaluate and improve our solutions before a single line of code is ever written.

ThePrototype == TheSpecifictaion

In our methodology, the prototype is the specification. It speaks for itself. Our developers use the prototype as their blueprint throughout the development process, all the way through to final QA testing.

It’s important to clarify what I mean by prototypes. We don’t create working prototypes. We create design prototypes called screenflows: click-by-click simulations of the user experience, showing every interaction necessary to complete a given task. A screenflow is based on a scenario of a person completing a common task. We simulate all the screens, all the clicks and all the data entry necessary to start and complete the task. The result is a slideshow that simulates somebody using the software.

Screenflows are an ideal blueprint for developers. They make it obvious what needs to happen, when, where, how and why.

Documentation == Ill Communication

Screenflows leave nothing to the imagination, since they detail every click and every interaction. I recommend avoiding written specifications as much as possible – the screenflow should be the spec. In some situations, a few bullet points are necessary to outline some underlying business rules. If the business rules require anything greater than a few bullet points then it’s best to show it in the screenflow, rather than using words to explain the solution.

Show it, don’t tell it.

Using words to explain a design solution invariably leads to misunderstandings and poor implementation.

Through this prototyping methodology we can makes dozens, even hundreds, of small and large refinements and fundamental improvements to a solution very, very quickly. We achieve a level of efficiency and effectiveness that could never be done through written specifications or even code level prototyping.

Design != PrettyGraphics

One dangerous misconception is that design is simply styling – choosing colours and making shiny graphics. Colours and graphics are important to the user experience, but the true purpose of design is to guide people through a process, making the process obvious and simple.

In the case of software, design needs to guide people through the process of managing information: entering data and getting data in return. Design guides people through the process of knowing what information to enter, where to enter it and what to do next. More than colours and graphics, it relies on information design and interaction design – strong visual hierarchy, simple language and obvious visual feedback.

By doing design prototypes you can develop the user experience with much more precision and far less effort than writing pages of specifications. That should be music to your ears. Unfortunately, many project managers, business analysts and information architects still cling to their documentation like a bad habit.

If you embrace design-led rapid prototyping I guarantee that your software (and web sites) will become dramatically better and your development time will be drastically reduced.

If (Useful) PleaseComment

If you find this interesting please let me know. If so, you should come along to my session at Web 2.0 Expo and workshop at Web09 that goes into much more detail.

UPDATE: You can see my slides here.

Today we’ve raised the bar again, by releasing a fixed asset register within Xero that allows business owners to manage their asset register so that accountants can keep depreciation up-to-date monthly, or annually with minimal work.

This is another example of how the web is changing the way we do accounting.  Managing fixed assets has always been a job done by the accountant at year-end, which means that the business only gets full visibility of their financial performance & position once a year.  By bringing this information into Xero, you are one step closer to having complete numbers at your finger-tips anytime, anywhere.

For accountants this means you can spread the workload for your clients during the year. With the numbers always up to date and accurate (and now including depreciation), year end will be much faster.

Click here to see the detailed help for Fixed Assets.

We’d love to get your feedback.

Helping you get paid

Managing cashflow has never been more important. To help out, we’ve turned the Awaiting Payment tab in Accounts Receivable into a debt collection tool.

The process is simple:

1. Simply click the overdue amount under Money Coming In on the Dashboard (or go to the Awaiting Payment tab in Accounts Receivable)
2. All invoices that are overdue or past their expected payment date will be highlighted in red.
3. Expand an invoice to view the contact’s phone number then give them a call (regardless of how great your accounting system, the best way to get payment on time is to talk to your customers).
4. Record a note about when they’ll pay and set the expected date.
5. Save the note and send a statement to follow-up your call. In your email, confirm the details they agreed upon.

Watch the short video below to see how it works:

Match your invoices to your brand

We know how important your brand is and your invoices need to show it. We’re working on a complete invoice customization solution, but to handle the most common customization needs you can now:

• Position your logo
• Edit the page headings
• Choose from a selection of fonts
• Decide which columns to show
• Hide or show the payment advice
• Plus, other layout options

Find out how to customize the look of your PDF invoices.

Also in this release: Import contacts, date shortcuts

• You can now import contacts from your old accounting system or Outlook. First, export them to CSV and then modify them in Excel or an online spreadsheet like Google Docs to match the format used in Xero.
• Please thank Kim Fowler for this awesome suggestion: simply enter +7 or +30 (or + any number) in any date field to automatically calculate the date.

For detailed instructions on importing contacts read the help or watch the short video below.

You can read this month’s full release notes here.

Please let us know what you think.

My session is on rapid prototyping – a passion of mine and the not-so-secret sauce behind Xero.

This expo has always been one of the most important conferences to watch for emerging web technologies and strategies. The whole schedule is jam packed with amazing people and topics.

If you want to go, just use this discount code websf09spr35 to get 35% off the ticket price.

Now we’ve made the process better for those accounting practices using MYOB Accountants Office General Ledger.  We are offering an overnight conversion process, via a special upload page, that converts an MYOB AO GL backup file into a Xero organisation, complete with Chart of Accounts and comparative annual balances.

We even send you pre-populated bank authority forms for your clients to sign and return directly to Xero, which makes moving from MYOB BankConnect for the new financial year a breeze.

To watch this in action, check out MYOB AO Export, then contact your local Xero Account Manager for assistance in getting set up to convert your AO GLs before 31 March.

Soon we are releasing Fixed Assets and Depreciation, to ensure that monthly management reports and annual accounts are accurate and up to date – an essential requirement for your clients in the current economic climate.

With Safari 4 Apple has introduced a bunch of new features (other than the new location for the tabs). Some of these new features include “Top Sites”, which shows users the most frequently visited Web pages, “Cover Flow” for flicking through your browsing history and a full history search, which not only searches through URLs and title of visited page, but also the complete text of the page itself. In fact, a lot of user exhanacments appear to be around the browser history and making it easier to get to your favourite web sites.

For web developers there is even more to like: new CSS effects, HTML 5 offline suport, and, of course, full Acid 3 compliance (a perfect 100 out of 100 score).

In addition to all this Apple claims the new version of Safari to be the fastest browser around. To do this they’ve introduced the Nitro engine, an advanced JavaScript engine designed to make web browsing faster. Apple claims increases in speed of 30 times over IE7 and 3 times faster than Firefox 3. CNet have done some independent testing of Safari 4 to test those claims and it does appear that right now Safari 4 is the fastest browser on the planet. Check out the graphs here.

This is great news for Xero: applications like Xero love fast browsers. In fact the beauty of the current iteration of the browser wars is that it’s all been about performance – which can only be a good thing for developers and users alike. It actually feels much faster than I expected. Xero has always felt pretty quick to me (I guess I would have to say that ) but with Safari 4 it feels really smooth and responsive – especially those parts of the app that use a significant amount of JavaScript (like bank rec).

I have not had one problem with Safari 4 so far – no unexpected behavior, no crashes – however because it’s a pre-release version you do have to be careful.

Safari 4 is in beta for both Mac and PC, available as a free download from http://www.apple.com/safari/download/.

Webstock, a design and technology conference held in Wellington, was once again packed with ideas, passion, inspiration and fun.

Highlights for me:

• Fiona Romeo – how the Royal Observatory is using crowd sourcing to get people involved with science, making science easy fun and interesting, in turn people are actually having a significant impact on science. She showed several different projects, each of them was a brilliantly simple example of how to engage and harness the energy of thousands of people…
  • Upload your night sky photos to a Flickr group, then software analyzes the images, identifying and tagging the star system in your photos.
  • Galaxy Zoo is a game where you’re shown a photo of a star system and you need to classify the type of galaxy. It’s easy, fun and addictive (sound familiar?). In the past, they had one full time employee do this over several years. Now they have thousands of people all over the world processing millions of images, resulting in the discovery of new galaxies!!

• Adrian Holovaty, Matt Jones, Tom Coates – were all riffing on the same theme: surfacing metadata to expose implicit behavioral patterns – making the invisible visible. Help people discover what’s happening in their neighborhood. Other interesting examples were a plant that Twitters when its water is low or a bridge that Twitters when it’s opening or closing. The goal: Help people become aware of what’s all around and aware of their own behavior. Awareness let’s us see the world in a new way. It’s also the first step to change.

• Ze Frank – finding fun ways to inject some humanity into technology and create ‘social resonance’. In the coldness of cyberspace people are discovering, creating and sharing their quirks , vulnerabilities, and moments of tenderness or absurdity. Ze is inspiring people to embrace their beautiful imperfections and he likes to challenge our collective beliefs.

Those are just a few of the big highlights. The list could just keep going for miles.

Whatever business you’re in, you could and should be applying many of these ideas in your work.

A roadmap is really only useful if you know your destination, otherwise it’s just a bunch of ordered features, so the first question to ask is:

What is the destination that this roadmap takes our company/product to?
It’s quite likely there will be some competing goals here – maybe it’s to open up new markets, or maybe it’s to innovate in your existing market. You may need to focus on one goal, or a few, but it’s important to first understand your goals so that you can measure the impact of each project and make sure you’re getting closer to the destination.

The next question to ask is:

What’s the quickest route to the destination?
This is what roadmaps are all about – knowing your destination and planning how to get there most efficiently.

Once you understand the goals, then get your stakeholders in a room and chuck ideas up on a whiteboard.   Rank each as high/medium/low impact – based on how close they get you to your goals.  Then rank each as high/medium/low difficulty – based on how long they will take to deliver.

The high impact, low difficulty projects are a no-brainer
Now you can start to plan the roadmap against your goals.  There will be dependencies between features and SDP (software delivery platform) projects needed to support customers, operations, billing etc – but you can prioritise the projects with high impact, low difficulties first, then the high/med and med/low projects etc.

Communicate the roadmap based on the goals
It’s good to keep your goals in front of everyone and show what goal each project is working towards.  The roadmap below shows goals as ‘swim-lanes’, with release milestones marked along the top.  Some people like to give each release a code-name – I like to give it a theme, which sets people’s expectations about what’s in the release (ie: yes – hooking up the twitter API is a great idea, we’ll look at it in the networking release).

This has become quite an effective template for visually communicating priorities between projects, how our roadmap is meeting our goals and how there are dependencies from release to release and between product and SDP.

If you’d like to have a play with your own roadmap, download this roadmap template for Microsoft Visio and fill in the blanks.  Let me know how you get on via the comments section below.

I’m not going to explain either here (you can read Tony’s take on it for an overview of both technologies) but I thought I would add my thoughts with regards to decisions we’ve made at Xero on this very subject.

On this website it states quite clearly that we’re the world’s easiest accounting system and that’s what we want our customers to experience. What we’ve built (and are still building) though is one of the world’s most sophisticated accounting engines – one that will hopefully become the number 1 accounting engine in the cloud.

One of the reasons we’ve been able to achieve this is our choice of storing data in a relational database (in our case utilizing Microsoft SQL Server). The idea of key/value stores is essentially a hark back to the old days of hierarchical databases, a technology which ironically underpins most of the current desktop accounting systems in the world. We believe that by being able to store accounting information in a logical and structured relational form has allowed us to build a powerful platform to evolve our accounting engine over a relatively short period of time.

Let’s take a peek behind the curtain:

Xero’s accounting engine combines a multi-perspective general ledger with an event-driven transaction engine. I’ll try to explain what that means:

The transaction engine stores documents such as invoices and bank transactions and contains all of the logic necessary to process those documents based on actions by agents (users or contacts). The outcome of these actions is to produce journals in our general ledger and because each document keeps a record of its actions, they can all be replayed or rewound when something changes and new journals can be created as and when required.

The general ledger resembles a standard journal-based double-entry accounting system, however we’ve built in the capability to model different types of transactions in the same journal. To begin with we modeled both accrual transactions (what happens when you raise an accounts payable invoice) and cash transactions (what happens when you pay that invoice) in the same journal – allowing us at any time to look at the GL in both a cash or accrual perspective. As we’ve added complexity to the system (such as tracking and multi-currency – coming soon I promise) more perspectives are added to the GL. Think of it as a dice – depending on how you look at the dice you get a different number – that’s the power of our GL.

The diagram below shows how the two engines fit into our architecture:

The transaction engine and general ledger operate like two accounting engines in one because they both contain copies of the data, one from a business perspective and one from an accounting perspective. This is beneficial because typically in a small business data is fragmented which leads to poor communication, poor visibility, high costs and unnecessary delays. The power of Xero is that it is at once both a business and an accounting solution, so its important that our business and accounting layers are self-contained yet fully integrated and that we’re able to connect our business and accounting layers with the outside world.

Why use a relational database for what appears to be inherently hierarchical data? Because it is the simplicity of our data design due to the relational model that makes Xero so powerful and allows us to achieve seamless integration between our transaction and general ledger layers.

So am I advocating relational databases in all scenarios? Absolutely not! You should always go with a “horses for courses” strategy when choosing technology. But for accounting data relational data structures offer huge benefits, both in simplifying application architecture and delivering a more integrated experience. The ideas and strategies behind key/value stores are sound and there are some very smart people behind them: my point is, though, that relational databases are not dying, let alone dead and the use of relational data design can be extremely powerful.

You can learn a lot from what others are doing, especially the big players like Google, eBay, Amazon and Facebook. In fact Facebook is a great example of an organization that has applied different technologies to solve specific problems: a MySQL relational backend, memcached (essentially an in-memory key/value store that sits higher in the application stack) for caching almost everything and key/value stores using Cassandra for email searching. This is where I see massively scalable architectures moving: choosing specific technologies to solve specific problems – pragmatism over ideology.

I have more to say on this topic, especially around what you can learn from scaling key/value stores and how can this be applied to relational databases – will leave that stuff for next time.

What is unusual is people’s surprise when I tell them that the best way of increasing their security when using Xero is to choose a strong password and the ability to keep it secure; rather than any security measures that Xero has implemented.

I’ve heard mixed opinions from customers on how sensitive they feel their accounting data is. But picking a secure password isn’t simply about preventing access to a particular site,  the consequences of poorly-selected passwords can be devastating. Having your social networking access compromised could be embarrassing but finding your identity has been stolen or bank account compromised is far worse.

OK take a deep breath before we get carried away with paranoia. These things can happen but ask yourself “How many people do I personally know who’ve had this happen to them?”  Personally – no one.

So what have Xero done to protect me?

•    We make sure you don’t have to share a login with any other user, as all organisations signed up to Xero get unlimited users. Therefore there’s no excuse for sharing logins and passwords.
•    It may seem annoying at times, but we’ve purposefully excluded the ability for browsers to remember your Xero password. You have to type it each time. This means no one else     will be able to access your data whether your computer is stolen or if you simply leave it unattended and the timeout returns to the login page.
•    We make sure you use a password of at least 8 characters containing both letters and non-alphabetical characters.

So what can you do to make sure you’re secure?

Here’s some commonsense rules that will help you with security and help train your memory as well:

1. Use different passwords. If you’re signing up for something that doesn’t need to be secure you could use the same password for all similar sites but beware if cracked or guessed it could well be applied to any other site you may have signed up to. Following this same rationale – make sure all your secure sites use different passwords
2. Choose passwords that are hard to remember (for other people). Birthdays, names, pets or maiden names are all easily scavenged from Google searches and your public profiles displayed on other sites.
3. Ideally choose a password that makes no sense and is a mixture of upper and lower case and non-alphanumeric characters. Take the first letter of a long phrase such as “I love to sing in the shower. No one can hear me and it lasts for an hour.” This can be used to create and remember a really good password “Iltsits.Nochmail4ah”
4. Without being patronising, please don’t use passwords suggested in blogs or other sites.  Although some sites can provide tools to help you remember a chosen password.
5. Never (and we really mean never) give you password to anyone else, no matter how much you trust them. If you think someone knows your password, change it immediately.
6. Make sure that your email account has a strong password, as if it is possible to get in to your email account it is possible to get into most of your online services. Use a different password for your email account than you use for Xero.

Other tools

There are password software solutions available to download to make entering passwords easier. These may mean you only have to enter a single password to access the application which automatically associates the real password with the site. These may be useful but make sure they don’t fall foul of any of the issues above before you consider implementing them.

There’s a new conference coming up in April called WEB09. The line-up looks like a cracker. I’m particularly looking forward to John Casasanta from Tap Tap Tap, Christian Schalk of Google, plus local heroes Karl van Randow of CactusLab and Jarred Bishop.

The conference is being organized by the Godfather of the Auckland web community, John Ballinger. John came to one of my Skyrize workshops and asked me to do the workshop and speak at the conference on rapid prototyping. My workshop will be on Thursday 16 April, although details aren’t posted on the WEB09 site just yet.

Let me know if you’re interested in going, I have a few discount codes to give away.

Sad to see that Xero is not going full steam ahead with their own practice management system… even a fully integrated system is still separate and will inevitably look and feel different unless you have a direct say on the interface and functionality.

We decided not to do Practice Management for a few reasons:

1. We don’t believe Practice Management fits a fully online model yet, as good Practice Management should be fully linked with you document management and email management systems, which are still predominantly installed applications;
2. Good Practice Management is a very specialised and localised application, and so should be tailored to the unique needs of each accounting practice;
3. When we saw what our friends at Acclipse are doing, it was clear that we should partner with them, while still providing links to the existing systems available today.

The exciting aspect of the relationship between Xero and Acclipse is that our teams are working very closely together to provide a seamless experience for accountants, from Practice Management to the newly released Xero Accountants Edition and to end customer accounting.

Check out this screen from Acclipse Practice Manager to see what we mean:

We think that is pretty seamless.

Apple, iPhone and iTunes – Impacts on the Wireless World (pdf)

Here are some highlights …

You may recall that 3G iPhone was launched globally on July 11th, 2008. Within the first 6 months, around 12 million 3G iPhones have been sold, with significant majority in the U.S., to AT&T subscribers. However, as of now, iPhone is available in over 80 countries, through more than 100 mobile operators. So, it truly is a global product.

… about 50% of all mobile Internet access in the U.S. is through a 3G iPhone

Application developers generally wonder which platform to focus on for their development. Sometimes (not always) numbers speak for themselves! Apple has launched the App Store for iPhones in iTunes on July 11th 2008 with only 500 apps, (about 150 of them free); In December 2008, this number exceeded 10,000 apps (which is a remarkable and record?breaking number to achieve within 5 months). In addition, in the same period, 500 Million application downloads to iPhones have occurred. That is about 100 Million app downloads per month!

For the mobile industry, 2009 is expected to be the year of applications. It is the applications where the user excitements are at; it is the applications that will justify and drive the deployment of wireless broadband / 4G networks in the future; and it is the applications where ultimately the money is.

If I was a young fella doing it all again I’d be investing my time here. The mobile platforms provides an access to market reducing significantly the costs to entry. This is an area where you can play with minimal capital and there are endless possibilities for increasingly complex applications.

That access to market is driving enterprises like banks to release applications for brand perhaps rather than utility. See the Westpac icon below on my iTunes front page today.

This signals that enterprise customers will pay for bespoke development for an iPhone application. So developers wanting to break into iPhone development have fee paying opportunities to hone their skills before building their million dollar idea.

Maybe it’s time my near 5 year old got his own Mac and learned a bit of Cocoa programming.  I may be able to turn him cash-flow positive much earlier than I originally planned.

Xero already makes it easy to raise invoices, send them by email then follow them up with a statement.  But with our update today, you can now offer your customers the ability to pay your invoices online using their credit card.

By using a free PayPal account, you can now add a ‘Pay online now’ link to all your invoices, allowing your customers to pay using VISA, Mastercard, American Express or PayPal (PayPal feeds apply on credit card transactions). PayPal will automatically notify you by email when payment is received from a customer. Find out more in help or watch the short video below.

This is a great payment option for businesses that don’t have credit card facilities (like Holiday Rental Properties) or businesses that have international customers or who are selling consumers or expense claimable size products & services and with our multi-currency module (coming in early 2009) you will be able to invoice in foreign currencies and reconcile your PayPal account directly inside of Xero.

Other updates released today include:

• With our Global version you can configure your own sales tax rates
• Pay or receive a refund against a credit note
• Australian users can now import their chart of accounts from MYOB

Read the full release notes here.

We have a dedicated team working on our developer API. We really want to hear what features you want so we’ve started using User Voice so you can tell us what we should be working on first. http://blog.xero.com/developer/feedback/

We’ve just updated our API this morning. One of our new features allows us to return if an invoice has been paid. This handles the subscription engine scenario.

For example :

1. An event registration site issues invoices on registration.
2. The invoices are sent to Xero using PUT Invoice
3. Bank Feeds are received into Xero each night (or manually uploaded)
4. Bank Reconciliation is completed in Xero. Payments are matched to invoices.
5. Event registration application queries Xero using GET Invoices to see which invoices have been paid

Here is a sample XML fragment of the GET Invoices response.

<Invoices>
<Invoice>
<InvoiceType>ACCREC</InvoiceType>
.......
    <Payments>
<Payment>
<Date>2008-10-01T00:00:00</Date>
<Amount>5.0000</Amount>
</Payment>
<Payment>
<Date>2008-10-29T00:00:00</Date>
<Amount>411.0000</Amount>
</Payment>
</Payments>

This will be great for anyone building club management or any other subscription based applications.

For developers we also have our CodePlex site for Open Source Projects.

How else can we help?

But let me step back a bit to paint the picture.I started accounting at Napier Boys High School with Fred Westrupp. I’m pretty sure we did accounting from 5th to 7th form. From what I can remember Fred was your classic accountant. He looked like an accountant. And like most accountants I know, once you get to know them, they have a very dry sense of humour. Fred was passionate about accounting and or some reason I was drawn to it as well. I liked that it was logical, symmetrical and that you put things into the right place and the numbers all worked out. Call me a geek but double entry accounting has always appealed to me.

I think it’s also why I like computer programming. Bob McCaw at Napier Boys got us into computing in the Apple II BASIC Programming days. It’s logical and when you get it right it works.

I did both accounting at computing at Victoria but I’m sure that I actually learned more at high school. Certainly I learned bookkeeping which didn’t seem to be taught at university.

When we started Xero I had to convince our first few people (like Craig, Kirk and Phil) that accounting was interesting and for the first few weeks we were drawing T accounts to handle the full life cycle of business transactions. I was determined that we were going to build a state of the art accounting engine that leveraged the power of a relational database. Kirk completely got it and not only built the double entry accounting engine but solved the problem of modeling cash and accrual transactions in a single engine. We’re really proud of that.

Once we had completed the R&D phase of Xero and selected our platform and approach we quite quickly built the core engine. That engine allowed debits and credits to be posted, and they had to balance. The engine would not allow things to get out of sync.
Essentially that is all you need to do accounting and was one of the reasons why we launched Xero with fairly limited functionality because the journaling system would allow us to post anything to deal with any transaction.

Over the years I’ve worked with lots of accounting systems and because of my systems background I’ve generally been appalled at their underlying file or database structure. Some systems allow one legged journals and all sorts of things that just allow errors to creep in. We didn’t want any of that.

Once you start building functionality on top of the accounting engine you’re essentially just making it easier for the user to create those base journals. Once you have all the features that people need they should never have to do a journal. We’re not there yet but have made a huge amount of progress. We love asking what accountants are using journals for because that is an indicator of functionality we’re missing and normally an opportunity to improve business processes.

Once you start building accounting modules over the core engine, like Debtors, you create subsidiary ledgers. That means that the account becomes a control or header account over a large number of transactions. Summary accounting reports like Profit & Loss and the Balance Sheet present a summary over the entire Debtors Ledger.

The functionality of the accounting application needs to handle all the things you do with debtors. Invoicing, receipting, credit notes etc to keep everything in sync. If you allow direct posting into the debtors control then you can get out of sync and can create a mess. In our view you should never be able to post to control accounts.

So being asked whether we could do it just reinforces to me how bad previous accounting engines actually are they would need to allow that. We’ve even seen some of the most popular products adjust the database schema on a period role. That is appalling. In a relational database do you need periods at all?

Another good example is hierarchical charts of accounts. We often see companies with charts of several hundred accounts with the same groups repeating. There are so many accounts it’s impossible to get meaningful management information out of reports. That is why we implemented our version of cost centers called Tracking, which leverages the relational database to report across multiple dimensions.

So we’ve done a lot of work to make Xero the worlds easiest accounting system. We’ve also done a lot of work under the hood to build what we believe is the most elegant accounting engine ever.

I hope Fred would be proud.

These are hosted at our Microsoft CodePlex site http://codeplex.com/xerolabs

One of the first projects we’ve put up is a tool that allows you to build custom invoice templates in Microsoft Word 2007.

We’ve had lots of requests for more flexible formatting of invoices. At some stage in the future we’ll have a great way to do this inside the Xero web application but we wanted to address this request as soon as we could.

We’ve decided not to release this functionality as part of the standard Xero product because it’s not our model to install software, though power users may find this functionality useful.  We hope that others will take the code, extend it and build their own tools on top of Xero.

You can download Xero Invoicing for Microsoft Office 2007 here. Other open source projects in the works are a Microsoft Outlook contacts importer and the Xero API wrapper for C#.

• state.co.nz
• amp.co.nz
• toyota.co.nz
• msd.govt.nz
• tranzmetro.co.nz

These sites cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to build, maintain and promote. Adding a redirect to the www address is a basic, ten second job for any web geek (see: wildcard DNS redirect).

Please try your site now. If somebody can’t access your site by simply typing your domain and the suffix (ie .com) then go fix it now!! Getting an error is a bad experience. You’re losing business and you’re frustrating people who happen to be persistent and knowledgeable enough to re-try with www in front.

Care to out any other offenders?

As of yesterday, you can now raise a credit note directly against a customer or supplier account and you will be prompted to apply it to any outstanding invoices, or you can carry it as a credit until the next invoice you raise.

We’ve also made some improvements to our Accounts Receivable dashboard and to all reports that include credit notes. You can read the full release notes here.

This is an exciting release for us as even though we’ve kept the changes to a minimum, we’ve set up the accounting engine for the next 12 months of features that we’ll be delivering like foreign currency invoices and bank accounts.

As you’d expect, raising and applying credit notes is as simple as working with invoices – here’s a quick walkthrough.

Improvements to credit notes are the major part of today’s release. You can now raise credit notes directly against a customer or supplier in either accounts receivable or accounts payable.

We’ll post more details soon, in the mean time you can view the release notes here.

Thanks to all those who fed me coffee and zapped me to keep going – I’m off home now!

Our Xero network continues to grow and one of the interesting parts of my job at Xero is identifying new opportunities and industries to work with.

We have a number of tourism operators using Xero which led me to think about what system would these tourism operators be using for their online bookings, and how could we make their lives even easier?

BookIt is the premier online booking processing service for the tourism industry, providing solutions for many of New Zealand’s leading tourism companies including Tourism Holdings, New Zealand Tourism Online and Christchurch Airport. Suppliers of tourism products including accommodation, activities, tours and transport can benefit from the increased exposure that BookIt offers through the reseller network or use the BookIt system on their own website to take direct bookings.

The BookIt system automates many routine tasks including payments, settlements, vouchering, cancellations, amendments and invoicing. We are working with the team at BookIt to take this one step further by integrating with Xero. If you would like to participate in trialling this integration then we’d love to hear from you – please contact us on network@xero.com.

We need a few beta customers to make sure everything is working properly. If anyone is using Zeald and Xero and would like to help out please send a note to network@xero.com.

As Google Chrome is based on Webkit, the core engine under Safari, it seems to work fine. The browser detection objects we used haven’t been updated yet so we had to do some tweaking to allow users to log in from Chrome. We’ve updated BrowserHawk settings to pass Chrome through as Safari 3.1.  (You can check your browser here:  http://help.xero.com/browser)

We thought that some of our geek fans would be all over Chrome today and want to test it with an application that uses ajax and javascript heavily.  Let us know what you think of performance and any issues you find. 

Some of the top requests from our customers we’ve addressed with this release.

New price list report
There are two new reports for items sold. Firstly, you can get a breakdown of the items sold from your Price List by running a Sales by Item report. This tells you how many units of an item you have sold and what was the average price of the item sold. You can then compare this to the unit price entered on your list. Secondly, the Price List Invoice Summary report is related to the new report above as it provides you with a list of all the invoices that made up the total sales for the chosen item on your Sales by Item report.

More invoice flexibility
With your invoices you can now print to PDF, an accounts payable invoice (not a Tax Invoice) that you’ve entered in Xero. And you can also prepay accounts receivable or accounts payable invoices via the invoice itself. Read more here.

There’s many more updates detailed in the release notes. Have a play.

My Xero is where you manage your information in Xero, your companies and subscriptions. We’ve got lots planned for My Xero and today we’ve released some significant updates.

We have updated the design of My Xero by moving the profile and billing information to separate tabs, rather than being in the right column.

We’ve streamlined the process of adding an organisation by eliminating several steps and instead taking you straight to the setup wizard. Of course, you can always stop and save at any point in the wizard by using the exit button at the bottom of screen. If you do, you will see a new progress bar in My Xero, showing how far along you’ve gotten.

There’s a long list of other changes, some you may notice and many others that are happening behind the scenes to make your experience as smooth as we can. Let us know what you think.