Ideal for small businesses the new card offers a great business credit card rate and if the balance is paid off in full each month, you get up to 50 days interest-free on purchases.
GlobalPlus is a BNZ offering for its business customers who want to earn Air New Zealand Airpoints Dollars TM for every purchase they make on their credit card.
It also helps small business owners to easily seperate personal from businesss spending by using this card instead of their personal one.
Xero supports the new card to deliver automated bank feeds, and we are included in the card offering. Customers who take up the new GlobalPlus Business Visa can try Xero for free for 60 days.
Next Wednesday I’m doing my final workshop of 2008 on Rapid Prototyping in Flash (no experience with Flash necessary). In addition to the hands-on work, I also show a lot of different prototypes that I’ve built over the years, including several from the very early days of Xero and a few new ones. As I’ve said in the past, rapid prototyping is essential to how we do things at Xero.
The next workshop is happening Wednesday 26 November in Wellington. Here’s a brief summary of the what the workshop provides:
Hands-on lessons for building prototypes in Flash (no experience in Flash necessary)
Insights into the process of design iterations
Insights into working with developers, investors and other stakeholders
Receive a video tutorial plus design templates with a library of design elements
I’ve been doing these workshops for the past few months and there’s always a great mix of designers, developers and biz dev people attending. Be sure to register ASAP, because it sells out every time and registration is limited to 10 people to make sure everyone has quality hands-on time.
This is a blog post I’ve been meaning to write for years. There remains a rampant problem in NZ: sites that lead to a Address Not Found error if you neglect to type www before the web address, for example…
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.
One of our most requested features has been the ability to raise a credit note directly against a customer or supplier account. We’ve delayed for a while delivering on this so that we could take some time to extend our accounting engine to support this and a lot of other future features we have on our roadmap.
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.
The upgrade to Xero over the weekend has been completed. We hope the downtime didn’t cause you too much inconvenience.
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!
As announced, this weekend we have some scheduled downtime. Many members of our devoted team will be working around the clock to make this upgrade go smoothly.
We’re installing a live webcam so you can keep an eye on Craig Walker, our Chief Technology Officer.
In addition, you will have the option to supply Craig with coffee OR give him a jolt of electric shock therapy - your choice - as a way to make sure he stays focused and motivated.
Be sure to visit go.xero.com during the scheduled maintenance period and show your support.
We’re doing some upgrades to Xero this coming weekend, 8-9 November. During the upgrade Xero will be unavailable for approximately 24 hours beginning at 12:00am Sunday 9 November NZT (click here for your local times).
The upgrade includes some great improvements to credit notes, plus it lays the foundation for many upcoming features, including multi-currency.
We’re sorry if this causes any inconvenience.
You might regard it as a welcome holiday from your accounting!
“The research confirms what our clients from around the country have been telling us for quite some time - constant changes in legislation make it just so much harder to do business.”
“With that in mind, we’re calling on any future Government to be mindful of that impact on New Zealand business - not just in terms of specific pieces of legislation, but the number and scope of changes business owners and managers have to be aware of to remain compliant.”
This is the problem with desktop installed software. Government is inhibited in it’s ability to make improvements because it can take 1-3 years for changes in desktop software to be rippled through to small businesses.
Online software can be changed as much as you like with no effort required from the small business owner. So the Government can continuously and rapidly reduce compliance activities and other costs on small businesses.
It’s the role of software providers to make things easier and more responsive so our companies to be globally competitive, not slow things down.
As small businesses contribute over 38% of GDP (over $50b) a small increase in productivity and survivability can make a huge difference to New Zealand as a whole. Therefore desktop software and it’s slow update cycle is unnecessarily holding New Zealand back.
I was an absent judge this year but was delighted to be at the final award ceremony tonight.
Congratulations to BIMCache who won, and launch next month in Vegas. BONZ and Life Inc were worthy runners up. All the finalists were impressive.
I had a number of thoughts as I watched the finalists.
The standard of presentations and ability of the presenters to quickly convey their business has stepped up significantly from last year.
The short business summaries had massively improved in some cases. When you are judging and have to read a stack of business plans, a well designed, concise and branded document is so much more digestible.
The finalists were all non-trivial businesses and almost all global from day one. The new generation of business owners are truly global. That was cool to see.
Even businesses that are fairly common in these sort of business planning competitions, like clothing brands, all had unique point of difference and business model, whether it be building and using a community in interesting ways, or extending the value proposition over the internet. I heard some great new ideas through this process.
Well done everyone. Wellington has become a hub of entrepreneurial activity. I was very proud.
We’ve worked hard to build our scalable software platform and to validate our offering with sales in New Zealand, the UK and Australia with our early market entry work. Within our own resources we’ve managed to notch up well over 2000 customers fairly quickly.
So now we have a fantastic platform and the next big challenge is to scale sales. To build a global brand yourself is incredibly expensive. So we’ve always believed that the way to large markets is to partner with those organisations that are already talking to your potential customers. In the online small business world that’s banks and telecommunications carriers.
This channel strategy is fundamentally different to traditional small business software which is normally sold through a retail channel where you pay it all upfront (at your risk) with hidden ongoing maintenance and support costs - rather than pay as you go (which is at the risk of the supplier).
We are doing some great work with the banks and appreciate their support. Working alongside those banking relationships Telecom New Zealand is the best partner we could possibly have in New Zealand. Not many other companies can market like Telecom does, and provide a company like Xero with exposure to the vast but diverse small business market.
Over the last 6 months, Telecom has worked hard on its brand. Part of their new strategy is to visibly support New Zealand businesses. Earlier this week Made From New Zealand launched with Telecom’s support and this announcement today shows that they are willing to directly assist young companies such as Xero.
The announcement signals the delivery of a commitment we’ve made to our accounting and broader ecosystem partners. Xero will deliver revenue opportunities to you. Contact your Xero account manager to make sure you’ve got the training and resources in place. From mid November we’ll be driving customers to our Advisor directory and they’ll be looking for partners to work with.
A big thank you to the many staff inside Telecom that helped over the last year to get us there. Your advice, insights and guidance are very much appreciated.
