The session will cover two areas

1. Technical information and feedback about connecting to Xero
2. Building your partner business alongside Xero in offshore markets

The half-day session is in Auckland on Thursday 2 Feb (the day before Xerocon New Zealand). Our country managers from Australia, the UK, USA and NZ will be there for you to connect to. This is a great time to build a relationship with these key people and find out about the markets we operate in.

Once the workshop is over, developers will be able to unwind with some of our accounting Partners at the drinks that evening.

We’re expecting around 500 accountants to attend #Xerocon this year so this should be the biggest event you can do in 2012 to move the needle on your business.

So if you use the Xero API and want some fresh ideas, we’d love to see you at the workshop. Find out more and register here.

Tradevine gives businesses the tools to efficiently sell online. The integration with Xero ensures data is synchronized instantly between both systems, giving customers the combination of inventory, sales, purchasing, plus accounting all-in-one.

Watch this video to see how it works.

Just out of beta, Tradevine has already attracted lots of users. Congratulations to the team for achieving this while based in Christchurch where the devastating February earthquake ruined their offices but not their determination to build a smart trading application.

Tradevine is free until January 31, 2012. You can find out more here.

So it was great to see Brad Golchin of Wise Advice launch a tax app that can help New Zealand businesses avoid late tax payment penalties and wrong calculations. Brad claims the Tax Toolbox is the only iPhone app in the NZ market which offers GST, PAYE and income tax calculators, plus due date reminders for each.

The app took seven months from concept to launch and is described by Brad as a “good learning experience”.

He recommends the free app to all NZ iPhone owners who have a business interest and need information on the move. “It’s also a great tool to have at your fingertips when interviewing prospective employees or talking pay rises with existing staff or changing tax codes and working out the financial implications on your business.”

Brad’s already planning the next app – an Android version of the same.

The Tax Toolbox is available to download from the iTunes App Store. Judging by the comments it’s already hit.

“I think the glory days of the reactive accountant who makes $350K plus profit per partner are coming to a grinding halt”.

I could not agree more, although I am not sure it will be as rapid as Rob suggests.

In the report Rob introduces a new KPI called the Sustainability Index. This index measures the reliance of a firm on the partners. It says, if we remove the partners, what does the profit look like. The results will astound you. The survey calculates an index of minus $9 – meaning $9 lost per hour contributed. This begs the question, why have staff, an office and so many clients if there is no money to be made from it?

Rob looks at the effect the cloud has on accountants and he likes what he sees (so do we).  All the big tick items are mentioned, like being connected, the benefits of real-time and a 30-40% reduction in the time it takes to produce annual and management reports.  Like Rob, I agree that we are seeing a commoditization of compliance accounting and firms need to evolve and make management reporting and business improvement the basis of the relationship.

Rob notes that business owners are now far more savvy and aware of evolving technologies and starting to ask the tough questions. Trouble is most firms do not have the right answers, yet. He talks about a sea of sameness in the industry – perhaps its time to act a little different? The impetus to change is certainly happening in other professional services inlcuding financial planning, banking and the insurance industry. These other groups seem to be branching out into the value added services area. While some accountants recognise this, there’s a danger the profession isn’t changing fast enough.

The good news is there are a lot of great firms out there doing really well. One of the benefits of this free report is the ability of accounting firms to benchmark themselves against the better performing firms. I’m sure you’ll find there are ways to improve your practice, there always are.

You can find the full report here. For a snap shot summary of the numbers (in Australian dollars) click the table below:

The annual index ranks New Zealand businesses according to their revenue growth over the past three years and sets the benchmark for high growth. As well as taking the export award, Xero was ranked 4th out of 50, on revenue growth of 873 percent. We’d also like to congratulate another Wellington company, online electricity retailer Powershop, which took the number one spot.

Together the 2011 group of Deloitte Fast 50 businesses grew the New Zealand economy by $594 million over the past three years and created 1502 jobs.

“These businesses have created dynamic cultural environments through the use of technology and communications tools which are not only meeting people’s needs around work-life balance, but also building workplaces which foster creativity and innovative thinking.”

Deloitte Partner Matt McKendry 

We know many of our accounting partners are very interested in moving their desktop environment to Microsoft’s Office 365. If that’s you, we suggest you get along to the roadshow Microsoft is running around New Zealand next month that’s specifically for professionals and small businesses.

You’ll see the web tools that combine familiar Microsoft Office productivity applications such as Microsoft Word, PowerPoint and Excel with the latest Microsoft communication and collaboration technology.

You can find out more and register here.

For Xero accounting partners it’s important that you get the right plan and licensing model of Office 365. We’ve determined the E3 plan has the features your practice needs. With this model you’ll be kept up to date with the latest version of Office Professional Plus. This also enables co-authoring, as well as Exchange and SharePoint online, removing the reliance on your server.

Make sure you get in touch with your Xero Account Manager after the roadshow to work through the implementation process and get answers to any questions you may have.

Since the launch of the Modern Practice at #xerocon NZ earlier this year, we’ve had a number of our accounting partners working through a beta to find out how best to deploy Office 365 in an accounting practice. We’ve learned a lot through the experience and partners will get an update shortly.

We’ve also set up some webinars to overview the document management component developed by SharePoint experts Provoke. This is called PracticePoint.

Once the beta is finished we’ll move into a pilot phase to test the process developed alongside Provoke and Office 365 setup and migration experts CodeBlue. Stay tuned for progress on this – NZ partners will get to see more at #xerocon in Feb next year.

You’ll be pleased to know we’ve updated the previous annual accounts report with Aussie content (yes, we’ve even removed the LAQC option!) and provided a high degree of editing/content control.

Watch the video to see it in action.

Some of the features you’ll notice include:

• Australian content and familiar layouts related to specific entity types; company, sole trader, partnership and trust
• Optional Auditors Report
• Default textual notes can be removed and edited
• Control over sections and reports
• Editable Notes to Financial Statements
• Optional signature on Balance Sheet
• Layout options for Profit & Loss, Balance Sheet and Movements in Equity reports

Thanks to all our Partners (including Interactive Accounting, Five Ways, CountGPS & Hansens) that gave us feedback and helped with the review process.

The ability to create compliant annual reports for each of your clients is a huge deal, but we’re going to take this even further. Recently we started rolling out Report Packs for New Zealand and next year we’ll be offering the same functionality in Australia.

Report Packs give accountants the ability to create report templates at a practice level for specific client segments. These can then be shared across all staff in your practice and used to produce reports using any client data, all in an instant – regardless of the client’s chart of accounts.

You can do all the same cool customisations that are available at the client level including setting textual content, add new notes, customise layouts and much more

So stay tuned for the next stage of annual reporting in Australia.

Right now NZ companies need to prepare an Annual Report that includes financial statements with rules about what you must disclose and how you have to treat various items and transactions. These reports are called General Purpose Financial Reports. Under the new rules a company will only need to produce reports that help support their income tax return. These are called Special Purpose Financial Reports. Conceivably all you will need is a profit and loss and a balance sheet. You may chose to do more at year-end, but this will be ‘your’ decision and one we’re sure will be influenced by the advice of your accountant as they consider the needs of all stakeholders.

The approach in NZ is very similar to that in the UK which allows for Abbreviated Accounts and in Australia which already has Special Purpose Financial Reports.

The new Financial Reporting Framework in NZ has yet to confirm the reporting requirements for issuers (such as public listed companies), registered charities, not-for-profit entities and public entities. Entity types such as these will still have reporting rules, however the intention is to make these rules clearer and more consistent. Good news indeed. Another important aspect to note is that the definition of a ‘large company’ is changing. To be large you will now need to have more than NZ$30 million of annual revenue or assets greater than NZ$60 million. This only applies to about 2% of all NZ companies.

In fact the changes will reduce the number of companies required to prepare general purpose financial reports from 460,000 to fewer than 10,000, and it’s expected to cut business compliance costs by about NZ$90 million a year.

Given this won’t take effect until mid 2013, there’s still FY11 & FY12 in which to continue under the old rules.

As Xero evolves we will continue to enhance the ability, from within the application, for all SMBs to have their annual reporting requirements met.

For the nuts and bolts we suggest you go to the the MED website. Next week we will feature a video interview with Mark Hucklesby, the NZ Technical Director of chartered accounting firm Grant Thornton, talking about the changes.

This is huge for accounting in NZ.

This was an issue identified at the recent NetHui conference held in Auckland, New Zealand and we took an action away to get the industry together to discuss and potentially come up with a Cloud Code of Practice for industry participants to follow.

In Wellington on Thursday 01 September from 9am to 1pm, we’ll be hosting a workshop to start moving towards this goal. We’d like to invite other software providers, government policymakers, industry representatives and end users to help us get started.

Some of the topics we’ll explore include:

• The implications of data being offshore
• Responsibilities around being the custodian of client data
• Responsibilities when a customer leaves
• How to manage change of ownership of a customer
• What are the best security practices to uphold the industry’s reputation

We hope this first workshop will map out a framework of items to consider.

Ideally we’d like around 20-30 industry players for this workshop. We do suspect that many more will want to attend, so please register your interest using the form below and we’ll report back on who we can accommodate.

To facilitate an open dialog, this session will not be open to the media but we expect to report back on progress publicly.

The Privacy Commission has indicated its interest in attending as an observer.

While it will take time to establish a clear direction for New Zealand cloud computing providers, this workshop, we hope, will be a good first step.

Register your interest form

So it’s great to learn that the newly formed New Zealand Bookkeepers Association Incorporated (NZBAI) has developed a certification process for bookkeepers. By sitting the online NZBAI Certification Test – covering topics such as accounts structure and terminology, business expenses, GST, payroll and best practice – bookkeepers become full NZBAI members. This in turn allows them to use the official NZBAI logo on their website or collateral.

It’s initiatives like this that prompted Xero to become the founding sponsor of NZBAI. “We’re proud get behind the NZBAI as it establishes itself,” says Xero’s NZ Country Manger, Leanne Graham. “We believe in creating a profession.”

New Zealand’s tax body Inland Revenue also supports the NZBAI in setting up the certification test.

“Inland Revenue works with many intermediaries, such as the NZBAI, and offers support to professional associations whose members positively assist businesses with their tax compliance” – Inland Revenue

Bookkeepers must achieve 80% in the certification test to pass and there’s the opportunity to re-sit and get some help through NZBAI with any aspects they are unsure of.

As well as the new certification, NZBAI has scheduled events throughout the year in the main centres for bookkeepers to help upskill and update their knowledge. Topics covered include end of year and GST reconciliation, marketing your business, IR updates and changes, legal and compliance and insurance.

If you’re a bookkeeper and would like to sit the test or find out more about this new qualification, you can contact the NZBAI here.

To help we thought we’d give those businesses the opportunity to recreate their accounts for the last financial year, free. Xero will be available to these business owners at no charge until 30 June 2011.

This allows you to backload your bank transactions from last year and quickly code them up using our Fast Cash Coding features and create a set of books in conjunction with your accountant. Watch this short video to see how easy it is to recreate accounts.

Some banks already provide electronic banking data back until 1 April or a business’s balance date, while some provide only three months. We hope that the New Zealand banks that do not provide 12 months of data online will quickly come to the party and create free files from 1 April 2010 for Christchurch users to help with this process.

Free, unlimited access to Xero until 30 June will give businesses plenty of time to complete April 2010 – March 2011 accounts.

You can find out more about recreating accounts for the last financial year free of charge at xero.com/christchurch.

Late yesterday the New Zealand Government announced a NZ$100 million+ six week support package for businesses and workers affected, which can be applied for online. This is a start toward what is going to be a long and hard recovery. Over recent days we’ve been in contact with a number of our customers and partners who have been through what they describe as a ‘nightmare’.

The offices of Xero customer and software development company Polar Bear Farm are a mass of mangled debris as these before and after shots show.

Polar Bear Farm founder Layton Duncan and his colleagues escaped unscathed but he will never forget running for shelter under a door frame to see the 19” server rack “bending and flexing what must have been a metre or so side to side, like a tall column of jelly”. You can read Layton’s experiences here.

As people grieve for friends who are still missing and come to grips with the fact their home has been condemned, the question of livelihood is the next focus. Xero Partner Paul Dawson of Numbiz predicts small business will be hit really hard. “A lot of my clients were already struggling to get back on their feet after the last earthquake,” he says.

“I think that Canterbury will need to take a collaborative approach to the recovery and I think there is a chance to rewrite the rules so to speak for a more sustainable future”.
Paul Dawson

We wholeheartedly agree and at Xero we’ll be doing all we can to help make this happen. While we’ve heard from some partners looking to relocate out of town after losing homes and offices, others such as Melanie Morris of Training & Beyond are rallying to help kick start a recovery on the ground. Today Melanie opened the Christchurch Business Recovery Centre at 201 Opawa Road.

Xero will help fund the centre which aims to help small business people get back on their feet. Services include access to stationery, office equipment, computers and internet access; a place for mail to be re-directed to; meeting and boardroom facilities, as well as business advisory services and help to access business relief packages. ” While there a quite a few websites popping up offering virtual services, we offer a physical presence which is what many people who have lost everything need,” says Melanie.

Assisting Melanie and her team at the centre will be staff from Xero Partner DJCA. They are ready to help with earthquake insurance, cashflow claims and in whatever way they can to ease the pressure of coming months.

As well as the offer of support at the recovery centre, Christchurch partners and customers can contact our Customer Care team to talk things through. There’s a way to go yet, but we’re here to help.

Like most businesses we have a number of customers and partners in the city who have been affected. What’s been amazing is the concern and pledges of assistance we’ve received from people in other countries, such as US based Xero partner Kara Haas, who has decided to blog for New Zealand.

If you’d like to help the people of Christchurch rebuild their lives we suggest donating via Givealittle or alternatively the NZ Red Cross.

Today we’re pleased to announce a bank feed partnership with SBS Bank (Southland Building Society). This is the largest building society in our home market and considered to be the only building society in the world to have achieved bank registration while maintaining its mutual structure of being owned by its members.

Like with our partnerships with other banks, SBS customers will be able to view all their bank account transactions and receive automatic daily updates without the hassle of having to manually import bank statement files. All you need to do is fill out the authority form and we will work with SBS to get your bank feeds started.

Rob comments that the top firms are moving from “trusted advisor to trusted partner”. This is a subtle but significant shift and one I certainly applaud, especially in a time of economic uncertainty. Rob runs the coachingclub for accounting firms and the majority of the results involve those firms. In the coachingclub, Rob suggests five KPIs are mandatory to manage the success of a firm. These are: productivity, average hourly rate recovered, write ons, WIP days and debtor days. This is sensible stuff and after reviewing of  the results I am pleased to note that accountants in Australasia are doing a good job with their firms. But there’s still room for  improvement.

The number accountants will be most interested in is EBIT per director before directors salaries. The average was A$304,929, with the upper quartile reaching A$402,722.  This is good, but could be better. The best performing result was a stunning A$1.7m.

Common traits for the better firms are:

• Higher productivity % for fee earners – average being 71% and the upper quartile 81%. If you can reduce the admin time for your fee earners, what they recover will be better. Makes sense really. That’s why Rob advocates the use of lower cost admin assistants.
• Lower productivity % for directors - this means the less billable work a director does the more successful a firm is.
• Large number of team members per director - with the average being 5 and the upper quartile  7.  Leverage is always important. The best performing firm in the survey had a staggering 20 team members per director.
• Average hourly rate recovered is better - A$156 on average and A$176 for the upper quartile. I’m sure this has something to do with hourly rates, but also efficiency. I’ve seen some firms recovering A$200+ per hour on core compliance work by using efficient technology and processes.
• Net Profit % – for the average was 37%, but the upper quartile 47%. It seems that aside from labour, accountants still have a fairly low cost of operating. It would be interesting to know how much firms are spending on growth, including marketing, sales, adwords, websites etc. In my view the better performing firms invest in growth. They spend money on client retention and acquisition. They also have acquisition targets and make sales results a key part of the monthly board meeting.

You can read the full 2010 Accountants Benchmark Report here. Well done Rob, these results are useful for any accounting firm that wants to do better.

Today we became a Silver sponsor of the Young Enterprise Trust which is a not-for-profit organisation that aims to create entrepreneurial students with a “can do” attitude. Programmes run from primary through to secondary school, encourage students to be enterprise capable and financially literate. By equipping young people with these skills, the Trust seeks to make a difference to the lives of the individual, their family and society.

While based in New Zealand, the trust has peer programmes in markets where Xero has a growing presence, such as Australia, the UK and the US. Over a four year period Xero will increase its funding contribution. In addition, students participating in the Lion Foundation Young Enterprise Scheme will get to use Xero at no cost. This particular programme lets students experience the setting up and running of their own company.

Helping to provide young people with the tools and support to create new, innovative businesses (like Xero), is we think a great way to give something back. We also believe it’s better to support one cause well, rather than spread ourselves too thin trying to support various different charities and community projects.

So here’s to the next generation of budding of entrepreneurs!

The index ranks the fastest growing 500 tech businesses according to their revenue growth (both public and private companies) over the past three years, obtaining key data across Australia, China (Hong Kong), India, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, New Zealand, Singapore and Taiwan. Xero’s ranking was due to 2,250.26% revenue growth over this period.

It’s interesting to note there were two Internet companies in the top five and they feature throughout. And not surprisingly software outranked all other sectors for the fourth year in a row.

In the full report Cloud computing, while receiving attention for its potential to shift the fundamental business model of delivering and consuming IT services, is making a quiet appearance on the Asia Pacific scene. Of the 245 CEOs who participated in the annual survey, 23 percent indicated that cloud-based application services have helped them grow more quickly, while 21 percent say it brought costs down.

Nice to see the likes of of Network partner Smartpayroll and Aura Software Security, the experts who audit our security make the list too.

This exposure lets you experience the best (and the worst) of what each market offers. There is, however, one overriding theme in a lot of tech markets that I’ve worked in: people.

People form the backbone of our work in technology and the shortage of skilled and capable IT workers has been palpable everywhere I’ve worked so far. There’s a continuous hiring blitz that seems unlikely to change anytime soon. Just look at the fall out from Google and Facebook constantly battling over staff.

I think there’s a collective responsibility among technicians/developers/testers/IT business owners to address this tiny runway of new talent entering the job market (otherwise we’ll never be able to take a breather). Part of this process has to be addressing the skill and attitude gap between academia and employment.

Some universities will credit work experience toward gaining a degree in software engineering – a technique that works for other engineering disciplines. But ICT really is a multi-skilled industry. For instance we need people with all kinds of skill-sets, from design to testing and from business analysis to development. There needs to be a whole host of people with skills ready to come on board as our companies grow. For this to happen tertiary courses really need to take work experience seriously. Why shouldn’t a design course require some kind of industry experience as part of course credits? Why should the non-engineering courses put less of a focus on actually getting employed?

I think, however, things are heading in the right direction in Wellington (home of Xero HQ) where a number of start-up companies established the Summer of Tech internship scheme (we’ve mentioned it on the blog before).

The scheme itself gives students a great kick start into their careers, allowing them to build some great skills and networks to help them to become really valuable members of the local IT community. More importantly for us it creates a whole selection of graduates who are ready to become valuable parts of the tech workforce straight out of university.

Summer of Tech allows students some critical advantages:

• Work experience (the obvious headline one)
• Professional training  (students are offered literally hours of free courses and bootcamps to hone their skills before interviewing for a job)
• Summer seminars (even once in a job, these weekly seminars encourage professional development)
• Networking  (more opportunities to meet employers and employees than you can shake a stick at. Often in this industry Who you know is as important as What you know)

Summer of Tech is really important to me personally, I would have loved to have had such an opportunity when I was entering the work force, especially with the kind of companies that support it.

So ask yourself what can I do to help the younger you… and go and do it!

Oh and if you’re in Wellington come along to the next Summer Seminar, they’re free.

Highlights for me:

1. The best revenue result by partner was a staggering $2.7m. But keeping this in perspective, it’s very unusual and probably better than what the big four firms do.

2. On average a firm generates $700k of revenue per partner and clears a profit per partner of about $220k (before partner salaries, interest and tax). That’s the baseline. You should be able to do better than this.

3. A reasonable average hourly rate seems quite low at $126. Those heading closer to $175 are certainly in a much happier place. Again, totally achievable.

4. Leverage models of 3-4 staff per partner are ok, but the better performers have 6-7.

5. Upper quartile productivity at 70% is reasonable when you include admin staff. Core accounting staff should be at 85%+.  I’m still confident that those firms using the quote, job tracking and workflow model do much better than those who simply bill on a time spent basis. Customers tend to prefer a quote too.

6. Upper Quartile firms have Partner productivity at 68%. I have always advocated that the less time a partner spends on billable work, the better. So this does seem high to me. However, Viv did point out to me that firms which do have partner billing at about 70% have much better profitability. While I don’t like the model, Viv’s right.

7. Even average firms now have write-off percentages that are lower than 10%. I totally believe that by using Xero for core accounting and compliance work, you should have net aggregate write-ons.

8. Debtor and Lock Up days still seem very high to me at 72 and 99 respectively for an Upper Quartile firm. Certainly room for improvement here. WIP is however respectful at just 15 days. What it means is we’re rather good at getting the invoices out the door, but bad at collecting the cash.

In summary the headline KPIs for most firms seem to be improving. Poor perception of value is reflected in lower than achievable charge rates, an absence of value pricing, as well as write-offs that have averaged 9%. Educating clients about value can be both challenging and scary for many accountants. Producing a monthly management report straight from the client ledger is easy and a quick way to give a client a taste of  the value that comes from a closer relationship.

Many practices have increased their average client spend by adding simple service layers, many of them seemingly insignificant. The compound effect of each service layer can be quite stunning. The bundling of services to increase the average fee really is working.

I recommend using Viv’s list of KPIs as a good way to measure performance each month and set the Upper Quartile from the GBU report as our minimum standard.

It would have been interesting to see council staff scurrying around hurriedly emptying parking meters, or large buckets of change from pokie machines being banked – so that the cash takings could be returned at 12.5% instead of 15%. Instead the most notable signs last night that things were about to change were the queues at petrol stations and supermarkets.

Talking to several business owners about the GST changes yesterday highlighted the fact that while many of us are on top of the change, there is still confusion as to what it means for businesses after 1 October and beyond. For businesses returning GST on an invoice basis, it’s generally a simple change, but it is important to determine ‘time of supply’ and be aware of exceptions. A handy place to look for answers to specific questions is on the GST Advisory Panel website - scroll down on their site for working examples.

Businesses on a payments basis need to enter invoices into their accounting system to make the ‘GST rate change adjustment’ based on total invoices outstanding. This adjustment is simply to make up for the difference in GST that will end up being paid for monies received from today (at 15%), where the initial invoice was issued at the old GST rate. For those still blissfully unaware or even slightly confused, we’ve put together a quick step by step working example.

Download the PDF

The rate change calculation is automatic for those on Xero, but for others on less intelligent software this will have to be a manual adjustment. Overnight we also adjusted the default GST rates to 15%, which you will have already seen this morning when you logged in. To see this and the other work we’ve done for you, watch our short video.

It’s not too late to switch to Xero and take the hassle out of the GST changes. Talk to your accountant or sign up here.

The beauty of Xero is that we update the software for you. Automatically. For free.

People still using desktop accounting systems are facing steep fees, only to endure the frustration of installing and upgrading their system. Since you need to upgrade anyway, it’s the perfect reason to switch to Xero right now – and never go through another upgrade ever again.

Here’s a quick video that shows an overview of all the updates we’re doing for you.

You may notice a couple new things we added since our last update:

• File Now – it’s important to keep a record of the GST Return, as you filed it with IRD. To do that, simply press the File Now button when you’re happy with the numbers. Similar to publishing other reports, this records a snapshot of the return and associated reports within Xero, which matches up with the numbers you copied onto your GST form.

• Updating Bank Rules – we realise a lot of you are using Bank Rules. In fact, some of you have hundreds of them! That’s awesome. Expecting you to manually update them all would be pretty uncool. So, at the same time as updating the rates on your Chart of Accounts, Contacts, Price List Items and Repeating Transactions, we’re now doing the same thing for Bank Rules.

There’s a lot we’re doing to make the transition to 15% GST easy for you – if you’re interested, here’s a detailed explanation in the Help Centre of everything that’s happening.

Stay tuned for more updates from us over the next few weeks and be sure to check the IRD website for more information. If you’re an accountant we recommend you join us on 8 September for our dedicated GST webinar with guest presenter GST Advisory Panel Chair, Frank Owen.

Please talk with your friends and colleagues about the upcoming GST change. Ask them how they’re planning on handling it. If they’re not on Xero, let them know how easy it can be.

It’d be nice to know the people doing your books (if not in-house) are credible, work to a recognised standard and you have some redress if something goes wrong.

In many countries such as Australia, bookkeeping is now recognised as a true profession. In New Zealand bookkeepers don’t have this status which is why we’re thrilled to hear about the newly established New Zealand Bookkeeping Association Inc (NZBAI) which represents suitably experienced and qualified bookkeepers. At Xero it’s important to be able to work with professional bodies as we develop Xero further and our customer pool widens.

One of the driving forces behind setting up NZBAI is Xero Partner and Trainer, Melanie Morris.

“With the shift in technology we aim to build the relationships between bookkeepers and accountants by providing collaboration on data and acting as interpreters between the client and accountant for the benefit of everyone.” Melanie Morris

Through NZBAI, bookkeepers can look forward to support across a broad range of  issues including indemnity insurance. Education is also a strong focus and in time once standards are developed and approved, bookkeepers will be able to complete a certification process.

For small businesses that use bookkeeping services this will lead to better protection. Certification should make choosing a bookkeeper less hit and miss.

For several years running, Xero has been a sponsor of Summer of Tech, where university students get matched up with tech companies looking for interns. The program has grown over the years, and now includes design students, as well as comp-sci and engineering students.

While the program helps us cherry pick rising talent, we also hope to offer some inspiration for a whole new generation of students entering the work force.

In my final year of university, I did an internship at a place called General Magic. It was an amazing experience, kickstarting my career and giving me an extremely valuable insider’s view of what it’s like to be part of a high flying start-up.

As I’ve been reviewing some of this year’s design interns, I thought it’s worth sharing some basics I look for in candidates:

• An online portfolio with plenty of work samples is an absolute must. Without that, you won’t be considered. It should go without saying, the design of your portfolio is as important as the projects presented.
• An online portfolio also shows you know the basics of web production, coding and site deployment. To be an interaction designer you need to know basic nuts & bolts.
• I take notice when people have their own domain. It shows you understand the value of branding.

• The ability to write clearly and concisely. Design is communication. The words you choose show if you’re thinking about users and their frame of reference.

• Participation in social media is good to see, it shows an interest and involvement with tech and culture, plus some insights into your personality.

Specific design skills I look for:

• Information hierarchy and typography – page layouts that establish a clear order of importance.
• Visual style – fine tuned composition, lighting and color balance that triggers an emotional response.
• Simple usability – links, buttons and navigation follow common conventions, they look and behave the way people expect. Experimentation and innovation are nice, as long as the basics are covered.
• Craftsmanship – sweating the details, an obvious sign of passion for the process.

And some worldly advice as you set out on your adventures:

One final piece of advice – do a little research. It’s dead easy to know all about the companies where you want to work and the people you’ll be meeting. It makes a big difference when you express a genuine interest and some understanding of the people and their business.

Best of luck & have fun.

We’re pleased to announce that Xero’s Partner Certification classroom course now qualifies for 5.5 hours NZICA Continuing Professional Development. NZICA is also in the process of assessing our Re-Certification – both of  these are key steps to becoming a Xero Partner and maintaining Partner status.

This recognition by NZICA validates the calibre of our training – not only the course content, which is a thorough overview of Xero functionality for accountants in practice, but also the quality of our delivery.

We have a great team of qualified trainers on board like Melanie Morris, Donna Wylie and Mike Hadwin – all of whom are technical experts in Xero and passionate about ensuring great learning outcomes.

”The Xero training course I attended was conducted in a professional manner, with clarity, and attention to learners’ needs. NZICA CPD looks for an adaptive, active learning style in training presentations and Xero offers this”, says Joe Grayland, NZICA’s Director of Professional Development.

All NZICA members are entitled to a 20% discount when they undertake Xero Partner Certification and Re-Certification (classroom) courses. You can find a course near to you and register here.

Three months ago Justin started Cloudaccountants in Freemans Bay in Auckland, New Zealand. The proposition is almost unique. Growth in client numbers is purely organic. There’s no established client database to convert from desk-top accounting software. Clients are already Xero users or they didn’t use any accounting software, relying on the likes of spreadsheets to do the books.

“Because we’re 100 % Xero there’s no baggage with using a different system, says Justin. “I have yet to convert someone from MYOB, but clients are confident with my experience using Xero, and the efficiencies that can be gained from using such a system. Sure it’s challenging starting from scratch, but building a practice to critical mass using an online system as a core offering, is exciting. It’s where the future lies for the accounting profession.”

Justin’s website is his brochure and several clients have found him by way of Google and through the online Xero advisor directory. On the Cloudaccountants homepage clients can choose from a range of monthly pricing plans which includes the subscription to Xero. For now clients tend to be freelancers who work on contract, including graphic designers and there’s also a steady following among property investors.

A lot of interaction with clients takes place over Skype and Justin will call on clients when needed. Clients who live in other parts of the country are more than happy to be serviced remotely. Justin tested this concept himself when he had his website designed by the team at Mogul, who to this day, he’s never met face-to-face. Some team members at Cloudaccountants also work remotely in preference for a lifestyle away from the city which also allows time for parenting.

Early on Justin was excited about the move to online accounting and sought to hone his Xero skills when he joined the Xero UK sales team for a year. This experience has been valuable as he now engages with his own prospective clients.