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Our Future of Accounting Roadshow kicks off next week. We’re holding seminars for accountants and bookkeepers to share our view on global technology and business trends. Plus, we’ll be detailing our partnership with Acclipse, explaining how we’ll be offering an integrated client accounting and practice management solution.
The response to the roadshow has been overwhelming (see location change below). It’s completely booked out to maximum capacity in most locations. However, there are a few seats left at our Dunedin event, so register now.
If you wanted to attend but we didn’t have an event in your area, please send us an email and let us know.
The Wellington event will happen at the same date & time Tuesday 25 November from 4-6pm, but due to overwhelming demand it will now be hosted at the following location:
Museum of Wellington City and Sea
Von Kohorn Room (The Historic Board Room)
Queens Wharf
View map
We’ve been doing some research around unlocking productivity in the small business market. The outgoing Minister for Small Business Clayton Cosgrove nailed the importance of this sector with this quote recently …
“the high number of SMEs makes them important to the economy, but it is their potential for growth that makes them vital to the government’s economic transformation agenda.”
Small Business contributes $50b to New Zealand’s GDP! We believe online technology is the key to improving productivity in the sector. The numbers are simply staggering. Minor productivity improvements can grow GDP by $500m or more.
You can download our report here …
Our recommendations to the Government are:
Please note: this document and the recommendations contained within represent the independent view of Xero Limited.
Report last updated 24 November.
BNZ, with Air New Zealand, recently launched its brand new GlobalPlus Business Visa card.
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:
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.
Care to out any other offenders?
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!
