As the Xero application grows and grows, so does the Xero Help Centre (http://help.xero.com/).

From it’s humble beginnings as pure help text per screen we’re learning from our customers’ experiences and feedback and are now trying to pre-empt familiar scenarios by providing help beyond “you can type a negative number the price field”. Hopefully you’re finding the ‘How Do I?’ scenarios, guides and Google site search helpful in finding information to answer your questions, and just this week we’ve introduced a page of quick tips and videos as another way of showing you examples of how to do things in Xero.

For example, did you know that you can often type just one letter into a date field in Xero to auto-populate a particular date … and not necessarily today’s date?

Quick date entry in Xero from Xero on Vimeo.

Visit Help Centre to see more videos like this on the Xero Videos page or quick tips on the Xero Tips page.

We’re happy to announce the Australian version of Xero is now available. You can read the full release notes here. This is another huge milestone for us – it’s the third market we have entered in just over a year.

We know there’s huge demand for an alternative to MYOB and we’re very proud to say the wait is finally over.

Australia’s 2.5 million small businesses can now join the thousands of businesses already using Xero in New Zealand and the UK.

We’ve worked closely with Australian businesses and accountants to make sure Xero simplifies the management of GST and the preparation of Activity Statements.

We’re also pleased to announce that two of Australia’s largest banks will be providing automated daily bank feeds soon after launch.

Pricing is $49 for the first organisation, $24 for additional organisations (AUD, exclusive of GST).

As a special limited time offer, if you already have a New Zealand based Xero subscription, adding an additional Australian organisation will only cost $24 (AUD, exclusive of GST). Contact sales@xero.com for complete details.

If you know any Australian business people or accountants please send them a link to our sign up page so they can try Xero for free.

One of the great new features in this mornings latest Xero release is Profit & Loss Common Formats.

We’ve heard from many of accounting partners (especially the Diva team in Pukekohe) that there are lots of different ways people want to look at their Profit and Loss accounts.  Our common formats allow you to quickly pick which view you want.  

We also have Common formats for the Budget Variance report.

Nice work to Andrew in our team who thought of presenting these options like this.  I find it really useful.

Xero now works on BlackBerry and Windows Mobile devices as well as your iPhone.

You can access Xero mobile at http://m.xero.com.

We’ve added a few new features like:

• Contact Groups
• You can now drill into your Accounts Receivable and Accounts Payable to see the biggest and oldest invoices
• All user roles within Xero can now access Xero Mobile

We’re still tweaking the Windows Mobile styles.  Let us know if you have any problems.

On the BlackBerry, the standard browser doesn’t easily allow us to make things pretty but if you download OperaMini (http://www.operamini.com), you’ll have a great experience.

Let us know what else you want in Xero mobile.

Another set of features we’ve released today around Contacts allow you to link from Xero into other systems.

Firstly, you can now make Skype Calls directly from Xero.

We’re hearing a number of our accounting partners are working from home, walking through Xero alongside their customers using Skype. Now that is Accounting 2.0!

We’ve also added the ability to build your own custom links to your CRM system directly from Xero contacts.  You set up Contact Links under your Organisation settings. We have a link builder that makes it easy to match contact fields inside Xero to your other systems.

Let us know what other systems you link to and what their link formats are and we’ll look at adding them in directly.  What CRM systems are you using?

One of my favourite features in today’s release is Contact Groups - groups of contacts inside Xero.

Contact Groups you’ve created appear in the contact menu for quick access.  

One of the benefits of Contact Groups is being able to create an invoice for everyone in a group at once.  This is fantastic for sports clubs, childcare organisations and anyone else that deals with groups of people in a similar fashion.  For example a rugby club might create a contact group for each team. When you need to chase everyone for subscriptions, you can create a single invoice to send to the entire group. It’s then easy to tick off each paid subscription as it’s received, and see who you need to chase.

This feature is really useful for all types of business that regularly charge groups of customers that same amount. For example Personal Trainers, Alarm Monitoring, Web Hosters etc, etc.

How else can you use Contact Groups in your business?

We’ve made lots of fine tuned enhancements in our latest release today. You can read the full release notes in our Help Centre.

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.

As product manager for our back office systems at Xero (subscriptions, billing, customer support, analytics, etc), my team aims to ensure that from the moment you sign up to Xero your experience is smooth and ideally flawless.

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.

We’ve gotten a surge in demand from people around the world, thanks to the attention we’re getting from winning the 10 Best Apps of 2008 award.

People are asking “When will Xero be available in [insert country of choice]?”

Daniel Mettler of Switzerland wrote this appeal to us on his blog…

Note that Xero is not available for purchase in Switzerland yet (hopefully soon). You can still try the demo though.

I’ve quickly tested Xero. Conclusion so far: I like it a lot! It delivers, what most startup companies need in regard to accounting and it makes things as easy as possible. In fact, I’ve never seen a more intuitive accounting system before! It will definitely set the new benchmark in its class. Let’s hope there will be a Swiss edition soon. Kudos to the makers of Xero in NZ: You rock!

Thanks Daniel and everyone for all the interest and feedback!

As you’d imagine, designing and building a proper yet fun-to-use accounting system that scales globally is no small task. Our approach has been to evolve Xero with the feedback of customers and partners in our initial markets, while building up our internal systems to scale internationally.

The plan is to have a global version ready by early 2009.

Sign up now to try Xero for free we’ll email you as soon as the global version is ready.

Here’s a quick summary of the changes to Xero in today’s release:

• A new grid layout for invoices: makes invoices faster to write and easier to read
• Price List Items: choosing from a standard list of items you sell reduces what you need to type and what you need to remember
• Bulk actions for invoices: process many invoices at once
• Plus a long list of customer requests
• Plus a wide range of performance enhancements

Get all the details in the release notes.

As always, we’d love your feedback on this release and what you’d like to see in future releases.