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.

I seem to be on a bit of a speaking tour at present with the CIO Summit in Auckland being my most recent event. I was there to talk about our security work with Aura Software Security and how they’ve been critical to the success of our security story.

Our reputation depends on providing airtight security and from the early days of Xero we have been working with the experts at Aura to continually audit our security and provide us independent expertise on how to integrate secure practices throughout our organisation. Aura have been highly impressed by Xero because “the security of Xero was embedded in the company’s mindset and filtered down from the CEO right through to the admin team”. It is this “holistic” view of security throughout Xero that has been the driving force behind this success.

Below are some of the security precautions we take. There are many more that we won’t publish because, as you might expect, that wouldn’t be good security policy:

• We model our security on the policies and measures taken by banks. To be as “secure as a bank” is an aspirational goal for us and one we continually strive for.
• We use 128 bit SSL encryption, the same used for internet banking.
• Our servers are hosted with a world leading hosting provider, delivering the highest levels of availability, performance and security.
• Only a select few authorised personnel at Xero have access to the Xero production environment and all access is actively monitored and logged.
• No one has access to your organisation unless you’ve invited them. You can remove any invited users whenever you want. You have the option to invite Customer Care, but it’s for support purposes only and completely at your discretion.
• There is an audit trail of everything a user has done in Xero and you can monitor the activity of all your invited users.
• Users must choose a strong password and we enforce automatic lockouts when incorrect usernames and passwords are entered, alerting us to any attempts to hack in.
• We don’t allow the browser to save your login information which mitigates unauthorised access from a stolen or compromised computer.
• If you are logged in and don’t use Xero for an extended period you will be automatically logged out in case you’ve left your computer unattended.
• Security is an ongoing process, not a singular event – we continuously reinforce our defences.

How is Xero more secure than desktop software?

• Unlike desktop applications your data isn’t stored on your computer, so if your laptop is lost or stolen no one can access your data without a login.
• Providing access to your data by inviting specific users into your organisation and controlling their access is much more secure than emailing your data around or giving out discs with your data on it.

While we continually work very hard to keep Xero and your data secure there are some simple steps you can take to stay protected as well:

• Create a password nobody can guess, so no dictionary words or family names. Be cryptic or use multi-word pass phrases - easy to remember, hard to crack.
• Don’t write your password on a sticky note and attach it to your computer.
• Don’t share your email address and password with anyone else. Xero allows for unlimited users for each organisation: that feature is there for your security - use it!
• Keep your browser software up to date. For enhanced security we recommend Internet Explorer 7 (download here) or Firefox 3 (download here)
• Make sure you have anti-virus software installed and kept up to date.
• Make sure you only login at https://go.xero.com/.

This month we’re taking a rare departure from our standard practice of releasing software updates every 3 weeks.

We’re focusing on making things in Xero even faster and easier…

• Faster invoices – there will be a number of enhancements to make entering invoices faster, including the option to create price lists for commonly invoiced items
• More invoices – we’re adding the ability to bulk approve and print multiple invoices (email in bulk will come later)
• Faster page loading – we’ve been fine tuning the file size of our pages to make loading even faster

For this release, we’re taking some extra time to make sure you spend less time doing the books.

We’re also doing some heavy duty geek work building a beautiful event driven model over our general ledger in order to provide more functionality in Xero and better integration with other systems. More on that later.

As Chief Technology Officer at Xero I spend a lot of time on the performance and scalability of the Xero application. Most of my work has been at optimizing our database and production infrastructure, but for quite a while now I’ve spent a lot of time on the user experience and the next release of Xero will highlight the fruits of that labour.

In the spirit of sharing what I’ve learnt with the development community I thought it was about time I presented at the Wellington .NET User Group meeting run by our very own Kirk Jackson. It’s been one of those things I’ve been meaning to do for a while, and was great to be able to present on some of the challenges and solutions we came up with to speed up the user experience for our customers. Thanks to everyone that was there.

You can view my presentation below. For people that were there it’s slightly different since a lot of it requires me babbling on so I’ve added some extra bits here and there to make it clearer for people viewing it for the first time.

I’ve had some great feedback on the presentation so if you’re interested in me doing it again to a more general audience then let me know and I’ll gauge the interest. It’s a topic I love evangelizing and it’s useful for anyone doing web development no matter what the technology.

We have great news for Westpac customers – you can now have your bank account transactions automatically imported into Xero every day. All you need to do is fill out the authority form and we will work with Westpac on your behalf to get your bank feeds started.

Please note there is a $25 (GST inclusive) establishment fee per authority form which we are passing on. This will be included on your Xero subscription invoice once the feeds have been successfully set up.

Westpac is the latest bank to offer automatic bank feeds via Xero. For more information on setting up automated feeds please select your bank: ASB, ANZ, the Bank of New Zealand, Kiwibank, National Bank, TSB Bank or Westpac.

This is a big milestone for us. Xero now has daily bank feeds available for virtually every small business in New Zealand.

As a .mac user I recently received an email from Apple regarding their new MobileMe service (described here). The email states that MobileMe is happy on any Mac or PC. Any PC not running Internet Explorer 6 that is:

“To use the new web applications, make sure you have one of these browsers: Safari 3, Internet Explorer 7 or Firefox 2 or later”.

We’ve been pushing our IE6 users to upgrade for some time now, but as you can see from our own statistics below even though the number of you using IE6 is falling it still represents a significant portion of usage:

Now it seems others are picking up Apple’s lead and are discontinuing IE6 support. 37 Signals announced last week that they would be phasing out support for IE6 from August 15 2008. Their main reason for doing this is because they believe they cannot deliver the user experience their customers deserve while still supporting IE6. Even though we agree with this wholeheartedly we feel they’ve missed the biggest reason about why you should not be using IE6: security.

As of June, 2008, Secunia, a company that publishes vulnerability and virus information on products, reports over 130 vulnerabilities in IE6, and 24 of them still aren’t fixed! Compare that to other browsers:

As you can see, anything is more secure than IE6 and we believe it’s our duty to get our users using the most secure browser they can, especially when it’s their own financial data that might be at risk.

Before we make a final decision on our own phase out of IE6 support we want to know what you guys think – would you mind if we stopped supporting IE6?

Earlier this year we launched the Xero Network. In addition to letting you send and receive invoices directly with other Xero users, the Xero Network can exchange transaction data with other software.

You can visit our Solutions page to get info on the different applications that currently connect with Xero and how to set them up - including solutions for payroll, project management, ecommerce, and many more in the pipeline. With these connections you get extended functionality that makes it much easier and faster to process transactions, while reducing error prone data re-entry.

Please let us know if there’s a particular software app that you’d like to see connected with Xero.

Our latest release out this morning has a bunch of banking improvements to make processing your bank-related transactions in Xero even easier.

The most requested feature is the Mark as Reconciled option in Xero’s bank reconciliation. This is helpful for anyone who can’t import their bank statements into Xero - either because your bank doesn’t let you import older (historical) bank transactions or because your bank doesn’t provide statements in the OFX or QIF file formats.

This option is only to be used in the two scenarios above. We recommend you always set up automatic bank feeds if your bank supports these. Learn more about banking in Xero.

Let’s say you have a savings account that only has a few transactions through it each month. Your bank doesn’t support OFX of QIF files but you need to reconcile these transactions so you know what’s in Xero is the same as what’s in your bank account. Enter the transactions into Xero (either spend or receive money or raising an invoice) and once the transaction has been processed through your bank account, reconcile it using the Mark as Reconciled.

Select one or more items using the check boxes and click Mark as Reconciled…

The items will appear with a tick mark, showing that they have been marked as reconciled in the list of bank account transactions…

Read more about Mark as Reconciled and other processing improvements in today’s release.