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.

Desktop accounting systems are generally locked away in the back office with either a hard working bookkeeper or yourself punching in all the invoices, expense claims…everything.

We think that’s crazy!

This week we’ve added a new way for your employees to use Xero. Simply invite them in using the Employee role. Now employees can do all your data entry in Xero, giving you more time to focus on the big picture.

This is a limited-access role. People with the employee role cannot access your bank accounts, cannot see your financial data, and cannot invite in other users.

Employees can submit invoices for your approval, they can also submit expense claims, plus they can manage contacts.

This saves business owners lots of time and hassle, while your frontline employees help the business run better.

For complete details regarding today’s release please have a read of our release notes.

Comments in Bank Reconciliation

Not sure how to code a transaction? Have a question about a transaction? Want to explain a transaction in more detail?

No worries. Just click on the comments tab, write in your comments and click save. Now your accountant (or other people you’ve invited to use Xero) can see your comments and help you sort things out.

In fact, we’ve created a new user role, Cash Manager, for people who only want to add comments in bank reconciliation - letting somebody else do all the rest. We’ll explain more about this next week.

Other Small (but useful) Improvements

In addition to the new Cash Manager role, we’ve added an Employee role. You can read more about the Employee role here.

There’s a new End of Year Lock Date for accountants to lock accounts once your end of year has been finalised.

We’ve fine tuned automatic matching in bank reconciliation. It now matches based on date as well as amount.

On the Dashboard, the Money Coming In and Money Going Out graphs get some minor improvements, plus we now show the total value of draft and overdue invoices with links to chase things up.

One more thing. We’ve added a one-click button to invite and remove Customer Care into your organisation.

For complete details regarding today’s release please have a read of our release notes.

Fresh from the Xero labs, we’re very pleased to announce a customised version of Xero for iPhone (and iPod Touch). It’s never been easier to have your accounts on hand.

Xero for iPhone gives you an overview of the accounts for every organisation you manage. See all your bank balances, recent transactions and who owes you money. You can even call any contact with a single tap.

Xero for iPhone is available immediately to all Xero customers at no extra charge. Simply login at http://m.xero.com. It’s also available for anyone to try for free by simply signing up to Xero.

Please have a play and tell us what you think. What else would you want from Xero on your iPhone?

We’ve spent the last month focusing on a number of small things that we call customer love. These are little enhancements (or not so little) that are requested by our customers to make Xero better. This morning we’ve released over 50 of these and the more notable ones include:

• Additional due date options are available for repeating invoices such as ‘due in 7 days’
• Repeating invoices can now have an end date
• Customer statements now include the due date of each invoice
• You can now send a customer statement by email
• Switching organisation is now done from the ‘My Xero’ menu
• You can now change the type of your accounts (i.e. from Asset to Expense)
• Your list of organisations in ‘My Xero’ can now be sorted and the sort order will be remembered
• The due date of an invoice is now mandatory
• When selecting an account, the search over account names has been improved. For example, typing ‘Int’ would find your ‘Telephone & Internet’ account instead of just accounts starting ‘Int’
• You can now compare your actuals with your budget on your Profit and Loss
• The Aged Receivables report now includes invoice references when showing invoice details
• You can now include your provisional tax in your GST return
• The Profit and Loss and Balance Sheet now allows you to re-order, summarise and group your accounts

There’s plenty more so hopefully you’ll find a few little things to make your day easier.

For full details of today’s release, have a read of our release notes.