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.

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…

• state.co.nz
• amp.co.nz
• toyota.co.nz
• msd.govt.nz
• tranzmetro.co.nz

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?

You may have noticed a new business guide section under Business Support on our website. Under this section is a collection of articles to help you run your business better.

In todays tough market cash-flow is everything.  Check out this guide to get some useful ideas on how to speed up getting money from customers: Invoicing tips to improve your cash-flow

Please let us know if guide is useful or any other areas you’d like us to write about.

I was stunned (then delighted) to read the following article from MYOB in New Zealand.

MYOB Calls For Next Government To Mind The Pace Of Legislation.

“The research confirms what our clients from around the country have been telling us for quite some time - constant changes in legislation make it just so much harder to do business.”

“With that in mind, we’re calling on any future Government to be mindful of that impact on New Zealand business - not just in terms of specific pieces of legislation, but the number and scope of changes business owners and managers have to be aware of to remain compliant.”

This is the problem with desktop installed software. Government is inhibited in it’s ability to make improvements because it can take 1-3 years for changes in desktop software to be rippled through to small businesses.

Online software can be changed as much as you like with no effort required from the small business owner. So the Government can continuously and rapidly reduce compliance activities and other costs on small businesses. 

It’s the role of software providers to make things easier and more responsive so our companies to be globally competitive, not slow things down.

As small businesses contribute over 38% of GDP (over $50b) a small increase in productivity and survivability can make a huge difference to New Zealand as a whole. Therefore desktop software and it’s slow update cycle is unnecessarily holding New Zealand back.

The Cable Car Challenge is a business planning competition in Wellington.

I was an absent judge this year but was delighted to be at the final award ceremony tonight.

Congratulations to BIMCache who won, and launch next month in Vegas. BONZ and Life Inc were worthy runners up. All the finalists were impressive.

I had a number of thoughts as I watched the finalists.

• The standard of presentations and ability of the presenters to quickly convey their business has stepped up significantly from last year.
• The short business summaries had massively improved in some cases.  When you are judging and have to read a stack of business plans, a well designed, concise and branded document is so much more digestible.
• The finalists were all non-trivial businesses and almost all global from day one.  The new generation of business owners are truly global.  That was cool to see.
• Even businesses that are fairly common in these sort of business planning competitions, like clothing brands, all had unique point of difference and business model, whether it be building and using a community in interesting ways, or extending the value proposition over the internet. I heard some great new ideas through this process.

Well done everyone.  Wellington has become a hub of entrepreneurial activity.  I was very proud.

Phew, the next version of Microsoft Office (version 14) adds real time collaboration.  I’ve been waiting for this for some time.  This is the most exciting news from Microsoft in recent years and provides a great opportunity for fast moving teams to work much more productively.

Hopefully we’ll be able to do things like fully integrated budgeting on Excel with Xero.

Video here

I just hope MacOffice isn’t too far behind.  I don’t think I’d be able to wait a year knowing it was available on Windows.

Congratulations to Xero customer and neighbour Victoria Bartram, a director of The Baby’s Room. They picked up the award for Innovation Excellence in Retail at the Top Shop Awards in Wellington last week.

The Baby’s Room is located in the Old Bank Arcade along with Xero. They sell quality baby-related merchandise and have even implemented an innovative carbon credit scheme whereby customers can purchase carbon credit certificates to offset disposable nappies.

The judges were wowed by the shop’s array of iconic and beautiful gifts, including their baby gift baskets and delivery service, and also the use of technology such as catalogue ordering on Facebook in the sales mix.

To win the regional award for Innovation Excellence is really something, considering they’ve only been operating for the past six months, so well done guys.

I’ve long been concerned at how off target the last versions of Microsoft Office were after we’ve seen the real time collaboration features of Google Docs.

As Rafe Needleman writes:

To my mind, the killer feature of Google Docs is not that it is Web-based, per se. It’s that it makes real-time collaboration easy. You can invite a user into a document you currently have open, and you both can edit the file at the same time. It’s not a feature you’re going to need all the time, but when you’re on a deadline and need to get sign-off from one or more other person on a document right away, it’s a life-saver.

In the past week Steve Balmer has started to go public with Microsoft’s Cloud computing strategy and it’s good to see they understand the issues.

I think what people want is something as rich as Microsoft Office, something that you can ‘click and run’, if you are not at your own desk. Something that is compatible, document-wise with Microsoft Office and something that offers the kind of joint editing capabilities that is nice in Google Docs and Spreadsheets. Will Microsoft Office offer that? Yes! Standby for details in the next month.

We want software that is more powerful than runs in a browser. Does that mean we will not have some neat stuff that does run in the browser? No.

We think you’ll actually want the full power of Word, Excel and PowerPoint - and you’ll want to be able to get that simply. But, if you just happen to be in an Internet cafe kiosk and you want to do some light editing, perhaps we need to have a way to support you in that as well, inside the browser.

This is great news and the best example of Software + Services. Using the power of the PC and the connectivity of the Internet together. I really believe that Collaborative Office could be one of the most exciting breakthroughs in productivity for enterprises and small businesses since online accounting.

However there are a few concerns that came immediately to mind.

• Now I’ve moved to a Mac and that Mac:Office runs a year behind Windows Office will Mac users have to wait a whole year after this is released?  Hopefully the Mac:Office team will clarify.
• Will Microsoft tie the collaboration features to SharePoint services - as there needs to be a mechanism for communicating changes and central document viewing? That may not be so great for small businesses.
• Will this be a global product or, because of the reliance on hosted services, will it be rolled out by region?

If I was in Microsoft’s strategy team I’d seriously look at tying Office collaboration into their stack. For many enterprises they don’t want working documents out of their firewall so SharePoint would make sense - and be justifiable.

Looks like some of the details will be revealed at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference later in the month. But this is exciting news.

There’s obviously a lot going on at the moment in terms of the markets and how this downturn is going to hit some small businesses. It may seem like a momentous leap – from Wall St to your small business – but the ethos remains the same, how do you protect your assets, your business and most importantly, your cash.

Accounting software such as Xero is there to help in the leaner times as well as the good..

Here’s some ideas on what you can do.

• Process your bank transactions daily to see what your available balance is, if you have excess funds then you may want to transfer money to a higher earning interest account. You’ll then know exactly who owes you money.
• Keep on top of your debtors – make sure that people are paying you. You can check away from the office on your mobile device (m.xero.com).  
• Send a statement if some debtors are falling behind.
• Be aware if anyone one large debtor creates a disproportionate exposure .
• Tighten up your expenses – identify expenses that are unnecessary and costly. Keep a close eye on travel especially.
• Monitor your staff’s expense claims.  It might be useful to send an email around your team to clarify your policy around expenses.
• Enter your Budget and use the Budget Variance report to see how your expenses are tracking against the actual budget – and whether you need to re-evaluate what you’re spending.
• Invoice as soon as you have completed a job rather than waiting unto the end of the month. You can change your payment terms to be pay on invoice.
• Prepare your management reports each month and send them to your bank manager so they can see you’re on top of your financials. 

The dedicated pet sitters and dog walkers UK franchise Paw Pals is getting its franchisees to keep their accounts up to date using Xero and they love it!

Paul Wright, a Paw Pals franchisee who has just started using Xero, had this to say after the first time he used it:

I’ve had a look at the Xero software, imported my Bank statement and done a reconciliation (albeit with two transactions!).  It looks really impressive.  Some of the reports that you can access are fantastic, the sort of thing that is invaluable to help run a profitable business.  I need to spend a bit more time getting more familiar with it and seeing exactly what it can do for me.  But my first impressions are excellent.

I also had a look on the accountancy support website [provided by Xero partners Dennis & Turnbull] and that looks equally as good.  Even though I’ve been dealing with businesses for the last 15 years or so, running one is different and I’m sure that some of the answers to my questions will be here, or available here.

We’re really delighted with this feedback and we think Paw Pals Managing Director Victoria Reinthal summed it up nicely when she sent this comment to us and added her response of “Super Dooper!” – Victoria we can’t agree more!

Paw Pals are using the Accountants Edition of Xero through partners Dennis & Turnbull