Great ideas succeed where others fail because among other things they are disruptive. One such idea; the practice of running software applications in the cloud, is growing so rapidly because it is disruptive in two important respects; economic and innovation.

Online apps share a common economic disruption because rather than paying for them up front like classic software, you pay as you go and you can easily scale your spending up and down as your needs change plus you are not locked in to lengthy contracts. And in the world of small business accounting we also see huge disruption along the axis of innovation with the elimination of multiple datasets, provision of access from anywhere and from any device, and an awesome platform for instant collaboration between business owners and their financial advisers.

And so today we’re thrilled to be adding a new chunk of innovation disruption to the list in the UK with the release of the second phase of automated bank feeds from more than 55 UK banks and financial institutions. This phase caters for customers of UK banks such as Lloyds TSB, Nat West, Santander, Bank of Scotland, Royal Bank of Scotland and for customers across the Irish Sea, Ulster Bank and Bank of Ireland, with more to follow.

It’s taken us a while to get here and we’re grateful for your ongoing patience as we continue to roll-out this new service powered by Yodlee, last month it was Australia, and from today in the UK and Ireland. Our Help Centre has more detail about these new banks feeds and how to set them up. It also shows you how to find out if your bank is supported.

And we’re also feeling chipper today because Xero is the first accounting system in the UK to seamlessly couple banking with accounting, with daily banking transactions from UK high street banks now automatically flowing straight into Xero.

Our experience with bank feeds in New Zealand and Australia is that this is a game-changer. Having near real time accounting information is transformational and we believe all small businesses will demand bank feeds in their accounting software over the next few years. And with bank feeds there is also a huge opportunity for the UK accounting profession to upgrade, add value and be competitive. Having launched our first UK bank feed in May 2009 for HSBC customers, what we do know is that there is a real appetite for bank feeds in the UK as you’ll see in the video above.

Next stop is bank feeds for banks in the US and Canada. We’ll be releasing these as soon as the new UK and Irish feeds have bedded down, which is expected to be within the next couple of weeks.

As our guest on the blog, Chris outlines WikiJob’s experience with Xero.

Before Xero, WikiJob didn’t have an accounting system beyond Excel. We shopped around QuickBooks, MYOB and Sage, but all of them were far too complicated, which meant a steep learning curve. Also, they needed to be installed on Windows which we don’t have.

I was recommended Xero by a friend. I was instantly attracted by the online hosting of Xero – far away in the cloud. Being delivered through the browser means I don’t have to worry about upgrades, backups or compatibility. We always have the latest version, and it works on all our computers, including Mac and Linux. What’s more, because it’s on the web, everybody can use it at the same time to raise invoices and file expenses in a distributed way. Even our accountant who works at her office can access it from afar.

Transition

After sorting out all of WikiJob’s old paperwork and bank statements, the transition was easy. As soon as we’d transferred over our old balances and outstanding invoices we were ready to go.

The benefits

Windows programs tend to break, and losing data is a regular occurrence for many people. We don’t have any of these problems. Because everybody can log in and use it, they can do their work without bothering me. We never had to set up any fancy network stuff or whatever- it all ‘just works’- which means we spend more time doing real work, and less time fighting software.

I admire Xero’s ease of use and focus on productivity. Automated bank reconciliation is a revolution that saves a lot of time. The invoices and statements it produces are first class, and create a great impression amongst our clients. Despite being a product of New Zealand, it has good support for the various UK VAT schemes, and is up to date with the latest developments.

Great vibe

Xero continually strives to improve the product, and has a focus on customer experience and satisfaction. The product’s strength is its simplicity, and extra features are added in such an elegant way that does not baffle the user. When I get in touch with Xero, my emails are responded to with great customer service, and even suggestions I’ve had in the past have made it into the product I now use.

But they’re pretty useless when it comes to providing concise and illuminating answers to complex, more nuanced questions like ‘how are you different to the 20 other players in your space?’

So, I’ve developed my own personal set of metaphors and these variably bounce back and forth between long distance running and icebergs.

Long Distance Running

The stage of adoption of cloud based applications like Xero – in the UK market at least – is still early. By early I mean to say that an approximate estimate of the numbers of UK businesses using online bookkeeping is around 20,000 which I estimate to be about 1% of even a conservative addressable market size of 2 million businesses – (there are 4.7 million businesses in the UK, 98% of which are very small and 2.1 million are sole traders, so an addressable market estimate of 2M companies is pretty conservative). By any definition that’s very early.

Classic technology adoption bell-curve pop-science says that innovators and visionaries make up around 5% of a given market before early adopters show up. To counter that, speed of customer acquisition is high so it won’t take long to eat through to 5% market adoption and the much larger community of early adopters, perhaps 2-3 years tops.

So it’s a long race and I’d say we’ve just finished the first lap. And being the first lap, everyone starts at the same point, more or less, and remains bunched together which makes it incredibly hard to differentiate and pick out the ultimate podium finishers.

But by lap two the field begins to open up a little and evidence of strategy, training, stamina and determination begins to emerge and it becomes easier for the audience (market) to work things out as a pack begins to draw a little distance from the original starting line up.

So, we’re definitely on lap 2 and the field is stretching out and I think Xero is in that lead pack in the UK.

As an aside, although they haven’t even found the arena never mind made the starting line, Sage will no doubt finally show up with some Heath Robinson rocket propelled roller-skate contraption and could – if they’re lucky – catch up quickly, if not very elegantly.

Icebergs

This is a variation of an old fake Rolex metaphor I’ve used in the past to describe new technologies that look like the real thing but which are fundamentally lacking in one or several critical aspects, but which still succeed in drawing attention and some market share, if from less discerning customers.

But implying that your competition are all making fake Rolexes is pretty disingenuous and not very cool – so I don’t use that one these days unless it is a genuine counterfeit business plan – and I’ve been pitched a few of those.

When you are building out a new product or business you can take a couple of different approaches, aim modestly low and scale up investment as demand justifies it, or flip that logic and aim high from the beginning and try to create high levels of demand early. Aiming high requires you to make tough early investment based decisions about brand, marketing, architecture and go-to-market strategy on the assumption that you’ll be successful in filling demand.

Initially evidence of those decisions is generally invisible to the outside world, aside from tangible things like branding. This makes it incredibly hard for the market to differentiate between players.

But if you’ve built in scale assumptions from the beginning then it is – if the plan comes together – a tough but critical decision that pays off in the medium to long term as the various stages of customer acquisition begin to take their strain on the business, the product design, architecture and your operational choke points.

In other words building a business that gets to 1,000 paying customers is very tough, but getting to 5,000 or 10,000 and beyond is exponentially much, much harder and more complex, particularly if you have to change course or undo decisions mid-way through.

So, it’s easy to build the tip of an iceberg, much harder to build the whole thing especially when it’s invisible to the market at the surface.

And if new cloud competitors have any hope of putting a fatal tear in the hull of the cruise liner that is Sage in the UK, then they’ll need a bloody big iceberg – not just the tip – fitted out with tracking sat-nav, a means of self-propulsion and a few torpedoes to boot.

We think we’re up for it.

Until today my proto-theory stood precariously on three principles (and some of them are admittedly hunches).

I think Osborne’s budget today just gave my theory a fourth leg.

1. The prospect of likely though as yet unconfirmed swathes of reporting and regulatory relaxation for small businesses in coming years, saving both small businesses AND the government lots of money – the latter being the clincher.
2. Improved access to more affordable and better business management technologies, like -cough- Xero, which provide small businesses with on-demand access to instant and scalable infrastructure, up-to-the-minute operational visibility (with their financial advisors and virtual CFOs on their shoulders) and tons of operating efficiency – UNLIKE medium-sized businesses still running 20+ year old ERP apps whose gnarled roots are so deeply embedded in their processes and operations that their removal fundamentally risks harming the business, or at best will cost thousands to mitigate and years to execute – hence it gets deferred and the roots get to run even deeper, ability to execute all but evaporates.
3. The fact that you used to need large chunks of capital to run a medium-sized business, what with all the traditional communications, sales and distribution networks such businesses required to trade, often as mid-supply chain intermediaries. In 2010 you don’t need the same amount of capital nor does the supply chain need lumbering intermediaries whose existence has more to do with tradition than expedience.
4. George Osborne’s newly announced ‘think small first’ fiscal support package for startups and small businesses; lower Corporation Tax, NI breaks for startups and Capital Gains relief for small business owners.

I’d say it’s a done deal.

Voting to make the shortlist runs until the middle of July and only takes a few moments to complete. So, if you are a Xero user and feel so inclined, click here. Thanks.

You can read the full report here.

This new generation of web-savvy service providers offers a broad range of services from traditional bookkeeping services like helping with your accounts and credit control – hence the Xero connection – to taking care of travel arrangements and  answering your inbound sales calls. But they are also real entrepreneurs often with rich experiences to offer in a multitude of key business disciplines including marketing, web design, sales management, social media and search engine optimisation to name but a few.

Think less ‘assistant’ and more Swiss-army service provider. And an army they are.

So much so that this week we concluded that the VA community deserves its own Virtual Assistant category on our Xero Partner Directory; so that change went live today and we’ll be re-sorting existing Xero VAs into their new home over the coming days.

We get a lot of small businesses using the Xero Partner Directory to find Xero Partners; from accountants, bookkeepers, trainers to other solution providers, indeed it’s a key component of the value of becoming a Xero Partner.

So, if you’re a Xero VA then let us know if this change works for you, or if  you’d like to be included in our Directory, please email us at partners@xero.com.

Which is to say there are 3,999,999 duplicate records that in the old unconnected world of business is an unavoidable consequence of necessity. Using some dubious expert guesswork I roughly calculate that one instance of BT’s details would use around 4k of disk space and therefore by theoretical extension all those duplicate BT supplier account records would soak up a combined 14 gigabytes of disk space.But that’s just one big company that has lots of customers and clearly not every single one of the UK’s 4.7 million companies trades with each other.

So, let’s ignore the big old edge cases and instead guess that the average small business – for they make up 98% of the 4.7M – maintains 500 other companies’ customer records in their accounting systems, not including prospect lists or other databases like services, warranty, memberships etc. Using my same dubious guesswork of 4k per record, that throws out a customer record database of about 2 megabytes per company. And if all those 4.7M theoretical 2 megabyte databases were dumped onto a single hard disk, that disk would need to be a not inconsiderable 9,000 gigabytes in size – single hard disks run to about 2,000 gigabytes today.

If all UK company data were stored only once in a centralised cloud database and all systems of record stored  a simple data pointer to each centralised record copy, the collective cloud data-file would be a measly 18 gigabytes.

You can get USB memory sticks larger than that today for twenty quid.

Finally, to get the absolute worst-case theoretical filesize where every UK company traded with every UK company we’d multiply 4.7M companies by 4k per company record to throw out single company’s data filesize of 18 gigabytes which we’d then multiply by 4.7M to arrive at a whopping 8.4 billion gigabytes of collective disk space.

So, a single instance of a universal cloud based database would take up 18 gigabytes and the theoretical worst case offline figure is 8.4 billion gigabytes with the true figure being goodness knows somewhere in between. And that’s before factoring in other records and transactions.

But before this blog post gets totally out of control, my simple observation is this; as we shift ever more into an online digital world whether it be systems of record in business or 10 million personal music libraries containing exact duplicate copies of a single MP3 file of a Lady Gaga track, you have to wonder if we will ever kick this thus far inescapable appetite for epic levels of database redundancy that our legacy IT systems and old world business processes impose.

I hope we do.

One of the highlights was presenting in the ICAEW Accountants Hall. An amazing building. Here’s Gary in full flight …

Another big highlight was meeting a few of our team in person for the first time.  Paddy, Glen, Debbie (who’s online demo’s are so good they are called Debinars) and Darren of the North. Here’s Darren, me and Gary in Newcastle.

It’s a great feeling to be part of a global team of really smart and fun people.  We talk at each end of the day over Skype and Yammer but there’s nothing like spending a few days on the road to get in sync.

Some of the things I noted during this trip:

1. The UK is tough market, the GFC really knocked it around, but we’re receiving an overwhelmingly positive response to what we’re doing. Many partners have tried a few online products and now know the space and vendors.  It’s very gratifying to see them understand the depth of what we’re building into Xero.  We’re starting to pick up quite a few customers from other products as experienced partners realize the investment required to do things properly.  It’s also good to see that they understand how online accounting products need a client-side and accountant-side view.  The market is quickly becoming more sophisticated.
2. I was impressed by the network of ‘Virtual Assistants’ around the UK.  Smart and energetic people who are providing a variety of services to many small businesses.
3. Social media is huge in the UK.  Everyone is on twitter.  We were leaving a virtual twitter trail behind us.  I was impressed the Virtual Assistants run a Skype public chat and have a great community going.  Gary was asking questions over Skype chat while we were driving between venues.  We’re seeing very strong communities and friendships being made online.
4. Everyone has an iPhone, and in a country like the UK the iPhone is super useful.  It’s a GPS, it finds the cafe’s, it tells you what plane is flying overhead, it joins you to the conversation 24×7.  The iPhone knew about the platform our Newcastle train would be on before the station board.  Or as Gary said “did the iPhone decide”

We had a good session with BT.  If you thought it was hard work getting a marketing partnership with a big carrier, that was nothing compared to the work required to link into their provisioning process.  After a long time and a lot of effort in the UK, India and NZ our order journey on the BT site is now live.

We’re building a good profile in the industry and we finish off tomorrow with four media interviews.

In terms of market acceptance we’re probably a year to 18 months behind where we are at in NZ, but we have a great team in place and a rapidly growing network of fantastic partners in the UK. It’s been very nice to meet many of them in the past week.

Aside from the hundreds of people we entertained with our 10-minute demos on the Xero stand over the two days, my abiding memory will be the number of times my explanations of Xero’s basic characteristics like unlimited user pricing or automated bank feeds were greeted with wide-eyed incredulity with ‘ Seriously?’ or ‘You’re kidding me?”

We think we’re onto something, so was great to hear that a chunk of the business start-up community agrees.

So, if you’re an accountant and like the sound of what Xero might do for your clients and your practice, or a start-up business looking for an early leg-up, take your pick from the following public appearances…

• May 10 – PROBIZ 2010 Summer Conference* - London, for accountants
• May 13 – Now’s The Time, online webinar for accountants and bookkeepers – Register
• May 20/21 – Business Startup Show – London, for anyone in business.
• May 24/27 – Now’s The Time** - Bristol, Birmingham, London, Newcastle, York, Manchester, for accountants & bookkeepers – Register

Places are strictly limited at the Now’s The Time regional events, so if you’d like to come along it’s best to book early.

Hope to see you somewhere along the way.

* Organiser charges for attendance
** Featuring Xero’s CEO, Rod Drury

So, I took my video camera along with me during a couple of days of visting accounting firms in North Yorkshire last week to get it from the horse’s mouth.

Here’s what two accountants in that part of the country had to say about working online.

I’ll try to nab some more interviews in other parts of the UK to build up a mini-series over the next few months.

PS. The hissy audio soundtrack is caused by me being the managing director of Xero UK and not a Hollywood qualified sound engineer. I have ordered the appropriate Dummies Guide for future episodes.

The encouraging takeaways from this latest BCM report are that business confidence grew for the fourth consecutive quarter, it’s the sharpest and most prolonged bounce back since the BCM index began and the latest figure marks the highest levels of confidence seen since 2004.

What’s still worth bearing in mind, though, is the spectre of deep public spending cuts this summer once a new government is installed and sets about working down our monumental public spending deficit. And the fact that while we are clearly feeling much more confident than we did 18 months ago, many businesses are still running below capacity, funding is still hard to find and overall GDP is unlikely to get an altitude induced nosebleed anytime soon.

However, it’s all heading in the right direction – keep on trucking.

We’ve just done a small product release to bring the default rate for UK organisations back to 17.5%.

While some things have been automatically reset for you from 15% to 17.5%, there are some specific items we’d prefer you to check and reset yourselves just to make sure you have the right rates for your business.

Thus, after rubbing some more Xero brain cells together on the subject, we opted to take a small detour around some of the guidance we gave in December’s blog post – the upshot is we chose not to update all your upcoming repeating transactions as we said we would. Ultimately, we concluded that it would be inappropriate for us to change your overall repeating invoice amounts without your input (which would have happened with a rate change) so you’ll need to check and adjust these rates for any repeating invoices you have setup where appropriate. While this may give you a little extra work if you happen to have more than a handful of repeating invoices (if you’re having to do this with a bit of a hangover then we’re sorry!) – but we concluded that, all up, this was still the best approach. In some cases, you might also like to check default rates you’ve used in your Chart of Accounts – while these will be automatically updated for the most part, edited default rates might need to be confirmed.

Refer to our Help Centre – How do I deal with the VAT rate change from 1 January 2010 to see the full list of changes either made by us or required by you.

For the UK, the HMRC’s Flat Rate Scheme (FRS) for VAT is a beautifully simple scheme for businesses who don’t have an accounting system, but a beautifully complicated scheme for businesses who do have an accounting system and want to take advantage of its benefits.

The good news is that as of today, Xero now supports the Flat Rate Scheme and we promise to keep it simple for you.

There’s a few changes to your VAT rates required – so please take care to check with your accountant to ensure you know the rules, such as the VAT reporting requirements you need to be mindful of if you switch mid-quarter etc., and then switch on the FRS from the Financial Settings page in Xero.

Once you are registered with HMRC, they will give you a rate. Simply enter in your Percentage Rate into our new Flat Rate VAT Return and Xero will calculate the right amounts for you.

You can then file your return as you would normally.

• The standard rate of VAT was temporarily reduced to 15% on 1 December 2008 and it will return to 17.5% at 12:00am on January 1, 2010

• Any Xero account (active or archived) that has a default VAT rate of 15% will be automatically updated to 17.5%

• Any price list item that has a default VAT rate of 15% will be updated to 17.5%

• Any repeating invoices that have a default VAT rate of 15% will be updated to 17.5%

HM Revenue & Customs has its own rate change guidance on how to treat certain trading scenarios on January 1, but as far as Xero is concerned it’s pretty straight forward and the rate switch will be automatically taken care of for you at 12:00am on New Year’s Day.

But please shout if there’s anything else you’d like to know for January 1.

This means that Xero users now have the ability to integrate with an HMRC Accredited payroll, prices start at around £1 per employee per month. MyPAYE adds its name to the growing list of online software companies enabling core business applications like payroll to find new life in the world of online, pay-as-you-go software.

Indeed, some years back I recall payroll being among the first applications to emerge as an early candidate for going online given its centralised bureaux DNA and the frequency of legislation driven updates and changes. Makes you wonder why it took us so long.

If you would like to find out more about MyPAYE’s solution either check their entry on our Partner Solutions page or go directly to their site.

But we need your help. We’re looking for people in New Zealand, Australia and the UK who can help us validate the files we’re generating. So if  you use commercial internet banking software eg: National Bank’s DirectLink and would like to be a part of the continuing enhancements in Xero, we would love to hear from you. Send us an email at network@xero.com

We are looking for people to test the following banks:

New Zealand

• ANZ
• ASB
• BNZ
• National Bank
• KiwiBank
• Westpac

Australia

• CBA
• NAB
• ANZ
• Westpac

UK

• Any bank that allows payments through BACS

A long standing frustration among accountants is the annual billing relationship they have with many of their clients. But on top of this we’re also hearing that getting paid (no matter when!) can be a bit of a challenge in tough economic times.

As an accountant you may present your bill with the final set of accounts. But if you think about it, there is no compelling reason for the customer to pay you until they get in touch next year. Monthly billing is definitely a better way to go. It’s good for your clients because they won’t be landed with a potentially large bill in one hit and they can budget for the expense. You have a more even income stream.

Making the switch to monthly or quarterly billing is easier than you think. A simple way of doing this is to list the services you’ll be providing your client, and as part of the list include the cost of Xero. You will find that by using Xero you can add GST/VAT Return Preparation and a Monthly Management Report for a very small increase in cost to you, but this will be of huge value to your clients. The aim is to turn your core services into a menu of offerings and build out the bundle that is right for each client.As part of your monthly review you can quickly process items such as fixed assets and depreciation –  which as well as providing better quality numbers, significantly reduces the amount of end-of-year processing you need to do. In effect you’re spreading your work over the period.

We already have many partners creating monthly accounting products. A few great examples are: Alexander Rosse, David Jessep & Associates and TuiBiz.

The move to online accounting is happening fast. Lots of accounting firms have seen the light and to stay competitive everyone firm needs an online strategy. There are hundreds of accounting firms on the Xero network and having assisted them to make the transition to online we’ve developed a wealth of knowledge and experience that will help and guide you and your firm to take that step.

Last in the series
This is the final part in my series in which I look at the pain associated with old desktop software in accounting practices and how Xero can be the client engagement platform. You can find out more about how Xero is designed for accountants here.

Green IT – not a label I’m a fan of, personally -  is an area I have been following for the last two or three years. Indeed it has been lately discussed and debated at some length at the Institute’s IT Faculty’s monthly technical committee meetings (upon which I sit) – in fact it would be remiss of me not to promote the ICAEW’s IT Faculty conference on Green IT in London next week.

But my sense is that for small businesses, the emergence and establishment of comprehensive environmental accounting will come in two phases; first though individual choice and then later through commercial imperative, whether direct or indirect.

In the immediate term it is likely that the primary motivation for small business owners to get green, whether through the use of smart technologies to mitigate or negate transportation costs for example, or through the careful selection of green suppliers, will be primarily driven by a personal sense of social responsibility and choice.

But in the medium to longer terms I see a strong parallel with the top-down adoption of quality management standards we saw emerge though the late eighties and early nineties. Whether it was through adherence to the British Standards Institute’s BS5750 quality standard or ISO9000, eventually even the smallest businesses at the foot of the supply chain were commercially encouraged, usually by an indirect customer once or twice removed near the top of the chain, to adopt or comply with formalised quality management processes.

So, while early adoption of quality management was mandated as a condition of trade, eventually it became a de facto norm as small businesses came to appreciate the wider commercial benefits it offered them, even if the effort to comply impacted short term profitability.

And so I suspect the same will be true for many businesses when it comes to environmental accountability. Or is it more complex that that?

The biggest takeaway from yesterday’s report is that UK business confidence has finally emerged from the negative zone where it has languished since confidence began its downward trend eight quarters ago in the summer of 2007. It is worth remembering that it was in August 2007 – doesn’t time fly when you’re not having fun – that we first saw the signs of the coming global financial markets collapse with the dramatic run and subsequent collapse of the Northern Rock Bank, a UK high street stalwart for many years.

Business confidence is an opinion based, subjective metric which can be loosely interpreted as a leading indicator of the underlying health of the economy. And off the back of the news last week that economies of Germany and France had both reverted back to positive growth, UK economists accordingly expect our GDP will be back in black within a quarter or so.

However, before we start lighting cigars with fifty-pound notes it is worth nothing that while this data-point is patently more encouraging than if the reported business confidence index was still plumbing its previous depths, it is still early days and there are other important factors to consider.

Douglas McWilliams, chief executive of CEBR who prepares the BCM report for the ICAEW gave this stark warning yesterday;

“Despite compelling signs of the recession nearing an end, I remain doubtful over the strength of recovery. The UK economy is still swamped with debt, earnings growth is weak and unemployment is rising…”

Last month I had the benefit of meeting an economist from CEBR and he demonstrated the same highly guarded sense of optimism. If you could even call it optimism. We discussed that while business confidence is a helpful if simplistic early warning system for economic contraction and recovery, historical analysis of the recessions of 1979 and 1991 suggest that the UK has some way yet to go. Notwithstanding the perilous state of UK public finances which the government will be forced to address though cuts in public spending and likely increased taxation – both of which will impede recovery – having endured its biggest drop in fifty years in only Q1 this year, CEBR predict that UK unemployment will continue to climb for up to a further two years after baseline economic growth returns – a somewhat sobering thought.

But it was encouraging to see that the industry sector with most improved confidence in the latest report was IT.

“….IT firms are the most confident of all and saw the greatest improvement in confidence in the quarter with the Confidence Index reaching 18.5 – the highest since Q4 2007.”

Even the traditionally up-beat UK technology sector had to break out its Leonard Cohen record collection* in 2008 in the face of most discretionary spend and absolutely all capital IT spend simply vanishing.

But now confidence among IT firms has returned, presumably off the back of cautious re-investment in updating elderly business systems and processes. While it would be something of a stretch to suggest that technology has a significant role to play in getting the entire UK economy back on track, I am hopeful that many will see this recovery phase as an opportunity for re-thinking and resetting expectations about how modern technologies can help businesses, and in ways that were not possible barely two or three years ago.

* Apart from Xero, of course – where apparently we’ve had Katrina And The Waves on infinite repeat for ages.

Gary Turner joined Xero in August 2009 as its new UK managing director. He is a twenty-year veteran of the UK accounting software industry and has had a seat on the ICAEW’s IT Faculty technical committee since 2005.

This is a huge benefit for all our UK customers and partners as the bank feeds are one of Xero’s most innovative and loved features. Read about bank feeds here and how simple they are to set up – just go to our Help Centre to complete the HSBC Bank Authority Form.

There is a small monthly fee of £2.50 per account for using the automated service but it is FREE until 1 August 2009.

Here’s some customer comments about bank feeds:

Brilliant! I don’t know what I would do without Xero and the automatic bank feeds! I’ve just completed my first ever GST return in 2 minutes, I’m loving it!

Our bank accounts are automatically updated in Xero, which is extremely helpful for us when I’m travelling. With everything online, both Anne and I always know where things stand, even when we’re in opposite timezones.

Xero auto bank feeds are really handy and it is simple to use.

Check out www.xero.com it’s sensational, online and cool. Even links into your bank acct and processes your transactions.

As far as we can tell we’re the first online accounting service to have direct bank feeds to UK small business.  Thank you HSBC for your help and support . We’re sure this is going to be a hit with our customers.

• Firstly, when importing the general ledger exported from Xero into MYOB Accountants Office (the software many accountants use to do end of year reporting) it seems that a particular setting was required in MYOB to understand the Xero date format. We’ve changed the date format exported so that MYOB AO understands it now without you having to do anything about it.
• Secondly, we’d removed the decimal places on PDF reports so that all numbers showed as whole numbers due to a high demand for this. We had feedback that on some reports this wasn’t desirable so we’re taking another look at this. In the meantime we’ve  put the decimals back on the PDF versions of sales tax reports (GST Return, VAT Return, BAS/IAS and Sales Tax Summary).

Thanks again for your feedback, it helps us make a great product if we know what does and doesn’t work for you.

As a Chartered Accountant with a public
practice background myself I found it pleasing that so many of my colleagues here in the UK are interested to know more about Online Accounting and how it can help them in business.

We built Xero to help Accountants and small business owners work together in a better, closer, more connected and valuable way.  Xero is a platform that enables service delivery for Accountants. More clients and stakeholders are requiring increased visibility and transparency of the numbers behind the business.

Xero is the platform that provides the tools and information, but when coupled with the Accountant, who has the specialist knowledge, it gets really powerful.

So many of the delegates at the conference were talking about changing the way they work with clients, billing monthly, preparing monthly accounts and focusing on helping the business owner, rather than just helping the tax authority.

I would like to especially thank James Dubois, who ran the conference and is in practice himself.  I would also like to thank Karen and the team from ICAEW who continue to welcome us into the Institute. Onward.