A key theme at the conference was that technology should be seen as a strategic asset. Keynote speaker Gary Boomer, who has been named in the top 100 most influential people in accounting for the past 10 years, talked about some outdated paradigms in the accounting profession, one of which is that “technology is an overhead”. He suggested that technology should be seen and used as a competitive advantage. Improving efficiency through technology can free up valuable time so that firms can offer more value-add services.

He referred to cloud technologies as being far more intelligent and much easier to integrate than traditional desktop products (You can read this in his recent article). Gary cited Xero as a product accountants should be looking at for their practices. Many firms who were relatively new to cloud technologies started to see the benefits of Xero immediately. A partner from one of the larger firms in Texas summed it up by saying, “Let me understand…no licensing issues, no version issues, and I don’t have to send data files back and forth…it’s all just there all in one spot?”. Exactly. One version of the truth and no file transfer. Ever.

As many of our longer-standing partners in New Zealand, Australia, and the UK can attest, Xero has helped them revolutionize their practice to a subscription and value-based pricing. Firms are truly becoming virtual CFOs introducing monthly reporting, tax minimization strategies, and proactive advice. They’re bundling services to offer a variety of prepackaged monthly plans based on value, not time. Moving from hourly billing to packaged pricing is not new to the industry in the US. Many firms have been doing it for some time. What is new is the mechanism in which these value bundles can be delivered at a much lower-cost and more efficient manner. This is one of the reasons Xero is so revolutionary. Exciting times…

You can find out more about our US Xero partner program here: www.xero.com/partners

Despite the aggressive hiring climate, we’ve been able to recruit top talent because we all believe in the same thing – making the lives of small businesses easier.

Please welcome the new members to Xero Team USA. Spencer, Deborah, and Michael. They are awesome.

From left to right: Deborah, Michael, Spencer, Catherine, Craig, Jamie

Throughout the hiring process we were lucky to find out that they all have a love of numbers. And being an accounting software provider, that’s important to us : ) I thought I’d dig into their backgrounds on some things that aren’t commonly known about them.

3

3 is the number of cocktails Deborah can make in less than 30 seconds. It is also the number of scuba dives she’s done in one day, and lastly, it is the number of nicknames she has one of which is Whale Shark for her aptitude with poker. Poker, cocktails, scuba…it didn’t take much for us to take a liking to Deborah.

15

15 is the number of years of accounting experience Michael has with public and private companies. It is also the number of days before his wedding date that the wedding reception hall burned down, and lastly the number of steps he took crossing a street prior to being hit by a car. He ended up marrying the driver.

7

7 is the day in March when Spencer was born. It’s also his jersey number for all the teams he played for growing up including baseball and football. And lastly it is the number of stitches he received in his forehead on his 7th birthday after using a gift his uncle gave to him – an exacto knife. Who gives a 7-year-old a knife for their birthday?

295

295 is the number of things Catherine owns that are orange. “I quite like orange” Catherine says frequently. Anything from a pair of socks to an alarm clock with orange numbers to laundry detergent in an orange package to orange staples, there isn’t much that Catherine owns that doesn’t have some remnants of orange. She is looking for an orange traffic cone to add to her portfolio. Hopefully she doesn’t take this anywhere Michael will be walking.

10,000

10,000 is the number of songs Craig has on his iTunes Match. This is a an eclectic mix of everything from Mozart to Metallica, Tiesto to Tupac, Green Day to … dare I say it … Glee. He resisted telling me that, but secretly I think it’s his favorite album. I can hear him whisper-screaming to it on Fridays.

Kidding aside, each of Spencer, Michael, and Deborah has had some serious pain they’ve experienced with competing desktop software products. They have a solid understanding of cloud technologies and a sensibility to see that what Xero has built is the future of accounting software. We are super happy to have them on board and are looking forward to serving the needs of our small business customers in the USA.

If you’re up for a challenge in this huge exciting market and want to join our awesome team here please take a look at Xero Careers – we’re still hiring!

Where to find good coffee in:

Portland, Oregon

A lush green city known for its great water, beer, coffee and perhaps lesser well known facts, excellent pigeon population control and home to the word’s smallest park (Mill Ends Park)! No shortage of great independent roasters in this city.

My favorite was Public Domain – check out these machines and the gloss on that cappuccino!

I also rate any of the Stumptown cafes and Water Avenue Coffee (not just because some of their beans come in orange packaging!).

San Francisco, California

My new home. I have a coffee app for that and I’m slowly working my way around the independent roasters here. Top of my list is Blue Bottle. They have a series of cafes and kiosks around town but my happy place is at their cafe in the Ferry Building, where I also get my weekly supply of beans.

The Xero office is in SOMA and we’re lucky enough to have 3 great cafes 5ish minutes walk away – Epicenter Cafe, Blue Bottle Mint Plaza and the very new Elite Audio Systems.

I have to say, San Francisco has the longest lines for coffee in the world – all the big names here like Blue Bottle, Four Barrel, Ritual Roasters have lines that go out the door and you need to get used to building a 30 minute wait for coffee into your day. I’d say this is high demand for independent coffee … new cafe anyone?

Washington, DC

Luckily most visitors to Washington DC are goggling at the White House or are in very important Government meetings so the local independent roasters slide somewhat under the radar, well, not mine! If you’re slightly out of the main crowded areas, Chinatown Coffee Co has a great space for coffee and a catch-up.

Also, M E Swing Coffee House, closer to the White House.

New York, New York

Definitely a Starbucks (shudder) on every corner in Manhattan but also loads of great independent cafes if you know where to look. My absolute favorite is Ninth Street Espresso, and in particular the one in Chelsea Market.

There are so many others – I can personally vouch for most of the cafes on this New York Times list – what can I say? I’m a girl on a mission! Try Saturdays Surf for a location with a difference or Rize if you’re caught in Midtown or Culture Espresso if you’re partial to an Australian accent or want to try a flat white (popular coffee order in New Zealand and Australia)!

Las Vegas, Nevada

Forget it. If you’re there for a conference and confined to the hotel and Strip there’s nothing. I did find one cafe in our hotel that didn’t seem to be a big chain outlet but even with 2 extra shots in the bucket-o-searing milk (at $2 per shot) I couldn’t drink much more than the 1st sip and at $8.50 for that coffee you’d think I’d force it down!

However, that same cafe over the course of my 4 days there, when I wasn’t searching out urns of hot water at buffet tables, did supply me with a cup of hot water at no charge so I could make my own coffee. Yes ladies and gentlemen I was forewarned by conference vendor veterans that the only way to get decent coffee in Las Vegas was to take your own – they might’ve meant a travel tin of Nescafe but I went all out.

My kit contains the only TSA-approved grinder – a thing of metal and ceramic beauty.

People were SO jealous when conference delegates were in session and I mixed up a brew … although the nature of my addiction was called into question … it’s just bad exposure, not white knuckles of desperation in this photo …

Austin, Texas

In the land of orange Long Horns t-shirts, big trucks, drive-thru banks and streets melted by the summer heat it is possible to get great coffee. Thanks to a Kiwi colleague who used to live in Austin I had a head start. Try Caffe Medici for somewhere reasonably central with lots of room to sit and meet.

Also great is Juan Pelota (in a bike shop) and Franks (in a bar).

Kansas, Missouri

Mostly barbecue, and I wasn’t prepared at all to drink their coffee so I had my trusty travel kit with me, however a bit of research uncovered a coffee-drinking hipster meeting point a 10 minute bus ride from our conference. Broadway Cafe.

An up and comer showing promise is Parisi’s new cafe in Union Station.

Are there any cafes in your town that I shouldn’t miss if I find myself there?

P.S. In the States, I recommend you order cappuccino at independent cafes for the best espresso-based-coffee-with-milk experience.

I am so thrilled to join Xero and be part of something amazing.

I can honestly say that this is the most excited I’ve ever been about a job. How often do you get to be a part of a cool, hip, fast growing company that can literally revolutionize an industry?

A little about me…

I have had the fortune of holding a variety of fun and interesting jobs over the past 10 years in several industries. While I enjoyed them all, moving to the West Coast (USA) into the software industry was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. The software industry moves at a pace I’m much more comfortable with – fast.

My most recent experience as the General Manager at Sage was great prep for Xero. I had P&L responsibility for a small business accounting division with a team of 170 people. I had an impressive team that helped us become the fastest growing business across Sage North America. We were also creating next generation SaaS and mobile apps and pushing the company into an uncomfortable area which was exciting. There was still some debate at Sage about the cloud which largely revolved around hosting desktop solutions. I had moved on from the cloud vs. desktop debate a long time ago. The internet has the ability to change every single industry on this planet so why wouldn’t accounting be the same?

My thoughts on Xero

I was introduced to Xero through Doug Sleeter. We caught up for lunch in Pleasanton, California and I told him what I wanted for my next career move. I was interested in a small, nimble, and fast-paced SaaS company focused on small business. Without hesitation he said “you gotta talk to the guys at Xero”.  A day later I was on a call with Rod Drury. The very next week I was in Wellington, New Zealand.

I remember my first morning in New Zealand being greeted by Catherine Walker and checking almost every coffee shop on the North island. Needless to say, I had my share of caffeine and was ready to meet the team….buzzing.

In my mind, this wasn’t just an interview. Part of my visit was to “kick the tires” at Xero and ask some tough questions to make sure this company was all it was cracked up to be. For every heady question I had, there was an equally impressive answer that just made plain sense. From Xero’s design-led product development, nimble start-up feel, awesome accountant-savvy staff, all-star board, sound business model, and bulletproof go-to-market strategy and sales model, I was thoroughly impressed. It’s no wonder Xero is doubling and tripling revenues.

Fast forward to today and I am flattered to have been selected to lead the US expansion and extremely excited about what we are going to accomplish. I am also thrilled that Craig Walker (engineering wizard) and Catherine Walker (community and coffee wizard) relocated to San Francisco to keep that special Xero vibe. We have an incredibly strong foundation to build upon and I foresee growth coming in leaps and bounds.

Want to be a part of the Xero story? We’re hiring and 2012 is going to be an exciting year.

Las Vegas is the home of bright lights, slot machines and, you guessed it, accounting conferences. This year it played host to the Sleeter Conference, which is a must-attend conference for CPAs, bookkeepers and QuickBooks advisers operating in the SME market. The theme was – The Next “Next Big Thing”. It made sense for Xero to be there.

The Sleeter Conference was an important conference for Xero. The delegates are the cream of the QuickBooks community in the USA and we weren’t sure of the reaction we would get.

We’ve been working with many of the key influencers in the US accounting industry to ensure Xero fits the market and to get advice as to the best approach. Doug Sleeter, founder and host of the conference, came to visit us earlier in the year to see what we were doing and he invited us to speak at the conference. For those of you who don’t know, Doug is a veteran, well respected QuickBooks evangelist and small business technology expert.

We were blown away with the response to Xero and really excited to meet so many forward thinking business advisors who already understand the benefits of moving to the cloud for their business and their clients.

During the afternoon session on the first day, Xero CEO Rod Drury, was a guest speaker and we were delighted to see the room overflowing. Rod talked about where we believe the accounting software industry is going and how moving to the cloud changes the game for advisors. It was a thrill to hear oohs and ahhs during Rod’s demo.

After the presentations our booth went manic – the buzz remained from start to finish.

Our favorite quote from a delegate was – you had me at dashboard!

It was clear delegates are ready to move to collaborative service models that allow them to work more closely and frequently with clients. There’s still some confusion around what ‘the cloud’ really means – desktop vendors have muddied the waters with interim hosted offerings of their desktop solution under the moniker of cloud. It was great to show what a ‘true’ cloud accounting solution can do.

We were looking forward to the 3-5 year vision from the big players Sage and Intuit, and the audience seemed disappointed these companies did not lay out their roadmap or vision for how they will help the profession move into the cloud. We got the sense that the US accounting industry is ready for leadership and a fresh approach that leverages everyone being connected.

We still have a few things to do to be a perfect fit for the US market, but many delegates agreed Xero is at a point where they can begin the process of on-boarding clients and give us the feedback so we can keep building a product they will love for years to come.

If you’re in the US and wanting to get started, you can get in touch at http://www.xero.com/partners and join the conversation with us on LinkedIn

The Xero team really enjoyed making a bunch of new friends and we look forward to being a long term partner.

And yes, check printing is coming real soon!

I’m a front-end developer. If you’re scratching your head wondering what that means, you’re not alone. When I tell my family what I do to earn a living they say, “That’s nice dear,” and then they talk about how the lawn needs to be mowed.

Simply put, as a front-end developer I build the bits of Xero that are beautiful and fun to use.

There are products available to me to make my job easier. At Xero we use tools built by Sencha, a company that exclusively creates frameworks for developers. When you open a menu, reconcile a statement line or touch your way through invoices on your iPhone, that’s all written by someone like me using products made by Sencha.

Last week I attended SenchaCon 2011 in Texas with Craig Walker, our CTO. I was there as a sponge and he was there as a speaker. There aren’t many front-end developers in New Zealand, so it was great opportunity to meet my peers and take a look at the applications they’ve written.

Can you imagine 600+ front-end developers in a room together, looking at JavaScript and erupting in applause when new components and methods are showcased? Sounds like a nightmare? You’re probably right, to but me it was heaven on a deep-fried stick of butter.

During the keynote speech the CEO of Sencha highlighted Xero as a remarkable company, which made us chuffed. Afterwards they had some big announcements, for example Sencha received $15 million in funding to grow their company and further develop their products.

Have you ever thought, “I wonder what an application would be like if the server was written in JavaScript?” If you have, you’re either weird or daring, depending on your background. That was the topic of Craig’s first talk at the conference. He built a server made of node.js and Ext JS, one of Sencha’s products. With a room full of geeks who love working with JavaScript anyways, it was like icing on the cake.

His second talk was a showcase of Xero and how we use Sencha to build our products. The developers actually clapped during the presentation because they were so impressed. Even in New Zealand, which is a small country far from the hubbub of the American and European development communities, we can be on the forefront of using these tools to produce beautiful software.

SenchaCon was excellent and I’m excited about all the new stuff they’re releasing. Not only are we at Xero continuously perfecting our service with new features and interface enhancements, the tools made by Sencha that we use to build Xero, are also improving every year.

That’s all good news for you, because managing your finances will only get easier and better.

Anyone who loves Sencha as much as we do and is smart and keen to have a play, we’d love to work with you. Check out our careers page.

Photos from nilsdehl

Nice message from our friends at K2 this morning that Xero was one of the winners in their annual Quality Awards.

K2 Enterprises CEO, Val Steed, announced five new categories this year. “The SaaS category of solutions really deserves dedicated recognition and we now have that. We don’t want to add too many awards but the whole world of accounting technology solutions is evolving rapidly and we want to recognize those who are doing a great job.”

Already we’re getting to know many of our peers in the US accounting industry so congratulations to them as well. We’re thrilled that SaaS is making an impact on the industry.

We’re making good progress in the USA. We’re working hard on US specific features to release before pushing hard but customers are rolling in everyday.

We look forward to catching up with everyone in Las Vegas in November.

You can see the full list of winners here: 2011 K2 Enterprises 10th Annual Quality Awards

Kiwi Landing Pad is a joint venture backed by leading entrepenuers from New Zealand and the US, as well as the New Zealand Government. The Landing Pad is a hub in SoMa, San Francisco, where technology companies from New Zealand can base themselves as they move to being exporting, global businesses. Xero is part of the initial wave of New Zealand companies taking up residence in the Landing Pad – it’s definitely a great vibe – it’s like a whole lot of New Zealand technology businesses taking on Silicon Valley from deep within the heart of San Francisco. It’s a great venture to be a part of, even if we hope to be so successful, so quickly that we’ll outgrow it!

Kea is New Zealand’s global network of expatriates and honorary citizens, connecting and networking together with the common goal of enabling New Zealanders to engage on a global scale. It is a fantastic organization, and one that has been very helpful to us as we’ve entered new markets. It really is amazing how many New Zealanders are out in the world doing incredible things and their willingness to share and embrace other Kiwis to help them to do the same. The Tall Poppy Syndrome that is very prevalent back home seems to dissipate as you cross oceans. For Kiwi businesses that are new to a particular market, Kea not only provides a little taste of home but also a tremendous network of contacts and connections.

As part of the launch event a few of the early residents of the Landing Pad, including Xero, did little introductions to their businesses (and hopefully made a few quick sales). And then the mic was handed over to Mike Moore, New Zealand Ambassador to the US. Mike Moore is a former Prime Minister of New Zealand and also a past Director-General of the World Trade Organization (WTO). He spoke about the relationship with the US and how it has been developing over the last few years. It was actually very interesting to get an inside view on it all. He was also very excited about Landing Pad and the New Zealand companies that are taking on the US market. He was very eloquent in his view that the biggest risks we face at New Zealanders are to ourselves. The opportunities globally are huge for New Zealanders and it’s initiatives like the Kiwi Landing Pad and organizations like KEA that are out to make sure we take full advantage of them.

Of course there are times when one country has different requirements to others. We already have versions of Xero for New Zealand, Australia, United Kingdom and a global product for other countries.

Today we’ve launched our US version.

If you have a subscription for any USA organizations you will be prompted in My Xero to update these to the new US version.

Now we have the platform in place we can start releasing US specific features. We’ve already done some work on spelling and a more US friendly default chart of accounts but there’s more we’d like to do.

The most obvious is the ability to print checks (cheques for the rest of you). Checks are still widely used in the US (the bigger the better) and while we’d love to encourage electronic alternatives we accept that there’s still a strong demand for paper checks.

We are still looking at more automated ways of enabling our users to receive and make payments – there’s lots of exciting options which we’ll talk about more in the coming months.

Other items high on the list include, generating 1099s, regional reporting and broadening our US based add-on partners.

Last but not least is the question of whether we need to tackle sales tax calculations or are Xero’s powerful custom tax rates enough? On this we’d like your feedback. Or perhaps there’s a must-have US specific feature you’d like us to consider – let us know.

I’ve not spent much time in San Francisco – obviously excited to see the orange (unless you’re in the ‘rusty red’ camp) Golden Gate Bridge and discover some good coffee places. We caught up with our friends from Clarium and went on a road trip (our first US driving experience) to visit bill.com, Doug and Sherrill Sleeter and we were invited by Steve Souders to have lunch at Google in Mountain View. There’s a real buzz in San Francisco and a lot of hiring going on.

While Craig was at the conferences in Portland I was really trendy and hung out with my Mac at various cafes around town taking advantage of the excellent free wi-fi that all cafes have, sampling some of the fantastic espresso that Portland is known for (excellent by Wellington standards too!). We had a chance to meet Bank Simple’s CTO Alex Payne while we were there and hear how things are progressing for them as they’re about to launch their online only banking service.

After tweeting that I was going to be in Portland I was excited to find out that an accountant using Xero in Seattle wanted to come down to meet me – she is a total Xero fan girl and it was rather humbling listening to her praise Xero. We talked about the key things missing for her in the US (pleased to find out they’re things we know about and are currently working on – bank feeds still to come from some banks, checks) and it was great to meet someone a world away who gets it and is a real Xero ambassador. I’ll let her tell you in her own words – I snapped this quick video after our meeting although I didn’t get her priceless quote on film “Xero is like driving a Ferrari after a dump truck”! Mariette Knoblauch of Ballard Beancounters.

Since I spend a lot of time on Twitter (in amongst the many hours of working, of course) there was very little that was particularly new that I hadn’t heard of before but the depth and range of topics was great. It was also very interesting to see how JavaScript is being used at different companies.

One of the big topics at JSConf this year was around modules. Modules are self-contained, interchangeable pieces of code that can be used and reused across projects. As well as being a great way to promote reuse, the ability to modularize has been an issue with client-side performance geeks for a while now. In that context, the ability to package reusable code and deliver it in a fast (preferably asynchronous) way to the browser while also handling any dependency issues that may arise (i.e., modules depending on modules) is a big problem to solve. There are lots of patterns for modularization that were discussed (with Node implementing the CommonJS module system) but nothing has ever been formalized at the language level.

Which leads onto the next big topic – JS.next. Brendan Eich (the father of JavaScript) talked about the work that’s being done on the next version(s) of the JavaScript language itself. This includes a module system that seems pretty reasonable, though I think there are still issues around how those modules work in the browser (in server-side JS, modules can be loaded synchronously so loading techniques are less important than in the browser). In general a lot of the proposed changes look very much inspired by Coffeescript (in fact Brendan was actually brought up on stage by Jeremy Askenas, the inventor of CoffeeScript, during his talk). CoffeeScript is a meta-langauge that compiles (or as it has been called: “transpiles”) to JavaScript. CoffeeScript is an interesting language – it abstracts away some of the painpoints of JavaScript and for some developers it’s a very clean way of writing JavaScript applications. But it’s not JavaScript – and to have these conventions morph into the standards feels slightly weird. Not that I dislike CoffeeScript – I don’t. But I would prefer it didn’t become the language, and I think trying to solve the problem of the word “function” being too long instead of fixing numbers is slightly misguided (I say that without any disrespect to the team behind JS.next since I know fixing numbers is actually a hard problem – but I had to say it). Also interesting are the changes to the language to get around the nested callbacks issue (which is particularly painful in Node) – it’s great that they’ve identified the complexity there and that they’re trying to lower the barrier to entry for new and inexperienced JS developers.

If you want to play with all the new language features then you can right now. Google released Traceur at JSConf, a transpiler for experimenting with JS.next features. This is similar to Mozilla’s own Narcissus. Both are written in Javascript, which means you can host the transpilers directly in your pages and play with JS.next on the fly.

After a rest day (well needed) was the very first NodeConf. I am going to be talking about Node at the WDCNZ so I won’t explain what Node is here, but trust me – it’s cool

Ryan Dahl, the creator of Node, delivered a great keynote. As someone that has created something with so much hype Ryan is a very humble and gracious presenter (and perhaps a little quirky) – his talk on creating the next version of Node to natively support Windows was absolutely fascinating and highlights how low level Node actually is. It actually bordered on captivating (in an extremely geeky kind of way). I totally appreciate all the efforts of the core contributors of Node to make the JS layer of Node completely platform independent – it’s truly amazing work.

The great thing about NodeConf was the fact it was one of the first conferences specifically on Node – a project that was only started in 2009. I’m pretty sure almost all the people developing Node in the world were in that room (apologies if you weren’t ) – it’s a small but vibrant community.

In fact it was the community aspect of both conferences that was the biggest takeaway – the ecosystem and community built around JavaScript is so inspiring – everyone is really friendly and approachable – egos were left at the door and everyone was just happy to revel in the fact they were with like-minded people, geeking out on JavaScript.

It was a great week. Thanks again to Chris Williams and Mikeal Rogers for organizing JSConf and NodeConf and thanks to all the sponsors for the amazing parties. And a specical thanks goes out to Meno Abels and Malte Ubl, two crazy and unbelievably talented German developers who have managed to invent a solution for conference WiFi that runs on Node and actually works! I had fast, constant, perfect WiFi all the time and on every device – there aren’t many conferences (especially tech conferences) where you can say that, so kudos to them for coming up with a solution to what is actually a very hard problem. Maybe Owen could use them for WDCNZ?

We call it ‘Social Accounting’. But it’s not just about using Social Media, it’s using this, together with the ability to collaborate online, so small businesses have a more meaningful relationship with their accountant. Watch Jason Blumer of Blumer and Associates explain why working this way is the future.

We had hoped to release the next phase of the Yodlee integration across North American banks this month. This is the biggest release to date and is going to involve several thousand banks and financial institutions. Unfortunately it’s going to take a bit longer to make some improvements and confirm exactly which banks will be available next.

We’re really sorry for this delay, but at Xero we’re about getting it right. So bear with us and rest assured we will be working over the holiday season so these feeds can be released around the middle of January.

We’ll let you know when the feeds are available by issuing a Xero inbox notification. Once you’ve received this you’ll be able to go into Xero and confirm if your bank is part of this next phase. In the meantime we’re publishing 12 of the more popular banks used by Xero customers that we know will be available:

American Express Cards (Personal Banking and Credit Cards)

Bank of America (not available in some states)

Capital Bank

Chase Bank

Citibank (Personal Banking only)

Fifth Third Bank (Personal Banking only)

ING Direct Bank

ING DIRECT Bank (Canada)

National Bank

PNC Bank

Scotiabank (Canada)

SunTrust (Personal & Business Banking)

Wachovia

Just a reminder that this release will not include banks that need some form of multi-factor authentication so you can access online banking. We are still planning to provide support for these banks in Q1 of 2011.

We’ve already attracted thousands of users across the country who love our accounting software. It’s time to go big and we need  exceptional people, starting with the following roles:

Product Manager

• Build and prioritize our US product roadmap based on customer feedback and market insights (both end-user and partner)
• Develop market requirements based on accounting, financial and tax requirements for small business
• Work with sales and marketing to build compelling messaging and sales tools
• Work with dedicated business development professionals to identify new partnership opportunities across banking/finance, telcos/ISPs, ecommerce and social networking sites, etc.
• Work with sales and marketing to drive world-wide revenue and market share growth
• Evangelize Xero to reviewers, analysts, and media
• Experience with accounting software is preferred

Business Development

• Engage with other SaaS and tech leaders, accountants, financial institutions, and telcos to establish strategic partnerships
• Drive customer acquisition programs leveraging strategic partner customer bases
• Execute customer and partner engagement programs spanning online and in-person events, user groups/communities, and social media
• Promote & demo Xero – to partners, business owners, media, influencers and analysts
• Experience with accounting software or the small business web is desirable

Xero is backed by an extremely talented, passionate and highly successful team. Our accounting software has rapidly attracted a loyal and growing following, with tens of thousands of passionate customers world wide. We’re perfectly situated to build a substantial customer base in the US. We need people who recognize the opportunity and will shine the spotlight on it.

In addition to a competitive salary Xero has a company share plan (Xero is a publicly listed company).

If you’re interested or know someone who is, please contact careers@xero.com. You can check out other Xero opportunities at www.xero.com/careers

Please help us spread the word via Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. Thanks!

We just got an email from Ido at PostalMethods.com telling us how their service can be used with Xero to mail paper invoices just by clicking send!

To see how it works, just read their very simple instructions.

Please note, their service is US mail delivery only, so if you’re a US customer of Xero or you send invoices to US clients then this is a really great option for you.

My session is on rapid prototyping – a passion of mine and the not-so-secret sauce behind Xero.

This expo has always been one of the most important conferences to watch for emerging web technologies and strategies. The whole schedule is jam packed with amazing people and topics.

If you want to go, just use this discount code websf09spr35 to get 35% off the ticket price.

Firstly, set the tax rates for each individual contact you deal with. You can now assign default tax rates to customers and suppliers, and enter their tax number. This will be useful for you if you have customers or suppliers that don’t use your normal tax rate, ie. because they are exempt or they’re in another country. When you enter your customer’s tax number it will automatically display on any invoices you raise for that customer.

Also today, we have updated Xero’s support for VAT tax codes for EC sales and purchases. UK customers now have two additional tax codes to record zero-rated EC sales and purchases. Additional tax codes can be added for other EC transactions that include VAT and for other sales and purchases made within the UK but with a special VAT rate. Each tax rate will be properly accounted for in the VAT return and audit report.

Read the full release notes for more details.