400,000

Over the last few days we passed 400,000 paying customers around the world. We thought it would be useful to give a 2014 wrap up and share some of the internal numbers we’re seeing as the power of the small business cloud platform is coming clear.

Key numbers from 2014:

• Millions of small businesses now connect in the cloud on Xero – we touched around 10 million businesses
• Processed over NZ$250 billion in transactions
• Over 400 customer facing updates
• Emerges as crucial growth platform for small businesses

400,000 is a key milestone as we head into key selling seasons in the UK, New Zealand and the US. In 2014 we processed NZ$250 billion of transactions and 95 million invoices, connecting millions of businesses, advisors, suppliers and customers worldwide.

The support from both our customers and partners is both humbling and exciting. Together we’ve established Xero as one of the leading platforms on which they connect, collaborate and conduct their business. Through a constant innovation cycle we are fulfilling our potential as a small business growth engine, bringing together crucial capabilities in accounting, payroll and payments with insights and the business specific applications small businesses need from our hundreds of partners worldwide.

We’re now utilising more than half a petabyte of data collected to report business performance at scale and deliver insights to help improve the growth of small businesses, providing a real time data set to discover the real power of the small business economy and trends such as growing self and part-time employment.

We are thrilled to be playing a role in igniting the small business economy. Our customers are adding employees and growing revenue and margins by having clear visibility of their numbers and easy access to advisors. At the same time, the vibrant ecosystem around Xero – including the growing advisor channel – is creating jobs worldwide.

We’re continuously improving with over 400 customer facing releases deployed during 2014. Most of these releases are silent, unnoticed by customers,  but span small business tasks ranging from payroll through beautiful business reporting. In the next week, we’ll unveil a new business dashboard to help small businesses have better visibility of their cash flow as Xero begins its delivery of ‘Big Data for Small Business’ in early 2015. We’ve now grown the team to over 1,000 in 2014, building capability for further innovation in 2015.  Onboarding so many staff has been an incredibly time consuming activity but it positions us very strongly for the coming years.

Our momentum is not only a clear vote for platforms born and bred in the cloud, but also for those optimised for mobile devices. In the past 12 months, over 145,000 small businesses have downloaded Xero Touch enabling them to pay, invoice and manage cash flow any place, any time.

Today, we are New Zealand and Australia’s most loved accounting platform and achieving a similar position in the UK. We had some staff speed wobbles in the US but we now have the key operating team in place and seeing a positive difference. The small business cloud market is still in its infancy: of the addressable market of hundreds of millions of small businesses, only a small percentage currently use cloud financial software.

Throughout 2014, we’ve invested significantly in our platform which is becoming critical infrastructure in its core markets. We now manage 500 servers across redundant data centres managing approximately 500TB of production data while maintaining best-in-class uptime of 99.99 percent. We have our sights set on not just leading in building our Cloud infrastructure, but also putting the innovations and investments from the global cloud providers like Microsoft, Google and Amazon to work for small businesses.

Thank you all for your support in 2014. Our team are fired up and excited about what’s to come. 2015 is going to rock.