I attended the Xero session at the beautiful ICAEW building at 1 Moorgate Place London this morning and met Gary Turner (UK MD) and Rod Drury (Kiwi Co-Founder of Xero).
They gave an excellent presentation as to the where Xero came from, the entire philosophy of their business model and where Xero is going.
It was aimed at accountants and bookkeepers as Xero tries to encourage them to become partners and bring on new clients under the Xero Partner Edition which allows practises to really get active in managing and supporting their clients.
As a Developer Partner (and a Xero user for Acorn Software), I was most interested in hearing where Xero is heading. Here are some of the highlights that I noted down:
- By September this year there will access to automated bank feeds to many thousands of banks globally thanks to an integration with some financial aggregator that pretty much all the banks use. That means for the UK that there will be approximately 80 financial institutions with direct feeds into Xero. Can’t wait for that.
- Also it is expected that by about September that Xero will be able to produce final accounts – making another compelling reason to go Xero.
- As part of the above change, online filing with HMRC will become available. I’m not too clear on the dates of that coming into play – but I hope that it will in the same sort of roll out time frame.
One thing about Xero that I wasn’t previously aware about was the fact that it manages both Cash & Accrual based accounting simultaneously. All the data is in the system, you choose which reports to run and it prepare the figures accordingly. What a breath of fresh air considering the tortured process of sending these details from simPRO to Sage that we have been experiencing.
It was also interesting to hear Rod talk about coming up with the business concept for Xero and how it came from the “fundamental shift” to cloud computing being driven by the `mass’ of consumers. But for a traditional business model it is hard to create a web based business for consumers as these consumers generally want everything free (think Gmail, Facebook, Twitter etc etc). So the next largest market to target was the small business (Gary mentioned that there were 4.7 million businesses in the UK, 2 million of them with very small often with only 1 employee). There is a mass of them out there with a decent percentage of them willing pay some money for a product that either
a) makes them more money, or
b) saves them money, or
c) gives them more time.
Absolutely agree. Empower the field worker to focus on their core responsibilities AND support the streamlining of back-end operations toward analysi
I like how straight forward the process is.
Sounds like a good idea but how is that better than just getting a pda solution for guys?
Great article. There's a lot of good information here, though I did want to let you know something - I am running Redhat with the circulating beta of
Looks good - the digital notes can also be transferred straight on the computer, right ?
Hi JDW - yes it would be a great tool for any kind of business that needs to invoice from the road. If any of your clients are contractors or service
Is this real? I need that for my new plumbing company for the lads. But we will use sage for this is there a sage pen?
Interesting - as an accountant I think that would be a great tool to use for busineses of any size that I deal with. Any ideas on when it might be