Australia the fastest growing market.
Xero doubled revenue from NZ$9.3 million to over NZ$19 million for the 12 months to March 31, 2012, New Zealand’s financial year.
The number of paying business customers also more than doubled from 38,000 to 78,000. Two months earlier Xero had announced it had reached the 60,000-customer mark, which suggested a daily sign-up rate of over 270 customers in the following two months.
Xero CEO Rod Drury wrote on the company blog that “we are in the key selling season”.
“Not promising we can do that month on month but as other countries come on stream we should smooth out the seasonal bursts,” Drury wrote.
Xero had captured 10 percent of the New Zealand small business market by doubling customers to 47,000 businesses.
The fastest growth was in Australia where customers jumped from 6,000 to 16,000. Despite the 160 percent growth rate the Australian market has enormous potential for the cloud accounting vendor. While New Zealand has an estimated 470,000 small businesses, Australia has 1.2 million.
In New Zealand and Australia, 97 percent of businesses have under 20 employees, the target size for Xero’s accounting software.
The vendor recently completed a national roadshow in Australia promoting the addition of payroll after acquiring PayCycle last year. Xero has previously said Australian businesses expected payroll to be part of their accounting software and the omission had held back sales as a result.
Xero staff nearly doubled from 113 to 194 staff and the company opened six offices in the US, UK, New Zealand and Australia.
The UK and US doubled their small numbers of customers. Xero has raised NZ$35 million this year to continue developing the software and to fund expansion into overseas markets.