Updated with iPad-friendly graphs.
Xero has added bank feeds to its cloud accounting program for individuals, Xero Personal. Bank feeds were available only for Bank of New Zealand customers when the product was released in March 2010 and were a long-promised feature for other banks in other countries.
Automatic bank feeds have been regularly cited as one of the reasons behind the success of Xero’s business product. The company claimed it to had to delay feeds for Xero Personal while it improved the banking integration platform that managed feeds for its rapidly growing business product.
Want help moving to cloud software? Check out the Cloud Adviser Directory – shortlisted experts in moving small and medium businesses to the cloud.
“Back in April we advised a delay in getting started on developing automated bank feeds into Xero Personal. This was due to the improvements required to our underlying banking integration platform to manage the continued growth in use of bank feeds with Xero,” a Xero spokesperson wrote in the company blog.
The cost of adding feeds was another potential issue. While Xero sought direct agreements with Australian and New Zealand banks, it paid US financial data supplier Yodlee for feeds from hundreds of banks in the US and other countries.
The number of banks providing feeds to Xero Personal was substantially fewer than Xero for Business. The list of participating banks included ASB Bank, ANZ and Westpac in New Zealand; NAB, ANZ, Westpac Commonwealth Bank, Bank of Queensland and Suncorp in Australia; and Natwest, HSBC, The Co-operative Bank, Halifax Online and Barclays in the UK.
The release also added the ability to add notes to specific transactions and all graphs had been re-encoded in HTML5 which meant they could be viewed for the first time on iPads. Xero posted a video explaining the update on Xero Personal.