Xero’s annual conference in New Zealand was held last week and drew 800 attendees, double the prevous year. The cloud accounting company gave previews of its plans for accounting and practice management.
If you missed out on Xerocon NewZealand 2013 here is a summary of the official figures and announcements.
General business
- Appointed a new general manager for New Zealand, Amanda Armstrong. Armstrong was previously CCH’s software sales director for Australia and New Zealand and had been with CCH for the past 20 years.
- Now has 135,000 paying customers and 350 staff.
- Running 160 servers with 5TB of financial data. It is processing 1.3 million requests a minute and processed NZ$84 billion of invoices last year, NZ$34 billion of which were in New Zealand.
- Counts more than 4,500 accountants and 1,200 bookkeepers as partners globally.
- Connects to over 4,000 banks, has 200 add-ons and 150 developers.
Road map: Clients
- Is working on purchase orders, quotes, stock, projects and version two of reporting. Main focus is adding a “Stock Light”, or inventory.
- Is adding resources tailored for farming clients in March release, working on farm reporting (similar to fixed assets). Will link to FarmIQ, AG-HUB, CRS, OSPRI, Deloittte.
- Is adding document storage that will let you attach a document anywhere in Xero. Receipts can be rotated the right way up, etc.
- Is adding more payment gateways to online invoicing. Right now it’s just PayPal but will soon add Authorize.Net (global), EWay and DPS (Australia and New Zealand), Stripe (US and Canada) and GoCardless (UK).
Road map: Partners
- Practice Manager has beta integration with Box, Dropbox and Google Drive. Office 365 can store templates.
- Will release Practice Studio in stages over the next 18 months. It will integrate reporting, practice management (Workflow Max), workpapers (Spotlight Workpapers) and tax into Xero’s partner accounting software (“green” Xero).
- Practice Studio will be free to Silver and Gold partners.
- Is adding content streams into Xero from Thomson Reuters, The Accountants’ RePublic and GiST.
- Upcoming features include grouping organisations on the dashboard, marking favourites, practice-wide groups. Also improved staff tools such as teams, improved access controls and expanding user roles.
- Has partnered with national IT services company Gen-i to help accountants move to Xero and Office 365.
Image credit: Xero