Xero HQ: Powering an efficient practice in a digital world

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At Xero, we see accountants and bookkeepers not as customers or even simply partners. We see them as heroes of small business, helping to power the global economy. Any opportunity to help them do even more has to be seized and our Xerocon series of events, of which Austin is the latest and last (although certainly not least!), is the perfect chance to share our world-class tools and technology with them.

Every day at Xero is geared towards helping small businesses grow so that they can have a positive impact on the world. Our research shows that one of the best ways of achieving this is for small businesses to bring on an accountant or bookkeeper as an advisor, with those who do so seeing profits grow 23 percent faster, with the insight offered helping to power investment and growth.

So it makes sense that to fulfill our purpose, Xero needs to be doing everything possible to empower our Accounting and Bookkeeping Partners.

To this end, we’ve curated an app ecosystem with our first Xero HQ app partners. We were proud to announce a thoughtfully curated set of apps that integrate directly into Xero HQ at our Xerocon South event in Melbourne, giving partners a beautiful open practice platform that drives efficiencies and growth by providing an integrated set of the world’s best practice tools in one place.

It’s been demonstrated that the more clients advisors have on the cloud, the more revenue they are able to make. Today, I was also excited to announce the availability of Migration Certification in the Americas. Designed to showcase your skills at helping small business clients get set up properly on Xero, Migration Certification gives you a way to assure them that you can guide them through these key steps.

As we work to revolutionize the accounting industry across the board through AI and Machine Learning, Xero HQ plays its part by changing the way our Accounting and Bookkeeping Partners work. By providing real-time visibility and insights across all clients, with timely alerts about their urgent needs, it brings our Partners even closer to their clients.

Xero HQ’s vision is to provide a one-stop hub for accounting practices. By listening to what our Xero partners told us about which apps they already used in their practice, we were able to integrate them directly into Xero HQ to enable superior client services. It also makes the lives of accountants and bookkeepers much more efficient.

Simply releasing a product is never the end of the road. Our research shows that practices that use apps make more revenue and are more successful than those that don’t, and Xero doesn’t want anyone being left behind in the age of cloud accounting.

Through the Xero Global Benchmarking series, we looked closely at the digital tools our most successful partners are using in their practices. These include capabilities such as automating client proposals and payments, automating data extraction and file management, client communications and digital marketing, as well as financial forecasting and analysis.

Using these insights, we can help bring that level of success to all our Xero Accounting and Bookkeeping Partners. By working closely with Xero HQ app partners, we are now able to provide the right solutions to help practices develop their capabilities.

Being at Xerocon is always a fantastic reminder of the real impact our new products have, and why we can never stop working to empower our heroes.

Here’s what we’ve got, so far:

Boma for marketing automation,
Datamolino to get status updates about client paperwork,
Fathom to efficiently create management reports,
FUTRLI, to provide future insights for a business,
Expensify for real time expense reporting,
Hubdoc for automated financial documents,
Now Infinity to make corporate and trust compliance woes a thing of the past,
Practice Ignition to assist with client proposals, onboarding and payments,
Receipt Bank for more efficient bookkeeping,
Suite Files to bring all client data and files into one place, and,
Spotlight Reporting, to enable accountants and bookkeepers to see how clients are performing in a single view.

And today I was very excited to announce at Xerocon Austin an additional app integration for our North American partners, with Plooto. Plooto is a venture-backed financial technology company dedicated to streamlining the way businesses manage their domestic and international payments. Timeliness of payments have a significant impact on businesses’ financials and through this planned integration with Plooto and Xero HQ, we will be able to provide our Accounting and Bookkeeping Partners with information to help manage their clients’ funds and cash flows.

As I mentioned in my Xerocon keynote, not only have we curated these Xero HQ apps, but from the Xero benchmarking series, we’ve been able to understand which solutions accounting and bookkeeping practices need to use first. These have been grouped into three bundles to suit different sorts of accounting practices, or different stages in your journey. You can check all the apps and the bundles out here.

I firmly believe we are better together and by enriching our partners with the tools they need to elevate their business to the next level, they can deliver added benefits to their small business clients. If small businesses succeed, families succeed which in turn means communities and economies prosper.

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