Xerocon hits Melbourne with a wave of new products

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It is stunning to have 3000 accountants, bookkeepers and ecosystem partners from 19 countries converge on Melbourne for one of the biggest Xerocon events yet. It’s a great opportunity to celebrate our community.

It has been a year of milestones for Xero, passing a million subscribers and today is another one, announcing our biggest ever wave of new products for our community of accountants and bookkeepers who serve small businesses.

We are early in the journey of using artificial intelligence to simplify accounting to make it easier for small businesses. Our focus is always to create opportunities for our community of accountants and bookkeepers to take advantage of our global platform to help grow small businesses and create new jobs.

We are proud to deliver a new generation of smart tools to drive further productivity. Here is a snapshot of a few we announced today.

Xero HQ curated apps

The next iteration of the Xero HQ open practice platform provides a curated ecosystem of nine integrated practice apps, to provide accountants and bookkeepers the best tools to drive efficiency within their own practice, build closer relationships with clients, and build additional advisory services.

On stage at Xerocon, Anna Curzon, Xero Chief Partner Officer said: “It is the golden age of accounting. It is creating opportunities for the growth of accounting and bookkeeping practices and it’s increasing their capacity to be the advisors small businesses need to succeed. We know that by helping accountants and bookkeepers fully embrace technology with a digital switchover of their practices, we can help them grow their own business.”

An integrated multi-vendor platform for accountants and bookkeepers to run their entire back office, the first nine app partners launched today on Xero HQ include:

Boma for self-drive marketing
Fathom to efficiently create forecasting reports
FUTRLI, to provide future insights for a business
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 onboarding
Receipt Bank for more efficient bookkeeping
Suite Files to bring all client data and files into one place
Spotlight Reporting, to enable accountants and bookkeepers to see how clients are performing in a single view

Mobile-first Xero Expenses

We’ve revitalised our employee expenses and reimbursement product redesigning it for the front office. We’ve taken advantage of AI and machine learning to make the entire expense process easier and more automated than ever, ensuring employees file their expenses more frequently and directly into Xero.

Xero Expenses is a mobile-first expense management with Open APIs for banks to connect to the millions of employees in small business.

Expense Analytics allows small business owners, and their accountant or bookkeeper, to see expense patterns by category, accounts and employees, and set permissions to ensure expenses are filed by the right person. Small businesses know which expenses still need to be reimbursed to their employees, and get informed in real-time through push notifications. Subsequently this eliminates inefficiencies caused by missed phone calls and unread emails.

Advisors can help small business make better spending decisions, using powerful analytics and integrated accounting in a centralised platform. The Expenses API will allow banks to link transactional and purchasing services to the millions of employees of small businesses using Xero.

Xero Discuss

Available to Xero subscribers in the coming months, Xero Discuss enables accountants and bookkeepers to discuss financial details about a client’s business directly with the client from within Xero, removing the need for lengthy email chains or potential miscommunication about their data.

Xero Projects gives professional service businesses visibility of profitability

Over 40 percent of our customers are Professional Service firms. Xero Projects now gives those customers a beautiful way to manage their staff and projects with seamless integration to accounting. Uniquely, we’ll be going to market alongside our accounting and bookkeeping partners as Xero Projects grows to suit the many vertical industries they work with.

Xero Small Business Insights data from June 2017 found half of Australian small businesses had negative cash flow, while 60 percent of small businesses fail within their first three years of operation due to these problems, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics.

In New Zealand, recent Xero research found that just over a third of New Zealand small businesses are concerned about cash flow due in part to late payment of invoices. More than 60 percent of businesses are paid two weeks or more after the due date of their invoice and one in 10 small businesses wait on average more than a month for their invoices to be paid.

Xero Projects transforms the way businesses track their time and expenses, directly from Xero or on their phone, giving business owners and solo operators the right tools to grow their profits and their business.

Xero Lifelong Learning Platform aimed at reskilling workforce

Xero Lifelong Learning Platform is an online learning tool aimed at students and the reskilling of the workforce, which will be delivered by educational institutions.

The globalisation of technology has not only reshaped the way we work but also the need for lifelong learning to stay relevant with the pace of change in the workforce. The Xero Lifelong Learning Platform paves the way for education to be accessible to everyone, from anywhere, at any time, democratising education for all. Best of all, it’s always up to date. Students and people reskilling will always be working on the latest version of the tools used in business.

Xero Lifelong Learning Platform will lift the financial and business literacy of students in secondary and tertiary institutions, training organisations, and learners at all stages of their career. The new open learning platform will help accelerate the growth and performance of small and medium businesses by giving their employees the multiple skills and capabilities that accounting and advisory partners are desperate to hire.

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