On 15 February I attended the Xero roadshow in Brisbane. Here are a few things I took away from the Xero presentations and talking to many attendees.
- The Xero team are passionate about their product and believe they have an outstanding range of products for accountants and bookkeepers.
- Xero now use the AWS platform for storage and data is encrypted both in transit and at rest, which is a positive thing.
- Two factor authentication for logging in was pushed by Xero and I agree this really should be used by all firms given the importance of the data being accessed. Talk to your Xero Account Manager to get this sorted if you don’t already have it.
- The value of having a single ledger which both you and your client are accessing was reinforced. It creates efficiencies.
- 92% of SMEs using Xero have an advisor and the businesses that have an advisor are more profitable than those who don’t.
- The Xero practice management tools are aimed at firms up to about 20 people.
- 2,500 firms are using Xero Tax.
- You can lodge 2014 and after tax returns using Xero. If you have any earlier returns you need to use something else to lodge those.
- The reporting tools on the accounting side look good. There is considerable flexibility to prepare your own report formats and utilise templates.
- There are over 500 add on apps now available for Xero.
- There are a number of tools within the ledger specifically for advisors, which not all advisors are aware of or use. These include cash coding, find and reconcile, report templates, uncoded statement lines and assurance dashboard.
- Significant improvements to fixed assets functionality are being made.
- 20,000 small businesses look at the Advisor Directory each month and Xero are launching a new version of this.
- If SMEs are connected to a payment solution such as Stripe or PayPal they are getting paid 80% faster than those who are not.
- There is a new Tax user interface coming in the next 90 days – first for SMSFs anf then all forms by the end of the calendar year.
- Xero are continuing their practice of providing certain practice management, accounting and tax tools free at each Xero Partner level.
Xero has been publishing information from the roadshow on line so if you want more details go to their website here: https://www.xero.com/au/events/roadshow/