I digress.

Apart from a short-lived rental agreement on a cupboard in London that Xero co-founder Hamish Edwards used in 2008, our UK business ran virtually for the best part of three and a half years.

Today, twelve weeks in to our new home, I have to say that I hardly recognise our UK business. Not least in the sense that our staff numbers have doubled from eight to sixteen since we moved in. So, as a seasoned veteran of remote web working but with the benefit of a little objective distance since we opened our office, how do I feel about virtual working and what have I learned?

Firstly, I should note that as an overseas subsidiary business, we benefitted greatly by not having to locally house a number of core Xero functions like finance, dev and operations. That said, we have the added challenge of operating at great distance and at the opposite end of the clock from HQ, which meant that our UK business was in effect virtual both upstream to the mother ship, as well as virtual in country.

When I joined Xero three years ago there were five of us in the UK. If your team is that small (and awesome) then individual contributor roles generally lend themselves well to working remotely. However it was a little more challenging managing a virtual team.

Unsurprisingly we leaned on web tech as much as possible to facilitate remote collaboration, helped enormously by the fact that our own back end line of business applications are all in the cloud, but we also quickly became power users of Google Apps, Skype and Yammer to negate our disconnected physicality.

Of the three, the one remote collaboration tool we just could not have lived without is Skype for a number of important reasons. Firstly, the combination of presence awareness and unobtrusive chat meant it was very easy to jump into an ad-hoc voice or video chat with someone to discuss an issue. But for this we’d have probably relied much more on email, which I’m sure would have slowed us considerably.

Secondly, while Skype’s conferencing capability also provided us with a platform for hosting our weekly team meetings, it also meant that if a 1:1 call required input from someone else half-way through the call, it was easy to drag and drop participants in and out. Skype’s screen sharing capability also made it easy to discuss product issues between colleagues.

We still use Skype today as a few people remain remotely based in the UK, but an interesting new use for Skype has emerged since we opened our office.

While having a whole team working remotely disadvantaged everyone equally, I sensed a risk that an ‘us and them’ divide might emerge between office based Xeroes (and more acutely so as we grow) and those in the team who are still based remotely. So, we now rely on Skype’s persistent chat room capability to create a back channel for all of Xero UK meaning that office based staff and remote based staff don’t forget that either constituencies exist, and we keep our UK team spirit strong. So far that seems to be working.

While we’re now well into a new chapter in the UK and you can’t beat physically bringing teams together, I’m still blown away by how modern web technologies both empowered and augmented our fledgling operation, enabling us to punch way above our weight for so long.

Could we have pulled this off ten years ago? No way.

In developing Tradevine, we surveyed over 500 Trademe sellers to find out which channels they sell their products in. The businesses we talked to ranged from large-scale chain stores, through to micro businesses, to hobbyists casually selling through Trademe. Have a look at the results:

As you can see from the graph, the vast majority of them (81%) combined their Trademe sales with other channels, such as dedicated webstores and traditional bricks-and-mortar stores.

This is indicative of a trend in the wider small business community: multichannel selling. More and more businesses are selling their products to different people through different channels. Bricks and mortar stores have online components; Trademe (and the equivalent) sellers sell through other avenues. Even a hobbyist selling through Trademe and the classified section of his or her local newspaper is a multichannel seller.

But to sell in multiple channels at any kind of scale, you need lots of different software. Point of sale software for the bricks and mortar store, an ecommerce solution for the online store, an inventory solution to keep track of the product itself and accounting software to make sense of all that data.

Until recently, this wasn’t really feasible because of the time-consuming manual intervention involved in collecting sales, inventory and financial data from various channels and putting it in the accounting system. The extra revenue gained from selling in multiple channels was offset by the time and expense of tracking that revenue.

Connecting different applications through API integrations solve this problem. Now business owners can manage their different sales channels by using apps that talk to one another. Rather than spend time entering the data from each channel into their accounting system, the API integrations fetch it automatically.

This insight was vital in our development of the Tradevine application.

Since we focused on businesses who sell through Trademe, there’s an obvious skew to our results. But the results still stand – as the world gets more connected, multichannel selling is the future of small business, and API integrations provide business owners with the tools they need to get there.

Peter Montgomery is the CEO of Xero Add-on Partner Tradevine Limited

Do your homework

You need to pick a market that you can win. It needs to be large enough to support your product, have enough demand to validate your product and people need to have money to spend on your product. As a business owner, some logical markets will immediately spring to mind. Cut the list to 2-3 and then focus your research on these markets. Compare markets based on the research and make your decision. It also pays to look at the markets where other local businesses are exporting because the channels you need will already be in place.

Spend some time in your new market

You need to be there. It really makes all the difference.  This could be a series of trips or you can move there for a few months.  Working hard, understanding the market and meeting potential customers will give you an invaluable firsthand understanding of what you need to succeed. Once you put a country manager in place, your experience in the market will give you better understanding of how to manage and support this person.

Create milestones and commit to achieving them

Confirm your key milestones and goals for your new export market.  What does short term (6 months) success look like? Set aside the funds and go for it. Make sure you know what you’re getting yourself into, too. Hiring your first person, growing the team and building the business is going to take time, effort and cash.

Anticipate scale

Exporting into new bigger market can bring a scale you may not have experienced before. Since it takes time and money to establish an office, market your product and build up some momentum, your costs are going to rise before your revenues do. Before you start exporting, you need to establish what those costs are going to be and raise enough money to cover them before the money starts coming in. If you’re massively successful, you’re going to incur massive costs, so think forward to make sure you can get ahead of them.

Look after your domestic market

When you’re setting up an export market, you’re going to be busy and distracted. Make sure you don’t neglect your domestic market; consider hiring someone to keep an eye on it while you’re getting ready to export.

Know when to walk away

If you do not hit most of your milestones in your first six months and have spent all the funds you have put aside, don’t just keep plowing on. Be clinical about it. It’s a business decision. You can always scale back, reset, then invest again at a later time.

Exporting is great for business growth. It’s exciting but it does have some challenges. Everything is new. With determination, good planning and well thought through governance you’ll improve your chances of success.

From today, Australian users have full-featured payroll built in to Xero. The best online accounting software now includes the best online payroll solution. We think you’ll like it.

Sol Wise, CFO at digital marketing firm Classified AdVentures certainly likes it. Check out the video to see why:

Payroll is the latest example of our substantial investment in tools that make life easier for small businesses.

Features include:

• Leave management
• Pay templates to standardise employee’s pays
• Automatic tax tables updates every new financial year
• Payment Summaries
• Timesheets
• Employee self-service portal

For more details on plans and features, check our Pricing Page.

Payroll in Xero is the first integrated cloud-based product with automatic superannuation payments.

This is just the beginning for Australian payroll. Over the next few months we’ll be delivering Xero-style reports, employee-submitted timesheets, dashboard integration and the June 2013 superannuation legislation changes.

Get started with payroll through the dedicated area in our Help Centre or attend one of our webinars.

We’d love to know what you think so weigh in on the discussion in the Xero Community.

Right now, we have a big need for Quality Assurance (QA) Analysts. We currently have nine vacancies in New Zealand, eight in Wellington and one in Auckland. Our QA team are the reason Xero “just works.” We only release new features after the QA team have put them through their paces.

Some of the Xero QA team in our Wellington HQ.

Day-to-day for a QA

Being a QA is much more than just testing software. At Xero, our QAs are involved in the entire development process. When a feature is first discussed, the QA team get involved and ask all kinds of tough questions – “what if a user does this? Have you thought about that?” They use their keen analytical skills and challenge our designers, business analysts and developers to make sure they’ve thought of everything.

When a feature reaches our staging area (a kind of dress rehearsal), our QAs write test scripts – sets of actions that emulate everything a user could do. Since accounting software is such a massive, interconnected system, a QA needs to be able to see these connections and write scripts that test them.

Becoming a QA at Xero

We’re looking for people who love QA and for whom QA is a career choice. People who want the opportunity to contribute to a great product and be part of an accounting software revolution. Along with the core Xero products our QA team also provide quality assurance support for all of our associated service delivery systems, including internal systems such as BOSS (our intranet) and SubXero (our billing system).

Ideal candidates for our QA roles have had 3 to 5 years complex Web and UI quality assurance experience and have excellent communication skills both (written and verbal). A QA has strong analytical skills and can think outside the box; is flexible, proactive and can work both collaboratively and independently.

A financial background or previous experience using Xero software would be an advantage, as this gives depth and familiarity to quality assurance process.

So do you have QA skills to bring to the table? If so, we’d love to hear from you. With our fabulous new offices in Auckland and Wellington and awesome people to work alongside, it’s an exciting time to join us. So have a look at the job description and drop us a line if this sounds like you.

Xero delivers offshore growth – full year results 2012

Annual Report

Some the headlines were:

• Revenue increased $9.3 to $19.3m (107%)
• Expenses increased $18m to $28.4m (58%) – as we grew staff from 113 to 194 people
• Loss increased slightly from $7.5m to $7.9m (5%)
• Customers grew from 36,000 to 78,000
• Cash grew from $16.9m to $39m following our capital raise

You can see the power of the cumulative monthly model as revenue has grown from $3m to $9m to $19m at an annualized run rate at March of 25m heading into this financial year.

We are very proud that more than half of monthly revenue is now outside of our home market and that Australia tripled revenue.

Following our capital raising we will continue our growth phase and plan to continue to invest significantly in our platform and team.  We’ll provide a full update on strategy and plans at our Annual Meeting on the 26th of July.

Our biggest challenge is continuing to hire great people. We have so much more to do so if you are interested please check out xero.com/careers

Again we’d like to thank our customers, partners and shareholders for giving us the opportunity to build a business that is making a difference. I’d also like to thank our wonderful team for the passion they bring to everything they do.

We’d welcome your questions below.

The ICT Excellence Award recognises excellence in the provision of a product or solution to customers and also one that can demonstrate a proven track record of success.

Accepting the IT Excellence award from Senator the Hon Kate Lundy. Photo courtesy of CeBIT Australia.

These two awards are testament to the very real and growing demand for an alternative to spreadsheets and cumbersome, traditional, accounting desktop packages in Australia.

We were joined on the evening by a number of our top accounting partners who represented just a small sample of a growing base of loyal and passionate advisors out there promoting Xero to their customers. We owe a lot of our success to this group so I want to thank each and every one of our partners who have supported us and helped us to achieve this wonderful recognition.

We also have our Add-on Partners to thank for building an ecosystem of cloud solutions that offer huge value and choice to small business customers by integrating with Xero. This was one of the factors that Gilad Greenbaum, Chief Technologist and CeBIT 2012 Curator, attributed to our successful nomination when he spoke later in the evening: “Xero’s contribution to the development of the cloud industry in the SME market has been significant. Over and above the great software that they have built themselves, I am also very impressed with the growing community of cloud ISVs that they are actively promoting within this sector. They are taking a leadership position by supporting many other innovative cloud start-ups and helping them to share in their success.”

The quiet revolution

The rest of the conference also kept us busy, with literally tens of thousands of visitors walking through the door each day. I was lucky enough to be invited to participate in a couple of speaking panels – “Beyond the cloud: what’s next?” and “Exploring the changing face of the Australian enterprise.”

The key insight I took from the discussions was that the take up of cloud computing in the small business sector sector is happening much faster than it is in other parts of the economy. Interestingly, this is largely going unnoticed, in spite of the fact that the small and medium business sector is a vitally important part of the economy. This takeup, and our success, are part of a “quiet revolution.”

Our recognition this year at CeBIT validates this assertion and makes the revolution considerably less quiet. In the future, we’ll start to see more focus and investment to promote cloud technology in the SME market. That will in turn help drive productivity gains in this key component of the economy.

We’ll be back at CeBIT in 2013 where I hope to see some of our Add-on Partners amongst the award finalists, showing the whole tech industry that small business is leading the way with the cloud.

Over the course of an afternoon, the folks from Xero Partner LIFT Consulting and I chatted with local small business owners about their relationship with their accountants. Here’s what I learned:

• Business owners don’t think of “accounting” as “tax.” Tax preparation services are just one part of accounting. The small business owners I spoke with knew this, and wanted more from their accountants. One of them described what he wanted as “the Big 4 for the little guy.” That is, he (and lots of other business owners) wanted the full-scale management reporting, consulting and other valuable services that large organisations enjoy.

• There’s no such thing as a one-size-fits all accountant. Not all businesses need the same services; not all accountants provide the same services. Different advisors have different areas of expertise, so if you want an accountant who offers more than tax preparation, you need to identify the accountant who knows what you need and how to offer it to you.

• Legacy desktop software is holding people back. Business owners want to get business advice from their accountants. Accountants want to offer business advice. The reason this gap hasn’t been filled is because desktop software stands in the way. It forces business owners into a retrospective view of their business performance, and forces accountants to ask (and wait) for data if they want to give advice. So, even though it’s theoretically possible for accountants to get more involved in client businesses, it’s too impractical to be plausible. Translation? It’s too hard.

• The cloud is the way forward. By removing the barriers between business owners and their accountants, cloud technology makes the “Big 4 for the little guy” relationships possible. When both business owners and accountants can access live data from anywhere, the hassle is taken out of offering consulting and business advice.

Most exciting, though, was that our accounting Partners have been saying the exact same things. This means that not only are there business owners demanding accounting and consulting services on top of their tax compliance, there are also accountants who are willing to offer them.

All we need to do is put Xero in the middle.

What kind of “Big 4″ services would you like your accountant to offer?

Xero has helped Tina’s team automate more business processes and tasks, and as a result take on and manage more clients. Since becoming a Xero Partner over 18 months ago, Tina’s practice has grown from three staff to ten.

Offering higher value services using live client data, Tina’s revenue is also on the up. Tina offers services such as monthly management meetings where she talks clients through their accounts and gives up-to-date advice. You can see how she moved into these higher-value services in this video:

Have you used Xero to grow your bookkeeping practice?

We’ve essentially reached a point where most of the big-picture stuff is taken care of with regional representation across a range of categories.

But the ecosystem is far from complete. We have loads of small business customers who still don’t have an integration between Xero and the key application they use or need to run their business.

It seems like many of the old guard have not yet woken up to the fast pace of change that now dictates the software industry. But their customers have. The result is there are gaps in niche areas, such as:

• Childcare: childcare management systems
• Education: student management systems – regional specialists: NZ, Australia, UK & US
• Farming: farm management software
• Tourism: reservation & property management systems

These gaps mean opportunity for the right people. Whether you are an established player, or are just working on your first version, our global customer base is creating a market for industry applications that work seamlessly with Xero. You can tap into that market if you’re prepared to move fast.

If you’re interested in Xero Add-on Partner opportunities, we would love to hear from you – get in touch. We have customers waiting for you.

However the topic of people was the one that resonated most with me; not just the challenge of deciding when to hand over the reigns of responsibility to others as your business grows, but specifically about the hiring process and the need to hire the best people.

Learning how to hire great people is something most business owners and managers are never taught as a core business competency. Nobody ever showed me how to hire well and I’m sure I’m not alone and that it’s something most people just learn as they go. Often painfully.

While instinct is absolutely key in hiring decisions, in my experience hiring on the strength of a couple of conversations or a single interview, a flick through a resume and a liberal chunk of instinct is more often than not, precisely how you end up in what the late, great Steve Jobs called the Bozo Explosion.

Regardless of the label, it’s a popular theory that goes something like this.

Conceptually rank candidate employees on a general scale of capability from A through to D, with the best, most capable people being the As, and the least capable being Ds.

The thinking is that uber-confident and capable A grader managers will always hire other A graders into their teams because they want to build the best possible organisations, but B grade managers will never hire As because they fear – consciously or subconsciously – that if they hired an A grade report, their own B grade failings would be exposed and their report might soon steal their job.

So, B-grade managers always hire downstream in terms of capability, and so on.

The Bozo Explosion colourfully described by Steve Jobs is what happens to companies who make the mistake of hiring B-grade managers. Hire a B-grade manager, turn your back for a few months and then watch your business, once a shining example of excellence, get over-run by hordes of well meaning incompetents, from the top right down to the tip of its toes. And the spectre of the unwelcome Bozo Explosion usually portends an inevitable decline in decision making, product quality or design, customer service – you name it, everything turns to mush. And unless you’re very lucky, say good-bye to your business. Oh, and that’s just for starters. Getting rid of a Bozo Explosion in your business is a whole other world of HR pain for which there’s unlikely to be a quick fix.

All of which places supreme importance on the job of great hiring.

No matter how busy or time pressured you (or your managers) are, no matter how good you think your gut instinct is, always sweat the details, always do extensive background reference checks and never compromise on quality for the sake of short term expediency.

Report Fields are a key part of Report Packs, and our Development team have managed to launch a major Report Fields update off the back of the big release on Monday: custom Report Fields.

Custom Report Fields let you insert placeholders that are automatically replaced with data when the report is run – like a mail merge. This latest release means you can now create your own fields to be populated with any data you want.

Practice Fields, such as your firm’s address, can be instantly applied to any report.

Client Fields are specific to a particular client, like their banker’s name. So once the field is setup at a practice level, the banker’s details can then be entered on the client side.

We’re continuing to make progress on Report Packs as Australia prepares to be the next cab off the rank in time for FY12 reporting. Report Fields will be available when we release Report Packs in each region.

If you’re a Partner in New Zealand you can find out all about Report Packs by registering for our Report Writing training course here.

All too often Elizabeth Pitu hears people say that accounting and other subjects at school did little to prepare them for the practicalities of running their own business.

A teacher of accounting for 26 years, Elizabeth has always suspected the subject matter was a little too academic and theoretical. Now, with exposure to small business owners, she’s convinced the school curriculum for accounting in New Zealand (and she suspects other countries too) needs a rethink.

“In my experience accounting at school is not as real or practical as it should be in terms of running a small business,” she says. “Understanding the concept is quite different to doing things like working out what to cost your work at, making sure you get a market price and allowing for the advertising you might need to do. Most business owners end up learning the hard way.”

In the hope of convincing policy makers to consider changes to the way accounting is taught in schools, Elizabeth has embarked on a research project through Waikato University titled ‘Financial Skills for Small Business Owners’.

This involves interviewing small business owners about what financial skills they think would have been useful to learn in school. Here are the most common gaps Elizabeth has identified so far:

• How to price products/services/concepts
• Coding bank statements
• Using accounting technology beyond entry level
• Better ways to manage debtors
• How to forecast cashflow
• Doing a GST/VAT/Sales Tax return
• Allowing for the vagaries of tax and other deductions when paying wages
• The need to put money aside to pay taxes

Elizabeth says being able to access technology such as Xero that’s easy to understand and use, has been acknowledged by several research participants as key to their achieving business success.

We’d love to hear what you think would be useful for prospective business owners to learn in school in the comments section below. Or you can let Elizabeth know on her Facebook page.

Budgets

When it comes to budgeting, Microsoft Excel is the best tool in the world. You can create all kinds of customised reports and graphs, run ad-hoc queries, and even do some fairly complex forecasting. Now you can export your  actuals from Xero, do some heavy lifting in Excel, then import the results as your budget line.

We looked at developing smart budgeting tools ourselves. However, Excel really is best-of-breed, so it made more sense to connect the two.

We teamed up with Deloitte to test this feature with Microsoft Office 365. Check out the video to see how the data round trips from Xero, to Excel, and back again.

Checks

If you’re a US customer, you can now print professionally styled checks right from within Xero. Xero manages check numbering, voiding, deleting, styling and a full audit history of any changes – perfect for managing bill payments. You can see it in action here:

And yes, we will be rolling this out to other regions as soon as we can. We’ve had lots of interest from Canada especially. In the meantime everyone can have a play with the new functionality by changing their Xero Demo organisation to the US. It would be good to hear what sort of check stock you’d like us to support next or whether the US voucher format in this release does the trick. Jump in and have your say on the Xero Community.

Tracking and tax from bank reconciliation

Your core data processing just got faster. We’ve added a feature that lets you add tracking or change the tax rate on a transaction from the main bank reconciliation screen – no need to drill in!

We’ve also released:

• A new centered look
• New partner bank feed from NZ Home Loans
• New report codes to support additional reporting for non-company entities (in New Zealand for now)

For all the details, head on over to the release notes.

So what is Pocketrent?

Pocketrent gives property owners and managers all the tools they need to manage their rental property and get the best from their investment.

Who is it for?

For those who need to manage tenants or keep track of rental payments, property inspections and building maintenance. Pocketrent works for single units or the management of entire buildings/multiple complexes.

How Pocketrent works with Xero

Pocketrent can monitor your Xero bank statement for payments and create bank transactions as rent money is received. There’s also the option to create an invoice as rent falls due.

Where you can use Pocketrent

It’s been customised to support New Zealand, Australia and UK customers. Pricing is in NZ dollars.

Check it out

Pocketrent is free for one property and there is a one month trial for all property levels. Find out more here.

(UPDATE) We are back online as of Tuesday 8th 18:55 GMT. We are still completing an review of what occurred but it appears to be a network configuration issue with the system’s database servers. We are not expecting any further problems.

(UPDATE) Confirming that the extension to the maintenance outage was caused by a network configuration issue between two of the underlying database cluster nodes. We choose to delay bringing the system back online until the network issue had been resolved so as to ensure the fault tolerance within this database layer was functioning correctly.

Highly successful entrepreneurs live more in their balance sheet than their Profit and Loss. The P&L is a short-term view of the operating status of the business. The balance sheet tells you where the future is and how to resource the business for growth. Pre-empting where your cashflow will be 6 to 12 months out is critical. All too often entrepreneurs grow their business, run out of cash and end up raising funds under desperate circumstances, which can be expensive.

I caught up with a friend recently who is helping investors from offshore find solid businesses to support. The businesses will not only receive $10m but the investors will use their skills and networks to open up opportunities in foreign markets. Strategic investors such as these can be a huge help to a business. While a cash injection is one thing, having doors opened for you can’t be underestimated.

Funding your business can take several turns and you should always be thinking ahead to the next step. Take Xero for example. Initially the founders funded the business; a second funding round involved employees, directors and strategic investors; the next step was a stock market listing; further capital has since been raised through strategic and retail investors as well as institutions offshore.

So how do you find strategic investors? This is much harder than finding good customers and it needs to be part of your business strategy. Here are some suggestions:

1. Start with those closest to you. While I don’t recommend taking money from family unless they are already experienced investors, they may be able to help you find the next person to speak to.
2. Look to your team or your customers. Quite often your employees will be interested in investing because they know the business. In my experience people with ‘skin’ in the game tend to push harder to make the business a success.
3. Find an Angel Investor to mentor you and fund you through to the next stage. These people will invest in people not ideas. Build your networks and ask for 30 minute coffee meetings to do a pitch. But do your homework first. The person you are approaching needs to be the right fit.
4. Move onto VC or Strategic Investors. Generally your Angel will help with this. But don’t worry, as you execute your business, pick up momentum and build your PR, you will get approached. That said it pays to seek these guys out 6 to 12 months before you need the money. Presenting your story and then coming back six months later and demonstrating you have achieved what you said you would is gold for investors.

Most important of all is to have an ongoing KPI around your equity story.

We’d love to hear your insights or questions about equity in business.

No doubt, he was a musical trailblazer, but he was a pioneer in more ways than you probably knew.

Nathanial was the first “customer” of Xero. If you look closely, you might notice the name Nathanial Hornblower in our screenshots and demo videos. When I designed the first screens for Xero we needed a fictitious customer name. To make sure long names didn’t break the design I used Nathanial Hornblower.

It was also a nod to my first real customer, the Beastie Boys.

Skills to Pay the Bills

In 1994, I quit my first job, bought a computer on credit cards and lived on unemployment checks while I worked on a business idea. I designed and coded a prototype of an online music store, based on my local record shop Groove Merchant. I flew to LA and pitched it to all the major labels, who promptly laughed me out the door. Still laughing?

Unphased, I found a way to get in touch with my heroes, the Beastie Boys. I pitched a concept for a multimedia project: an interactive video and audio CD-ROM packed with rarities, home movies and bootleg material. As soon as they saw my Groove Merchant prototype, they sent me a check along with a box of videos and outtakes from their archives.

I immediately hired my brother, another friend, and founded my first business, Turntable.

Gratitude

Looking back, I am eternally grateful to the Beastie Boys for having the vision and courage to experiment with a new medium – not just hip hop. They also took a gamble on an unknown geek with some wild ideas. They hired me when nobody else would. It didn’t just change my life when I was starting out, it helped influence and define a new design, technology and business medium.

Going through my closet, I found a copy of the original CD-ROM that still plays on my ancient Powerbook. Nearly 18 years later, here’s a video I shot on my iPhone of the work we did. Finding this has been a great way for me to remember and celebrate everything that was brilliant about the Beastie Boys.

Thank you for everything, Yauch. You had a huge impact on my life and career. My heart goes out to your family and friends.

In general terms, the smaller you are, the easier social media is.

Most social media technologies such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn have been designed for individual humans to talk and connect with each other.  So if you are the owner of the business, it’s generally pretty easy for you to log on to an account and chat with your customers the same way that you would at a business breakfast or if someone called you on the phone.

I highly recommend that you post from a personal account with your face on it in first-person rather than off a company account (or as well as). Most big companies would love to have the freedom to connect online the way that small businesses can so use this to your advantage.  Be yourself and don’t try to sound corporate. Corporates are all desperately trying to sound small and personable!

It pays to not overthink it and just have a look around at what some other individuals and businesses are doing and learn from them. Play is a very important part of developing engagement and learning how to come up with creative ways to get people talking about you and your business.  So don’t feel guilty about spending some time looking at silly cat videos on Youtube and commenting on them. It’s the best way to learn new features and to see what people are drawn to online.

I’ll do a full post on the benefits of blogging but the main thing to remember is that blogging is the cornerstone of any social media strategy.

Blogging is often overlooked as the nerdy older brother of cool kids like Pinterest and Instagram but it is absolutely essential to hold all of your different online accounts and channels together.  Blogs can also serve as the top end of your sales funnel to drive customers through to transacting with your business so its worth putting the effort in.

Again, spend some time discovering successful bloggers that really interest you and read and comment to learn how they drive engagement.  What posts get lots of ‘likes’ and comments? What do you like reading and when do you read blogs the most? Where are you reading this blog now and how did you discover it? Who are some of your favourite bloggers?

If you were to spend more than five minutes chatting with Denis, it would quickly become evident that he just gets where the future of accounting advisory services is going.

So, I went into Kubrick Mode and grabbed a few minutes with him on camera.

As you’d expect from an Irishman, Denis tells it straight about why he believes the traditional accounting services model is flawed, and how the aftermath of the Irish financial crisis has created an acute commercial context in which businesses need to know where they stand financially month to month, sharpening the commercial senses of Irish business owners.

So what is Peoplemine?

Peoplemine is a customer intelligence and CRM tool designed for retailers. It gives you insights into your customers and their behaviour so you can target different groups or promote special offers tailored just to them.

Who is it for?

Anyone involved in retailing. If you have customer and sales data in Xero and want to use this to drive repeat business, Peoplemine is worth considering.

How Peoplemine works with Xero

Peoplemine extracts and uses key data such as contacts, inventory items and invoices from your Xero organisation for detailed reporting and analysis. It automatically synchronizes at regular intervals to keep the data up to date.

Where you can use Peoplemine

Anywhere and pricing is available in all the same currencies as Xero.

Check it out

For more details on Peoplemine and to sign up for a free 14 day trial, check it out here.

I’ve been involved in a number of rapid growth and new business start-ups including Xero and more recently an online system for managing foreign exchange and interest rate risk called Hedgebook. I’ve learnt a huge amount through the process. Here’s the top five things I recommend you do if your aim is to hit the accelerator.

1. Dragons’ Den it:  Get 30 minutes with the most wildly successful entrepreneur you know. Tell them about what your plan for growth is and get their feedback. It’s likely they will rip it apart and this will help you know whether to pursue or not.
2. Know your customers:  Speak to your existing customers about your aspirations. Remember ideas are cheap and execution is expensive. Don’t be afraid to let people see what you are doing. You need the direct feedback from those who use your product.
3. Know your markets: You need to understand your growth markets, especially if these are off-shore. Visit them.  Nothing beats being in-market, meeting with the people who could help with your business and getting their understanding. Hedgebook has been looking to expand beyond New Zealand and recently invested in a four day trip to Australia where we attended 23 meetings!  This was well worth it because the net result was a very clear first phase go-to-market plan.
4. Get some funding: Getting someone else to help fund your idea is an excellent endorsement. It shows what you’re doing makes commercial sense. In almost every market there is a government funded inward investment organisation. You need to meet the people behind this, see what they think about what you have to offer and find out what research they can do for you. Most of these organisations will have a fairly solid review and selection process. Going through this process will help make sure you have done everything you need to.
5. Write a market research paper: Before Xero entered the UK market I spent six weeks doing research. Then I presented my findings and recommendations to the board as part of the approval process. This was an excellent exercise that validated our go-to-market plan and provided a time-frame (in this case six months) for reporting back.

We’d love to hear your experiences in scaling up a business and if you have any gems to share.

We’re often asked about the bookkeeper accountant relationship. Generally we see the two offering different services and by working together the client gets the best of both worlds.

Australian based Toni McCulloch from Accounting North (left) and Briohny de Vere of Bees Knees Bookkeeping  are case in point that collaboration works.

For Toni the best outcome is achieved when the incoming information her accounting practice receives is accurate and fully reconciled. “This gives us the scope to focus the real issues at hand for the clients such as growth of the business, profit and cashflow,” she says.

Taking the bookkeeper perspective, Briohny says: “Whenever I get an accountant to review work for end-of-year, I always ask for feedback (yes positive and negative). Having an open relationship between the accountant, bookkeeper and client makes everyone’s life easier”.

How it can work

To explain how the bookkeeper accountant relationship can work, Melanie Morris of Bookkeeping and Beyond Ltd offers this overview:

• Generally day-to-day accounts functions can be undertaken by bookkeeper at a more cost effective rate than accountant such as Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable, GST/ BAS returns.
• Bookkeepers can notify and defer to an accountant on tricky transactions that require a higher level of expertise and which may have tax implications.
• Accountants have a better understanding of the tax returns and get the best  outcome for clients in terms of company set up, large purchases and depreciation.
• Bookkeepers will bring any issues to the accountant throughout the year rather than wait until year-end.
• The year-end work (undertaken by the accountant) should be more streamlined if accounts have been prepared by a good bookkeeper rather than someone without specialist knowledge in this area.
• Accountants can outsource their overflow accounts work to a bookkeeper.
• If the bookkeeper is taking care of the day-to-day accounts and base compliance,  the accountant’s time is freed up to undertake the trusted financial advisor role by working with the client on business growth, strategic planning and cashflow budgeting.

Sometimes we hear about friction between the two groups but I believe this stems from the lack of visibility and transparency inherent when using desktop accounting systems, resulting in a lag in completing a client’s accounts. Products like Xero are paving the way for better collaboration between bookkeepers and accountants because both sides can now be working on the same set of data for their mutual clients.

We have always tried to support the relationship between bookkeepers and accountants beyond providing the software that allows  it, so it was gratifying to hear Toni’s perspective on this. “Xero has a hands on approach to working with both partners and the events, webinars and Xerocon not only provide a collaborative environment but both parties are encouraged to attend which is great for networking. Account managers also invest in both for success.”

We’d love to hear how you’ve found the bookkeeper accountant relationship – as a client or as one of these professionals. What works and what doesn’t?

So what is Cin7?

Cin7 is a web based inventory system that can be customised. It has all the features needed to manage manufactured goods and stock, combined with sales and order processing.

Who is it for?

Cin7 fits a variety of businesses including general manufacturing, made-to-order manufacturing and those with advanced inventory requirements. Cin7 is modular and can be customised to a range of business processes.

How Cin7 works with Xero

Purchases and sales are seamlessly integrated with Xero and customer and supplier contact records are kept up to date.

Where you can use Cin7

Cin7 is fully web based and can be used anywhere.

Check it out

For more details on Cin7 and to request specific requirements, check it out here.

Integrating payroll into a much broader Xero platform has certainly presented some new challenges. The project has involved some 40 people at varying stages; work on 4 different apps in the Xero platform that payroll touches; the involvement of 4 dedicated testers who are the guardians of a high quality outcome and 2 weeks of final migration and performance testing before we are ready to roll it out.

All these factors combine to mean that we will be a little late and won’t be releasing at the end of April as we had hoped. However, we are still committed to delivering payroll well before the end of the financial year in Australia so you have plenty of time to conduct migration from your legacy systems. We’ll let you know more about the expected release date in the 2-3 weeks.

In the mean time, please don’t forget that a Paycycle account is now free and all your data will automatically appear inside Xero on the day of the integrated payroll release..