Why not join our next Integrated Solutions webinar and put your hand up. It’s on Friday 17 July at  11:00 am – 12:00 NZST. You’ll hear from Julian Stone of ProWorkflow (project management) and Elaine Kirk from iPayroll.

You can register for the webinar here. We look forward to having you along!

We’re thrilled to announce Xero is now available through the British Telecom platform.

The launch of Xero is supported by BT Business research which finds almost 50 per cent of staff employed by small businesses in the UK work extra hours to clear their current workloads. Around 41 of survey participants admitted they wasted work time because of poor technology and systems.

“Customer feedback is that traditional accounting packages are complicated to use, and can only be accessed while in the office, says Chris Lindsay, general manager at BT Business applications. As a result, managers put book keeping off and spend too many late evenings or weekends in the office.

Owner managers tend not to be finance experts, and dread having to file their accounts with these systems. The research shows that employees are working harder and longer during the downturn anyway, so we hope that Xero users will instantly be more productive and redress an often dire work/life balance.”

Over the last few months we’ve been working with the BT team to link our sign up process into the BT website. Over the coming months we’re working on a more integrated solution where BT customers can order and pay for Xero on their BT customer bills.

Thank you SaraB and the BT team for getting us to this first step.

Around 8:15am NZT while doing some routine checks on our servers, both Craig, our Chief Technology Officer and Paul, our Infrastructure Manager, lost their connection to our hosting environment. Almost immediately our monitoring alerts indicated that a number of our production systems were unavailable. The initial indication was that this was due to a network issue, but shortly after that we got our first update from Rackspace advising it was more widespread – a power outage at their Dallas data center where Xero is hosted from. 

Fortunately our blog was still up, so at around 8:50am NZT we posted our first notification to customers explaining that Xero was unavailable due to this power outage. Shortly after the first blog post Rackspace started to restore power to the data center and the full system was back live around 9am NZT. The total outage was approximately 45 minutes.

Throughout the morning we continued  to use both our blog and Twitter to keep everyone up-to-date. In fact the amount of blog traffic caused a short outage on the blog itself! This was quickly rectified by extending the hosting capacity specifically for the blog.

Power is obviously a critical element to our and any other online service. What happened today is a very rare occurrence, especially for a provider such as Rackspace that prides themselves on high availability. In more than 2 years our system availability or service level has been 99.99%. We are standing by for a full debrief from Rackspace and from this we will consider what further improvements we can jointly make to minimize the risk of a similar outage.

We are dedicated to providing a world-class service to our customers and we apologize to anyone who was affected by this downtime, but stress at no time was there any risk to your data. We trust that the open and frequent updates kept everyone abreast of what was happening.

We apologize profusely for any inconvenience this may cause – this outage will not affect your data in any way – it is purely a network problem at this stage.

Update @ 9:10 am: All our systems are back online. We are still investigating the cause of these issues. More info to come.

Update @ 9.19 am: According to Rackspace it appears to have been a power outage rather than a network problem. Power has now been completely restored to our data center. We’ll provide more details as to the exact nature of the power failure when we hear more.

Update @ 9.59 am: According to the Rackspace blog (http://www.rackspace.com/blog/) they are still manually bringing up some services however this does not affect our systems which have all come back online (a lot of other sites are still down). We are currently running consistency checks on all our systems so you may experience some slowness – these should be finished in the next hour.

Update @ 10.32 am: We understand some customers are still having problems logging into Xero. Please email support at xero.com if you are having problems logging in. And in case you were wondering whether the problems at Rackspace this morning only affected you, even famous people were a little put out: http://twitter.com/jtimberlake/status/2392792791

Update @ 12:33 pm: Rackspace has announced that they are currently running on a mixture of utility & generator power. While all our systems are running as normal we will continue to update you as we learn more. And please let us know if you’re still experiencing problems.

Update @ 2:00 pm: Rackspace has now got all their systems back on utility power & everything at their end is running as expected (I believe there are some sites that are still unavailable but that’s not affecting us at all). As stated above we’re completely back online and have been for the last 4 hours without incident. Thank you to everyone for their patience while we worked to get our service back up and running. This will be the last update till we learn exactly what happened from Rackspace (they’re are still very busy so are only providing us with the bare essentials at this stage). Again we apologize for any inconvenience the outage caused.

Update @ 4:37 pm: Rackspace has just updated their blog with some more information but they haven’t provided any more details on the root cause yet: http://www.rackspace.com/blog/?p=355.

“Hacking”  is an emotive word which companies dread to hear, but the prevention of hacking requires constant vigilance. The online nature of Xero means we are frequently asked about the security of our service. Obviously we can’t tell you everything , but what we can tell you is here, and that Aura plays a big part in this.

The turnout has been really encouraging. We got off to a great start in Auckland and in Wellington more than 100 people were treated to a sneak preview of multi-currency and a rundown of how the Enablement Team works. Last night in Christchurch Partners enjoyed an update from Stuart about how Xero fits in the accounting practice software toolbox.

Xero will be hosting Partner evenings every few months. If you have any feedback on these events or ideas about what you’d like covered next time, we’d love to hear from you. To find out more email the partner team.

“I just wanted to let you know that I am starting an affair with the multi currency module in Xero because I love it so much…we are moving in together next week. 

Having spent the last couple of weeks getting my head round some basic multi-currency issues for a client we’ve just put on MYOB Premier, I nearly went grey trying to educate them.  Now my hair colour has come back and turning red with amour for your lovely little programme.”

Feedback from those who’ve used other systems shows we are well up with the best. Here’s what  CEO of Openside Accountants, Stephen Nicholas had to say:

“Multi-currency in Xero is the most flexible and comprehensive solution I’ve ever seen. And I’ve seen them all, from simple accounting systems to the big ERP solutions. This is a well thought out solution for both accountants and users. The irony is that most people won’t recognize the effort that has gone into getting this right unless they have experienced some of the truly awful alternatives.”

In this video I talk to Stephen in more detail about how he’s found using multi-currency in Xero.  

Monday’s release of multi-currency was just the beginning. In coming months there’ll be more functionality, such as: 

• Entering payments –  you’ll be able to choose whether to enter the exact FX rate from your bank, or let Xero calculate the rate based on the amount you received or paid 
• A major upgrade to the bank rec will allow cross-currency reconciliation and bank fees to be entered with ease 
• Improved reporting will mean more reports by currency and allow a different reporting currency for companies with foreign ownership 
• They’ll be more visual cues around the foreign invoices  gaining or losing value 
• Our API and invoice imports will support foreign currency invoices

But once again it’s your feedback which will help  fine tune multi-currency. So keep it coming.

As a way of saying thank you to our early customers, if your business is on a Xero billing plan before 1 September 2009 multi-currency will be free forever as long as you remain on that billing plan. Starting 1 September multi-currency will cost an additional monthly fee (see the multi-currency page for details). So sign up now, while it’s free!

Instant and effortless (the Xero way)
This marks a really important step forward for people who do international business. Until now, doing multi-currency has been a complex and time consuming process. You really needed to be an expert to work out your gains and losses.

If you’re a small business with foreign currency exposure Xero can now mange this for you. Xero automatically does foreign currency conversions for you in real-time, so you know how much money you’re gaining or losing on all your international transactions. No other small business solution can match the simplicity and precision that Xero gives you.

Unlike other solutions on the market, Xero does way more than simply let you raise an invoice in a over 160 currencies – Xero revalues your numbers in real-time and eliminates the major hassles of doing foreign currency accounting.

The following video shows how comprehensive, yet simple, multi-currency in Xero is…

Here are simple instructions for setting up multi-currency. For in-depth details, please read the release notes.

We’ll be making additional enhancements to multi-currency over the next few weeks, so we really look forward to your feedback.

Update to the Terms of Use
Please be aware that the Xero Terms of Use have been updated to include XE.com terms, which cover the use of the currency data feeds.

Payables or creditor processing can be one of the most time consuming activities for businesses.  Today we’ve released the first of a series of upcoming features that will make payables processing a breeze.

Check out the following movie:

Now you can plan when you will pay certain bills and nudge them a few days if you need to. We sat down with lots of businesses and discovered this is often how you work.

Can anyone guess what’s coming next?

Please read the Chairman and Chief Executive’s report. It provides a crisp summary of where Xero is at.

It’s now two years since our IPO and it is very satisfying to see all the hard work of our team paying off.

Over the last couple of months we’ve been invited to talk to many investment advisors and it is quite noticeable that we have moved from something of an oddity to take our place in the investment landscape. Our strategy and the opportunity that online software provides is becoming generally understood.

We try very hard to be a good public company. Transparent in everything we do and sharing the experience as much as we can. We are a trail blazer for other technology companies and that’s a responsibility we take seriously.  We hope others will follow our path.

There is no doubt the disciplines of being a public company make you a better.  When we first floated Xero, we said our challenge was to grow a long term, sustainable business.  In fast moving technology companies funding strategy and business strategy are intertwined. While it is scary doing everything so publicly and within a rigorous legal framework, the challenge is rewarding.  The fire is always under your feet but it really is a huge amount of fun.

Our product is getting to where we visualized when we started our journey.  In two frantic years we’ve caught up with the incumbent providers in our space. We built the functionality required to be a credible alternative player but with all the benefits of being connected.  This year we can start setting the agenda and do the things we really wanted to do when we started Xero. We’re at the end of the beginning – now the fun starts.

Thank you to all the valued customers and partners who have supported us over the last two years. We’ve made some great new friends and love getting your feedback.

And a huge thank you to our very supportive shareholders who have given us the opportunity to build a world class company. It’s a privilege for us to have the opportunity to build Xero properly.