Hot on the heels of the popular Auckland Small Business Expo in Greenlane last month, Xero is off to the garden city for the second leg of the expo series. The Christchurch Small Business Expo will be held at the Convention Centre next week from Tuesday 20 - Thursday 22 May.

We are pleased to offer you free e-tickets to the expo. Simply fill in your details below to pre-register your attendence. The expos are the biggest events in New Zealand for small businesses - whether you're a one-man band or have a staff of 40. Free advice, giveaways, mentoring, networking and seminars, are all under one roof. You can also catch Xero CEO Rod Drury speak as part of the National Bank Seminar Series at 12pm on Thursday 22 May.

If that doesn't sound compelling enough to come along, then how about this: sign up to Xero and you will go in a draw to win an Apple iPod Touch, also just leave us your business card to enter a draw to win a bottle of Champagne! Too easy.

Follow the link below to get your fre e-ticket:
http://www.businessexpo.co.nz/Christchurch/Xero/registration.asp

If you've ever wished you could access your documents from anywhere or easily co-work on a document - then you've probably been following the improvements in Google Docs.

Reports in Xero have always been able to export to Excel and PDF and today we added the ability to export our reports as an online spreadsheet to Google Docs.

If you haven't come across Google Docs yet, it's an online office suite (including spreadsheets, documents and presentations) that is provided free from Google. It allows you to store spreadsheets online so you can access them from any computer and easily share and collaborate with other people. 

If you don’t have a Gmail account yet, you will be prompted to create one when you first export a report from Xero to Google Docs. 

The power of Xero is that your accountant accesses the same data as you use to run your business. 

In our latest release, you'll see a new option on the Profit and Loss and Balance Sheet to allow you and your accountant to re-order, group and summarise accounts.  This allows you to manage the presentation of your reports on-the-fly, instead of having just one static hierarchical Chart of Accounts. 

Here are a few things you can achieve by customising your reports:

• Group similar accounts such as wages
• Summarise groups of accounts into one line
• Show your credit cards and overdrafts as current liabilities
• Show your tax, dividends and other non-taxable expenses below your operating profit
• Show your shareholder current account and other balance sheet accounts with an opening and closing balance

Because you may have different presentation requirements for your reports at various times, you can save multiple report layouts. Accountants can use this to create reporting templates and share these across all of their organisations. 

To customise your reports, use the Layout Options button at the bottom of the report.

Over the last month we've been working closely with leading web-based payroll provider iPayroll to save you more time when processing your payroll.

For most companies, your payroll provider will generate a number of bank transactions which can be quickly processed into Xero with our self learning bank reconcilation - for many small businesses this is all you need.

For companies that want to track salary expenditure into cost centres, iPayroll uses the Xero Network to automatically and securely send the accounting transactions into Xero saving you considerable time each pay cycle.  You can then approve the invoices from iPayroll and reconcile them quickly with a single click when the transactions hit your bank account.

iPayroll supports both a traditional chart of accounts (with headers and sub-headers) and also the new Tracking features of Xero.  Once set up in iPayroll you'll find accounting for payroll a breeze. It's set and forget, approve and click!

You can read the help for more detailed information.

We use iPayroll ourselves at Xero and have been impressed by the work they have done on KiwiSaver and other changes that reduce complaince costs. Using iPayroll + Xero saves us 2-3 days a month.

Many people either belong to or volunteer at a local club, and Xero is a perfect fit for these.

We’ve been looking at how clubs operate and what their accounting requirements are. The important things for a club are transparency, multiple user access, and easy distribution of financial information.

It’s amazing how many clubs out there are struggling under the weight of bad financial management systems which chew up volunteers’ time on bookwork instead of running the club and having fun.

Check out our new clubs page and read the clubs user guide to see the 7 simple steps to setting up your local club. 

If you would like your local club, committee member or treasurer to be introduced to Xero, email us at sales@xero.com 

It’s rewarding when we get coverage on leading UK websites such as AccountingWeb:

Online Recruitment Company ‘Hires’ Xero to Handle its Accounts Online.

The AccountingWeb article covers how an online recruitment company now does all its accounting online.  AccountingWeb has a community of more than 90,000 accountants – in business and practice – who are considered the first port of call for expert advice from their accountant database.

Thousands of about-to-be and just-started entrepreneurs are packing the ExCel exhibition and conference centre in London on Friday and Saturday this week for the Business StartUp Show. http://www.bstartup.com

With speakers including current 'Dragon' from the Den James Caan, ex-Dragon Rachel 'Red Letter Day' Elnaugh, plus model-turned-lingerie-business-owner Caprice all sharing their experiences, there will be lots of interesting business people to learn from.

The team from Xero will be showing the successful business owners of the future how they can easily manage their accounts online (and how not to fall at the first hurdle of not knowing their numbers if they ever approach a Dragon!).

The Business StartUp show is free to attend, and you can register for tickets here - http://www.bstartup.com/free_tickets.asp

Our advice is to get there early (it opens at 10am on both days) as there is a lot to see and listen to.

The Xero team will be giving live demos all day - so please come and see us on stand 340 if you want to take a look, or ask us any questions.

Automatic bank feeds will be delayed for ANZ, BNZ, National Bank and TSB, due to the public holiday on Friday. Thursday's transactions will appear in Xero on Friday morning as usual, but transactions made on Friday will arrive with the weekend and Monday's transactions on Tuesday morning.

ASB and Kiwibank feeds will be unaffected, as they arrive 7 days per week, even on public holidays.

If you're a Xero customer with New Zealand bank accounts, you can read our guide How do I set up automated bank feeds to find out how to set up bank feeds.