What a week! I’m here at the Sleeter Group’s Solutions14 — one of the premier accounting solutions conferences in the U.S. I had a chance to announce some exciting Xero news in my keynote presentation this morning that I want to share with you.
First off, we’ve upped the pace of our product innovation here at Xero with a soon-to-be-launched Business Performance Dashboard. This new dashboard and our vision will put small business owners and their advisors in better control and show how they compare to other businesses like them.
I’m also excited to to announce that our second Xerocon accounting show in the U.S. will take place in early June in Denver, Colorado.
Now let me give you more details on this news and a sneak peek at what’s to come.
Big data for small business
Today, most business owners don’t know how their business is performing until it’s too late. With our upcoming Business Performance Dashboard and future big data capabilities, business owners will be able to see in real time how they are doing and how they compare to others to quickly make any necessary adjustments. This is just the first step in how we’ll be looking to use big data from our global accounting platform to better serve our customers.
Business owners and their advisors can collaborate to make the timely decisions needed to drive business health and growth. For accounting professionals, this means they can use the information presented in the dashboards to help grow their firms by providing value-added services to their small business clients in terms of strategic advice and coaching.
The Xero Business Performance dashboard will be available within the Xero accounting software — for free to all existing customers — in early 2015.
Future proofing your firm with Xerocon 2015
I’m also super excited to announce that our second Xerocon here in the U.S. will take place from June 2 – 4 in Denver, Colorado. Xerocon 2015 will bring together accounting and bookkeeping professionals and software developers to hear from inspiring keynote speakers on how to grow their firms. They will also learn how to use Xero’s online accounting platform and ecosystem of over 350 integrated business apps to accelerate their practice and expand their service offerings.
At the same time, attendees will hear from their peers who have transformed their firms by leveraging cloud and focusing in on specific niches and verticals. They will also benefit from tailored content designed specifically to help them be successful in their role whether it be an accountant, bookkeeper, virtual CFO, consultant or firm owner.
“we’ve upped the pace of our product innovation” but still no estimates, statement of cashflow, stable bank feeds, sales tax and other standard features that businesses need to just do their normal work. Come on less sell.
Interesting to see the prioritisation of dashboards. @Michael Pearson I have to say that as a small business owner whose needs are met by the existing software, the plain-language business intelligence is really attractive.
Ha! Just wrote a story about how dashboards were a distraction but I’m actually looking forward to seeing how it interprets my cashflow…
And still no fast reclassification of entries between accounts, merging chart of accounts items, reasonable U.S. small business payroll prices with e-file and e-pay or even correcting bank accounts with journal entries. Meanwhile, QuickBooks quickly copied most Xero special features. No wonder Xero lost its terrific user growth and $3 billion in market cap.
Will the dashboard be available on mobile versions?
@Michael @Mike Thanks for the feedback. We know it’s frustrating waiting for the features that mean the most to you. Rest assured the Dashboard work is not detracting other teams from making progress on some of these things and more. Quotes is coming soon. As is inventory, bulk reclassification, improved searching and the continued rollout of our amazing new reports. The reporting work we are doing right now lays the foundation required for the Cash Flow Statement as well as many other improvements. We’re in the process of scoping out a streamlined sales tax integration for the US and will give more details over the coming months. Our recent acquisition of Monchilla accelerates our payroll plans with e-file and e-pay across all 50 States. Meanwhile the Sniper team are knocking out smaller updates every three weeks and we’ve done over 150 updates this year. So there’s a ton of momentum and it is accelerating.
@Sholto glad you are looking forward to it. We think we are changing the game for small businesses and their advisors with this functionality. In the accounting profession we mostly talk about improved “accounting functionality”, but with our business performance dashboards and where it’s going to evolve we are moving beyond that to what we call “network functionality”. Bringing multiple sources of data will add incredible value and insights to small businesses. Stay tuned.
@Stuart Xero is optimized for any mobile device, so yes, it will be available. As for our native Android and iPhone apps, the answer is yes, but I can’t speak to the timing of this just yet. As you probably know, our native apps don’t carry the same feature set as the full Xero app by design. Mobile is a core part of our product strategy and we always look at the best features to surface in our native apps. Business performance absolutely makes sense for mobile consumption.
Good innovation but one quibble about your dashboard titles: you mix up margin and markup in your gross profit as percentage of sales; that’s margin, not markup. There’s a vast difference between 22% margin and 22% markup. Many small business people confuse the two and get into trouble as a result.
Any update on when this will be going live? Looking forward to this!
I’d be really interested to know when the release date is for this as well 🙂
@Matt @Nikki we are working hard to get this released. I can’t give you a specific date right now, but rest assured we are driving hard to get it into your hands. There’s certainly lots of excitement around it.
I Just found this post and can’t wait for this dashboard! This will be a huge asset to everyone who uses Xero. I don’t know what graphs and metrics you will show but hopefully these will be configurable and include some with the ability to merge with some non-financial data. I think that if these graphs were available to add to management reports this would really connect the dots for small business owners and give their advisors a great tool to be able to interact and communicate better financial information to their clients. It would be great to get an indicative date for their release.