Xero Blog

When you’re managing a business you want to be able to make sense of the figures. While it’s important to know where those dollars and cents are going, sometimes you need to step back and get a big-picture view of your earning and spending.

Yesterday, Wednesday 12 September, we experienced a technical outage which affected our users’ access to Xero. The site went down at approximately 5pm New Zealand time, and was restored at 12.30am New Zealand time.

For some reason, the idea of sales is scary for many accountants. As natural practitioners, many feel they can’t easily transition between that and the role of a salesperson. Why is this?

It’s National Payroll Week in the UK – an initiative organised by the Chartered Institute of Payroll Professionals (CIPP). It aims to demonstrate the importance of efficient payroll to the economy.

A combination of richer customer data, more responsive banks, and partnerships with accountants may be the key to helping close an estimated $80 billion lending shortfall to Australian small businesses, said panel at Xerocon in Brisbane.

At Xerocon Brisbane 2018 we announced that, with Xero, you’ll be able to lodge activity statements directly to the Australian Tax Office. Every quarter, six million business activity statements are lodged in Australia, with 50% lodged by tax or BAS agents, and 30% on paper forms.

People often ask what keeps me up at night. When I joined Xero five and a half years ago, there were around 60 people in the Australian team supporting around 51,000 subscribers. 

Amongst the hordes of accountants and bookkeepers at Xerocon this year, we’re also seeing fresh faces representing an entirely different career path – education! For the first time ever, we’ve invited educators to Xerocon, as we’ve just unveiled Xero Learn, the first cloud accounting platform designed and purpose-built solely for educators.

I had the opportunity to sign a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the accounting body ACCA UK. This followed a roundtable discussion with their global team and some of the UK’s leading accounting practitioners.