Xero – Giving You More

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Xero has announced its biggest ever wave of new products, which is designed to help accountants and bookkeepers grow their firms and enhance their clients’ small businesses.

The announcements come as part of the opening of Xerocon in Melbourne, where 3,000 accountants, bookkeepers and ecosystem partners from 19 countries are seeking more from Xero to help with their practices and clients.

The new products – including the official release of Xero HQ and a hub of curated app partners, Xero Expenses, Xero Discuss and Xero Projects – will be available to accountants and bookkeepers, and their small business clients in the coming weeks and months. This powerful, integrated suite of products connects the front and back office for firms, while also equipping small business owners to manage their businesses more efficiently.

In a phone conversation earlier today, Keri Gohman, president of Xero Americas, told Insightful Accountant, “Accountants and bookkeepers are always at the heart of what we do at Xero. Over the past ten years, we have used the latest cloud technology to build tools that help accountants and bookkeepers grow and thrive. Looking ahead, we are focused on next-generation technologies leveraging automation and artificial intelligence to drive efficiencies across firms, so accountants and bookkeepers have room to become true advisors to small businesses. We know that will be fundamental to the success of small businesses, the key to our economy across North America.”

Xero users everywhere are waking up to Insightful Accountant and shouting, "Santa came early this year."

Xero HQ 'Official Release'

Having gone through a one-year plus beta and pilot program, Xero HQ is ready for prime-time and is being officially released. Now more than ever, Xero HQ is your hub for providing superior service to your accounting, bookkeeping and consulting clients.

With Xero HQ, you get real-time visibility and insights across all of your clients, connections with with a curated selection of third-party apps, and access to all the the best tools to help your clients. Xero HQ:

  • Provides accountants, bookkeepers and advisors with a suite of practice tools designed to help them build a successful digital practice and meet the needs of their clients 
  • Unlocks major workflow efficiencies to better manage their own firm, as well their Xero and non-Xero clients
  • Allows accounts/bookkeepers to bring all their client contacts together on one single client list. You decide how to organize and group the details; record, tag and filter notes; and create useful lists and views. The explorer tab provides you with new and different views of your client data.
  • Permits you to customize the way you see your clients' financial data, even when they use entirely different sets of accounts. 

Use the Xero HQ activity feed to keep an eye on all of your client and practice activities. See when there are transactions to reconcile, workpapers to attend to, and more. Then click straight through to make it happen.

One of the new features in this upcoming roll out includes a curated set of third-party apps providing deep integration into Xero HQ. The initial eight App integrations are:

  • Boma for marketing automation
  • Fathom to efficiently create forecasting reports
  • FUTRLI to provide future insights for a business
  • Hubdoc for automated financial documents
  • Practice Ignition to assist with client on-boarding
  • Receipt Bank for more efficient bookkeeping
  • Suite Files to bring all client data and files into one place, and
  • Spotlight Reporting to enable accountants and bookkeepers to see how clients are performing in a single view

While many Xero and non-Xero users are familiar with some or all of these apps, the extent to which the new integrations bridge the gap between specialized app features and Xero’s cloud-based accounting will be on the cutting edge. 

In the near future, Insightful Accountant will have one or more follow-up articles covering the specifics of Xero HQ as the product rolls out. 

Xero Discuss

This new Xero feature, which will roll out a little later this year, enables accountants and bookkeepers to discuss financial details about a client’s business directly with the client from within the Xero dashboard, removing the need for lengthy email chains or potential miscommunication about their data.

SMB owners can ask questions about a specific issue, bill, invoice or other transaction, and get help from their accountant or bookkeeper when they need it. At the same time, Xero Discuss will make it easier for advisors to answer questions and fix potential issues in Xero, thus improving the accuracy of financial information and permitting correct and timely business decisions.

Insightful Accountant looks forward to giving you more details about Xero Discuss in our Xero Zone webinar set for Oct. 25, 2017. Be on the look out for your chance to sign up for that webinar in the near future.

Xero Expenses

This new feature will give advisors powerful visibility into how money is spent in their clients’ small businesses. Those advisors can then help their SMB clients make better spending decisions, using powerful analytics and integrated accounting within a centralized platform.

Xero Expenses is taking a modern, mobile-first approach and focuses on simplifying the process of capturing expenses, making small business owners and their accountant or bookkeeper as efficient as possible.

The Expenses API will enable banks to link transactional and purchasing services to the millions of employees of small businesses using Xero.

Xero Projects

More and more businesses need detailed job costing, but cloud-based accounting has been lacking in this feature. Xero is launching Xero Projects to help small businesses grow as well as track their revenues and profits on a projects (job-costing) basis.

Xero accountants, bookkeepers and advisors will be able to not only grow their own practices by helping their small business clients across the country track key operating metrics, including budgets, expenses and time.

Xero Projects is also designed to signal potential cash flow problems within a client’s business before it becomes a major threat to survival, thus enabling those SMBs to manage their business’ survival and profitability.

So, just like the morning after Santa has visited, I'm sure all of you Xero users are wanting to start playing with all these new goodies. The feature roll out is headed your way, some within the next few days and weeks, and others a few more months off. I, for one, can hardly wait to get hands-on, so I can give you a more in-depth feature-by-feature review in the near future.