Xero

Caught up with Rod Drury a few days ago to discuss everything from fibre and peering to blogging.

Rod was kind enough to give me a quick demo of Xero, which is his latest venture – an online accounting package for small and medium businesses.

Now accounting is one area I do know more than a bit about. I spent around six years doing the monthly and annual accounts for Red Cross and then an advertising agency – all the way to audit. I’ve been Treasurer of a few organisations and as a board director I take a great interest in the accounts of those organisations I am on the board of. Plus I have my own small business which I do the accounts for (but am learning to delegate some of that!)

Now let me tell you I was very impressed with Xero. Even though the product wasn’t fully finished, even what they had to date looked great. I’m now onboard as a beta user.

I think accountants are going to love clients who use Xero. For rather than have to go through hoards of printouts and books, they’ll be able to access their clients’ accounts directly, look for errors, run journals, as and when they can.

As someone who travels a lot I like the concept of being able to access my accounts from anywhere I have Internet.

But the nicest thing about it is just how easy it makes things. Data from one bank is already transferring directly into the accounts of Xero users, and the others are not far behind. Interfaces with the IRD save double handling. It has nice reporting and lots of graphs for those who like them. Also all in user friendly language.

I had a list of a dozen or so features I wanted, and for everyone one of them it had the feature or Rod could give a date when that feature would be implemented.

I think there will be a lot of excited people when it becomes publicly available.