Xero

I am a Xero shareholder. I invested in them early on because I thought there was a small chance they could go big. It was a risky investment as they had around 40 staff and only 100 customers in their early days. I was quite prepared to lose my investment, so kept it at a level where I could.

Since then they have kept to their targets, and I have been thinking “Hey, I may even get my money back one day”.

Then a couple of montsh ago I decided (upon urging from my staff) to transfer my business accounts from MYOB to Xero. I was a bit resistant as MYOB is a one off software cost and Xero is a monthly cost and when you own a business you don’t like extra costs.

But then I started using Xero, and my God it was a dream. The setup is easy, but the integration with the banks is seamless. Xero receives the bank statements directly so you just have to go through and code them. But even better it remembers your previous coding, so you can get to a month end and most of it is already coded.

And the invoicing is great. I am away from the office a lot. My staff can prepare an invoice, I log in from anywhere in the world, approve it, and then they can turn it into a pdf and e-mail it with a click.

It is so good to use, that my business manager said she actually is looking forward to doing the first monthly set of financial reports on the new system.

So am now a very happy customer as well as shareholder.

And very nicely, Xero has just done a deal with British Telecom who will resell their service. This put the share price up to $1.70 (initial price $1). And looking through my e-mails I see I have an option to buy more shares at a rate of 90c as a foudnation shareholder. Yay.

I can’t wait for Xero to hit the US market.

Meanwhile I love being able to log into Xero every few days and see my latest accounts – don’t even have to wait for month end anymore.