I’ve been playing with Xero’s demo, which is well worth looking at.
You land on the dashboard, which has a nice summary of what is going on. What is particularly pleasing though, in true Don’t Make Me Think style, is that you are not just looking at information, but you are being asked to do stuff.
For example, in the top left corner ther eis a summary of onbank account:
Xero is showing you that there are 12 unreconciled items, and is guiding you to reconcile the bank account numbers (which are downloaded automatically each night) with accounts payable or receivable.
Some quibbles with the demo:
Xero doesn’t run in Safari. Not even the new version of Safari. Actually maybe it does, but I was not given the option. Score minus one point to start – I’m annoyed.
Your password does not meet the minimum password requirements. Passwords should contain 8 or more characters, one of which should be a number
Score another minus point – surely my password shouldn’t be an issue when signing up for a #$%#$% demo.
I can’t deliberately overpay an invoice (something I like to do), but accountants may not like me doing that.
Internet banking isn’t yet properly integrated – you still have to make payments through manual internet banking, which requires rekeying. Xero will import the resulting transaction details from your NZ bank accounts each night though.
The contact page shows just 12 people at a time – with no option to extend the number visible, and no <more> indication at the bottom of the list (there is at the top.)
OK -enough quibbles – they are working hard on the product.
There are some very nice UI tweaks such as the Google Finance-like charts with extendable periods:
Xero’s communications to (potential) customers has to be rated highly – they do it via different channels, including the roadshows mentioned above, a blog, forum and excellent contextual help in the product. You can see that contextual help in the screenshot above – the brown ‘What’s this’.
Reporting is well enough implemented, and the excel export of reports seemed to work very well, with no bizzare formatting and strange column setups. However there does not seem to be an MYOB or other export feature, but I’m sure that is coming (or I just didn’t see it).
Here are the latest features, added in early August. As you can see (well you would if you followed that link) the new features are not exactly out there, but are basic essentials including a new sign up process, some tweaks to reports, and a landing page for those with multiple companies. So some work to do.
Indeed overall it all seems a bit spartan. There are plenty of gaps to fill, and I really don’t yet see any reason to start using Xero versus, say, MYOB.
As time goes by though we should expect to see the feature set improve, and I am looking to see seamless import/export to a range of programs, ability to work offline, ability to automatically pay invoices and fantastic handling of local tax conditions. and more. a lot more. I hope that Xero’s features will surprise and delight.
<update – check out Bwooce’s mini review of Xero and other accounting/invoicing products>
Lance Wiggs 
Hi Lance,
Nice review. I’ve been trying to find a decent SaaS package, even just for estimates and invoices, that is usable in NZ. It is quite a challenge.
Xero would be quite good, even though it doesn’t do estimates, but it is very expensive when compared with the competition. As I said in my mini-review on my blog I can’t see what the target market is, the sweet-spot is quite small and they’re either looking to get more blood from a stone (money from micro to NZ small businesses) or not charge enough from the NZ medium size enterprises. I’d also have some concern that they’re going to hit i18n problems from the other direction; customising for local tax means you can make some decisions which are hard to generalise later.
Xero does look very nice, but I’m not much closer to finding even the basic estimate/invoicing option; a lot of i18n problems everywhere. The last suggestion (time59) won’t let me put TAX INVOICE on the invoices…grrr…
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Bwooce said…
I’d also have some concern that they’re going to hit i18n problems from the other direction; customising for local tax means you can make some decisions which are hard to generalise later.
I don’t know how Rod & Xero are designing their system, but since they are targeting to go global, perhaps it would be a good idea for them to explore the possible use of rule-based & expert-system in the architectural design of their system. Expert-system suits very well with applications that have different rules (ie, different taxation rules in different countries), that are changing frequently. When the rules changes, you don’t need to re-write or re-compile any codes, all you need to do is re-edit the rules (addition of new rules or deletion of old rules that don’t apply anymore) which are written in text-files. I am aware that taxation legislations are prone to frequent change, so in such an environment rule-based & expert-system comes very handy and it has low costs of maintenance because there is no re-coding or re-compiling of codes whenever the rules change. Rule-based & Expert-system are already popular in taxation-adviser software application of today. I might drop Rod an email about exploring rule-based & expert-system scenario.
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I don’t know how Rod & Xero are designing their system, but since they are targeting to go global, perhaps it would be a good idea for them to explore the possible use of rule-based & expert-system in the architectural design of their system.
AFAIK they are using a rule based system. At KiwiFoo this year when they presented they said they have designed the system from the ground up to be able to launch into new markets with different tax systems. From what they said they have spent a lot of time building the base architecture so adding new features will be a lot easier.
LANCE: They also mentioned that they will be building an API which will allow third parties to add features onto the product. Import/Export filters would be a prime example of this. My guess is you will see constant innovation on a 6 week/2month cycle with small improvements each time. In a years time the product will offer a lot more in terms of features while hopefully keeping it simple to understand for the small business owner (something that I don’t think MYOB does at all).
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