Day two – Xerocon
/The highlight of day two at Xerocon was Major Tim Peake’s talk about his experience on the International Space Station. It was remarkable to listen to how he had to train and what he had to experience and go through to prepare himself for the job he had to do on the space station. It made me realise that if you want to achieve your ambitions, you need to prepare, train and work hard to get what you want. Nothing happens just because you’d like it to.
We also had a motivational speaker called Brad Burton chat to us about making your dreams come true and how not to let things that you can’t change hold you back in achieving your aims now. Try to have a positive mindset and ask yourself, ‘is this the best use of my time’? What I realised from listening to him is that I am doing what I love and doing my work is what I want to do with my time. The only thing I will work harder to achieve is a better work/life balance but that is the thing about finding balance, it can easily tip, and you need to work at it every moment of every day.
We went to a demonstration about how XeroTax works and it is a great add-on to Xero for all UK clients. It’s integrated with Xero accounting to prepare your financials and tax returns. As soon as the financials and submissions are finalised, the journals are passed in the accounting software automatically and the period is locked.
It also links into Companies House and HMRC so you can submit your reports and tax through XeroTax. Because it is cloud-based you can have multiple users on your partner account and various people can prepare, review and submit the financial year. FRS102 is not yet completed and finalised but we should have this available soon. FRS105 is already available.
Some great applications we looked at today were:
Transferwise – this is a digital bank that was designed to help with international payments, and it makes it easier to see what a transaction will cost and what exchange rate will be used. The fees are significantly lower than normal bank transactions and they have a great interface to help you see all the details clearly. Transferwise has also partnered up with Xero to facilitate immediate supplier payments in a simple and seamless manner using open banking. It also helps significantly with reconciliations and it will eliminate the unnecessary effort of logging into your banking app and paying suppliers manually. Unfortunately, this won’t work for transactions in South Africa but will work for UK payments to South Africa.
GOCardless – ‘We take the pain out of getting paid’ – this is an online direct debit solution that integrates into Xero. The fees are relatively low, and it can be a very useful application if you have regular clients who are happy for you to take payment for invoices through direct debit by signing a mandate.
Mettle – is a digital bank that has NO fees for any of its accounts. It is purely a business bank and is associated with NatWest. What I really liked about Mettle is that it has an invoicing functionality in its app, allowing you to invoice your clients from your phone as well as sending out the invoice. It also has an expense management function which means photos can be taken of expenses/slips and linked to the transactions in the app. It also integrated with Xero which makes the process very simple and easy to use. I think this will be amazing for clients that are joiners, electricians, plumbers or tradespeople, because everything can be done ‘on the go’.
Futrli is a budgeting, forecasting and reporting tool that works on top of Xero to help you understand your financial information and help you budget and plan. My question to the people at the stand was: how is this different to Float or any of the other cash flow management tools? They explained that it is pretty much the same except you can use Futrli with excel sheets/csv imports which means it can work with any accounting software. Most of the other cashflow budgeting tools only work with Xero, Quickbooks and/or FreeAgent which means customers in other countries like South Africa will struggle finding a cashflow budgeting tool. It is relatively inexpensive and could be great addition to our Anlo practice features. We are looking at this, so watch this space 😊.
Stripe is a card payment facility that works in a similar manner to PayPal and Worldpay, but according to them the fees are lower and the process easier. I will be trying this out shortly so I will let you know!
After two days at Xerocon I realised just how Xero is trying to make accounting smarter, simpler and more seamless by allowing applications to plug into the program and deliver better and faster accounting information to business owners so that they in turn can make quicker and more informed decisions and focus on what they do best – building their businesses.
All of this also reinforces my view that as an Accountant it is my role to use the time saved by technology to be able to act as a trusted advisor to my clients, helping them with day-to-day matters, not just year end reconciliations. Since this is exactly what I have always tried to do, the technology now available makes my job so much easier!
I also realised how important it is to use all the Xero training and certifications available to Xero partners to improve their knowledge on various topics and not just to sign up to every software’s partner accounts unless you are 100% certain that it will be useful to your clients. Much better to be a competent specialist in a key technology, than ending up being a master (or mistress) of none. Where you do decide to commit, take advantage of the training and certification available and try to ensure that your staff do as well.
Xero’s focus this year was on easing cash flow problems for businesses and I think they showed partnerships with Transferwise, Hubdoc, and improvements to Xero itself, that they are committed to this. What can be measured can be changed and through using Xero, businesses can achieve this if advised correctly and this is where a well-trained, tech-savvy accountant comes in.
And finally! A really big thank you to Dominique Marias (Xero South Africa) and Aisha Smith (Xero UK) and Xero for an amazing conference and inspirational two days.
