Xero, the global small business accounting platform, this week unveiled new features for small businesses and an enhanced app ecosystem that underlines its formidable and growing presence in business software.
The new features of the Xero platform itself help small businesses better understand their finances, manage projects’ profitability, better manage their staff, operate and scale.
The new features were announced at Xerocon London 2019, where over 3,000 partners gathered.
The new features include:
- Real-time, smarter insights with Business Snapshot: A new tool to go into pilot early next year, Business Snapshot gives small business owners an important, high-level view of their critical business metrics and important trends using beautiful visualisations to help them make decisions on immediate issues
- Connecting Quotes with Projects to support job profitability: Easily estimate, quote and track jobs directly within Xero Projects, so all new work is accurately costed and projects are more profitable
- Manage car expenses without the complexity or paperwork: Work-related car expenses are now easier to track and manage for all staff. Automatically calculate fuel and mileage expenses, and reimburse staff without the fuss
- Automated payroll functionality eases employer paperwork: A new automated solution directly connected to HMRC removes tedious and time-consuming manual tasks for employers providing car or van benefit in kind to their staff during the tax year.
“We have been working hard over the past year to develop new ways to give small businesses smarter, simple and seamless workflows that help them better understand their business and make crucial decisions about the future of their operations,” said Anna Curzon, Chief Product Officer, Xero. “With these new features, small businesses and their advisors can have deeper discussions about what’s working, what isn’t, and focus on how they can continue to grow and thrive.”
Read on to find out about Xero’s deeper integrations with Microsoft Office 365, Google, HubSpot and others as it enhances its apps ecosystem
At Xerocon London 2019 this week, Xero announced that it is building deeper integrations with apps that small businesses use everyday, including Google, Microsoft Office 365, HubSpot and more. The new integrations, built in-house by Xero, were identified as gaps that give small businesses a simple, seamless and smarter way to connect and access their most important information — from finances to customer communications — in one place.
The new integrations, as supplied by Xero, include:
- From lead to deal in no time with HubSpot: Automatically sync customer contacts between Xero and HubSpot’s free CRM, ensuring any customer details — from changes to email or address information — are captured, managed and edited in one place
- Combined contact updates with Google Contacts: Sync all of your customer and supplier contacts from Xero to Google Contacts, ensuring contact details are always up to date, whether it’s for general communication, quotes or invoicing
- From ‘send’ to ‘send and update’ in Microsoft Office 365: Instantly update customer contacts from Xero to Outlook, so small businesses can spend less time ensuring they’re sending the invoice to the right contact, and more time in the business
- Intelligent audience marketing with Mailchimp: Use Xero data to quickly create curated audience lists within Mailchimp marketing campaigns whether it’s rewarding regular customers, or encouraging those who haven’t bought something for a while.
By connecting Xero more tightly with these apps, small businesses will no longer have to work in data silos to ensure their information is more accurate, up to date, and consistent across the business.
Adding to the more than 800 third-party apps already available in the Xero app marketplace, these new integrations are the first step in a series of changes Xero is working on to build deeper connections to the apps small businesses use the most.
“We didn’t want to simply build another integration,” said Nick Houldsworth, executive general manager of ecosystem at Xero. “We looked at the most common friction and pain points in everyday small business workflows and we were able to create customer-focused solutions that will have a positive impact on how small businesses operate every day. This is just the beginning of creating simple, seamless and smarter workflows between Xero and the apps small businesses use day in and out.”
Scott Brinker, vice-president of platform ecosystem at HubSpot, said: “Any successful business needs two core ingredients: healthy finances and happy customers. So bringing Xero and HubSpot more tightly together was a no-brainer for us, ensuring our mutual customers can have better visibility across their business all in real-time.”
It is the latest in a number of major improvements to the Xero app marketplace. In September, Xero unveiled a phased roll out of Single Sign-On, a more seamless way for developers to build on the Xero platform. Xero has also rolled out advisor recommendations for the app marketplace, giving accountants a way to recommend the right apps to the clients based on their unique requirements, size and capabilities.