Emma Hardwick and Debbie Marriot from our Plus Advisory team headed up to London last month for the 2018 Xero conference.
Xero’s conference last week was an informative and inspiring experience. As well as speakers from Xero there was futurist Gerd Leonhard, who gave his insight into the world’s future. Gerd’s talk looked at the opportunities and challenges that arise from automation and Big data, before talking about Megashifts. Hemlata Narasimhan, responsible for growth and innovation for Visa also spoke at the conference.
Sir Chis Hoy, a six time Olympic Champion talked about pushing yourself to the limit by aiming high, dreaming big and shooting for the stars by working hard and persevering. Finally the truly amazing and down to earth Ben McBean, a former Commando and double amputee who stepped on a landmine in Afghanistan, talked about his experiences and how he ran the London Marathon twice within two years, because he had the will to achieve, needless to say he recieved a standing ovation.
The event which was presented by Louise Minchin from Morning Breakfast TV, started with Gary Turner, who is the co-founder and managing director of Xero. He advised that Xero is the multi award-winning global leader in online accounting software with 1.4 million paying subscribers in 180 countries. He announced that 7/10 customers surveyed said that the Bank Reconciliation is their most loved feature in Xero, That’s one of our Emma’s favourites.
Speakers
Other main speakers from Xero were Steve Vamas, Chief Executive Officer, who was advising about the growth and performance of the business.
Anna Curzon, product management, development and marketing of Xero features to Xero Partners including the 700+ apps to help service small businesses, went through the feedback from practices on their client gains.
Edward Berks, director of platform business, who works with Xero’s App partners, leading banks and fintech organisations to finetune points to assist small businesses also featured at Xerocon.
Lucy Adams CEO, from disruptive HR, delivered a speech on why change is not always popular as well as discussing public scrutiny and adverse publicity.
Damon Anderson, director and lead role in the partner and product team at Xero , works with accounting and bookkeeping partners to assist in the digital transformation and he spoke about the new Xero client experience.
Nick Houldsworth, executive general manager – ecosystem, leading the way for Xero’s developer API and app marketplace.
Rod Drury, founder of Xero, speaks about his vision for the future of Xero and accounting.
Talks
As well as the above speakers, there were many other talks on smaller stages, such as ‘How APIs are changing the world’, ‘HMRC: Getting set up for MTD’, as well as many talks from the various App companies including Receipt Bank, Unleashed, Hubdoc and many more. Around the stages were around 80 stands of App companies willing to discuss how their products can help improve and grow your business, with demos as well as lots of goodies to take away!
Xero Updates
Needless to say Xero have as always been updating and making further improvement and many of them were revealed at Xerocon including:-
- CIS can now be submitted through Xero
- Xero Bank Feeds API – enabling other banks to build to Xeros API for faster bank connections.
- Emails to bills – create an invoice from an email – faster than before
- New Expenses – multi currency using xe rates – add new contacts when creating purchase/sales invoices, Profit & Loss reports, multi-line options and data capture making it easier and quicker to use.
- Payroll – import new employees via spreadsheet instead of adding each single new employee individually.
- Xero Projects – User roles and permissions improved, sales credit notes can now be created in projects, start-stop timer, transfer timesheets directly to payroll to avoid input duplication saving time and Trello integration to update project time.
- Coming soon – changes to sales invoices, mileage log and many more!!
And of course, we cant forget the evening party!
See you next year?
Author: Debbie Marriott, Xero co-ordinater, Plus Accounting
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