The response to the roadshow has been overwhelming (see location change below). It’s completely booked out to maximum capacity in most locations. However, there are a few seats left at our Dunedin event, so register now.

If you wanted to attend but we didn’t have an event in your area, please send us an email and let us know.

IMPORTANT LOCATION CHANGE:

The Wellington event will happen at the same date & time Tuesday 25 November from 4-6pm, but due to overwhelming demand it will now be hosted at the following location:

Museum of Wellington City and Sea
Von Kohorn Room (The Historic Board Room)
Queens Wharf
View map

“the high number of SMEs makes them important to the economy, but it is their potential for growth that makes them vital to the government’s economic transformation agenda.”

Small Business contributes $50b to New Zealand’s GDP!  We believe online technology is the key to improving productivity in the sector. The numbers are simply staggering. Minor productivity improvements can grow GDP by $500m or more.

You can download our report here …

Opportunity for Economic Transformation
Encouraging Small Businesses Online (PDF 148k)

Our recommendations to the Government are:

1. Educating SMEs on the benefits of being online in all agency communications.
2. Promote www.business.govt.nz as the business to government website.
3. Allow high quality New Zealand solution providers to be certified and profiled on www.business.govt.nz
4. Encourage the Small Business Advisory Group to play a larger role in the design of the www.business.govt.nz portal so it meets the needs of small businesses on an ongoing basis.
5. Look to expose key government information as web services so that application providers can integrate government activities into the workflow of their solutions. Individual government departments do not need sophisticated transaction websites. This work is incremental and can start immediately. (For example filing of GST returns as a web service.)
6. Establish a single business identification number for all trading entities to facilitate commerce between New Zealand small businesses.
7. Work with the private sector to take a global leadership position in Standard Business Reporting.
8. Accelerate the Standard Business Reporting project, starting with an opt-in voluntary service.

Please note: this document and the recommendations contained within represent the independent view of Xero Limited.

Ideal for small businesses the new card offers a great business credit card rate and if the balance is paid off in full each month, you get up to 50 days interest-free on purchases.

GlobalPlus is a BNZ offering for its business customers who want to earn Air New Zealand Airpoints Dollars TM for every purchase they make on their credit card.

It also helps small business owners to easily seperate personal from businesss spending by using this card instead of their personal one.

Xero supports the new card to deliver automated bank feeds, and we are included in the card offering. Customers who take up the new GlobalPlus Business Visa can try Xero for free for 60 days.

The next workshop is happening Wednesday 26 November in Wellington. Here’s a brief summary of the what the workshop provides:

• Hands-on lessons for building prototypes in Flash (no experience in Flash necessary)
• Insights into the process of design iterations
• Insights into working with developers, investors and other stakeholders
• Receive a video tutorial plus design templates with a library of design elements

I’ve been doing these workshops for the past few months and there’s always a great mix of designers, developers and biz dev people attending. Be sure to register ASAP, because it sells out every time and registration is limited to 10 people to make sure everyone has quality hands-on time.

• state.co.nz
• amp.co.nz
• toyota.co.nz
• msd.govt.nz
• tranzmetro.co.nz

These sites cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to build, maintain and promote. Adding a redirect to the www address is a basic, ten second job for any web geek (see: wildcard DNS redirect).

Please try your site now. If somebody can’t access your site by simply typing your domain and the suffix (ie .com) then go fix it now!! Getting an error is a bad experience. You’re losing business and you’re frustrating people who happen to be persistent and knowledgeable enough to re-try with www in front.

Care to out any other offenders?

There’s a hot new store in downtown Wellington called The Bay - it’s a Premium Apple Reseller shop, which is the next best thing to an official Apple Store. It’s caused quite a stir, everytime we walk by it’s packed with people.

The store looks amazing, just like you’d expect from Apple. They’ve got all the latest greatest Apple gear with experts on hand to show you what’s what .

As proof of their immaculate taste and good business sense they’ve chosen to sell and promote Xero exclusively as their accounting solution.

Abbey provide bank statements in a slightly unusual .CSV format not easily converted or imported into Xero.

Well not any more - Ash has developed his very own Abbey .CSV to .QIF converter which enables the Abbey .CSV file format to be converted to a .QIF which is fully compatible with Xero. Not only this, but he’s embedded the converter within a page on his website making it accessible to all Abbey Bank customers experiencing the same issue.

Thanks Ash and the evoluted team. Great job building this and making it readily available!

In todays tough market cash-flow is everything.  Check out this guide to get some useful ideas on how to speed up getting money from customers: Invoicing tips to improve your cash-flow

Please let us know if guide is useful or any other areas you’d like us to write about.

As of yesterday, you can now raise a credit note directly against a customer or supplier account and you will be prompted to apply it to any outstanding invoices, or you can carry it as a credit until the next invoice you raise.

We’ve also made some improvements to our Accounts Receivable dashboard and to all reports that include credit notes. You can read the full release notes here.

This is an exciting release for us as even though we’ve kept the changes to a minimum, we’ve set up the accounting engine for the next 12 months of features that we’ll be delivering like foreign currency invoices and bank accounts.

As you’d expect, raising and applying credit notes is as simple as working with invoices - here’s a quick walkthrough.

Improvements to credit notes are the major part of today’s release. You can now raise credit notes directly against a customer or supplier in either accounts receivable or accounts payable.

We’ll post more details soon, in the mean time you can view the release notes here.

Thanks to all those who fed me coffee and zapped me to keep going - I’m off home now!