Tag: xero

Extending the knowledge graph

Big data takes baby steps on our desktops

Google’s latest search changes – introduced by Search Senior Vice President Amit Singhal – are another development, or baby step as Amit would call it, in making data more useful for us.

The flood  of data that’s washed over us since the web arrived has left most of us befuddled. Increasingly, a basic keyword search just hasn’t been enough to find the information we’re looking for and we’ve had to trawl through pages of irrelevant information.

One of the aims of Google’s new features is to make data more relevant to a user – so if someone in the US types “Kings” into Google, they will be given details of the Los Angeles Kings hockey team or the TV series “Kings”.

Those details will include snippets of information about the topic. It could be the teams venue or the cast of the TV show. For tourist locations it could be some basic facts or transport information.

Amit is particularly proud of integrating tourist information and flight details into search and Gmail which indicates Google is beginning to leverage its buyout of the ITA travel booking network last year.

Google’s treatment of data reflects what’s happening with other services. At the recent Australian Xero conference and in an interview with MYOB executives, it’s been emphasised how knowledge is being aggregated to give customers and users better, more useful results.

With Google’s knowledge graph we’re seeing the realisation of what big data can do, there’s many baby steps ahead but there’s a lot of potential.

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Accounting for business change

Cloud computing is changing the accounting industry, how are the incumbents dealing with this?

Small businesses owe a lot to Craig Winkler – in 1991 he bought a obscure Mac based accounting package called Mind Your Own Business (MYOB) and built it into Australia’s leading small business accounting software.

Today Craig is a director and investor of Xero, a cloud computing service which is MYOB’s fastest growing competitor

At Xero’s Australian partner conference, Craig described how the development of business accounting software has evolved around technology opportunities.

MYOB’s massive growth happened as desktop computers became accessible to small businesses. Prior to 1990, it was rare to find a computer sitting on a business desk and they were largely confined to large financial, engineering and government organisations.

In the early 1990s computer prices dropped and as small businesses started using them, the need for desktop based office software exploded. This drove the growth of software like MYOB, Quickbooks and – most profitably of all – Microsoft Office.

Today a similar revolution is happening as computing moves onto the cloud, further reducing business costs and giving small organisations access to the same resources that only big corporations could access a decade ago.

Cloud based companies like Xero and Saasu are now threatening the incumbents like Quickbooks and MYOB who are responding with their own online products.

Tim Reed, the CEO of MYOB yesterday discussed how his business is moving to the cloud. With MYOB’s legacy of desktop based applications which they claim is used by 40% of Australia’s small to medium businesses it isn’t a straight forward process of dropping the old software and embracing the cloud.

Not that their customers are rushing to the cloud, Tim claims that a survey of their clients found that most want a ‘hybrid’ system where data is saved both on the cloud and on the desktop.

MYOB are catering for the hybrid cloud demand with a pilot program of their AccountRight Live product that adds online capabilities to their desktop software.

This is clear difference between MYOB and its cloud competitors. Xero’s founder Rod Drury maintains that those hybrid solutions are cumbersome and adds far more complexity into software. In Rod’s view, “cloud technologies are the right technologies.”

The difference between the philosophies of MYOB and Xero is reflected across the software industry – most notably this is the difference between Google and Microsoft or Apple.

Both Microsoft and Apple see cloud computing as an adjunct to their desktop, tablet and smartphone products. Data is synchronised between the cloud and the device while work is carried out on both.

Google on the other hand tries to do everything on the cloud.

Both approaches have their benefits, particularly in a world where Internet access cannot always be taken for granted which is the cloud’s biggest weakness. Although as mobile broadband becomes ubiquitous in the developed world, that disadvantage is quickly eroding.

Regardless of the differences in the philosophies, everybody agrees that cloud services are going to revolutionise small business. Both Tim Reed and Rod Drury see how the Big Data opportunities in the cloud are going to give business much more access to real time sales, banking and expense data while being able to benchmark their operations against industry performance.

As Craig Winkler described, we are on another big wave of change and there are great opportunities for the businesses that figure out how to use it.

Paul travelled to Melbourne attended the Xero Australian Partner conference courtesy of Xero. He received a private media briefing from MYOB.

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Building an ecosphere

How customers, followers and developers make a business dominant in its field

One of the keys to success for a software platform is its ecosphere  – the community of developers, consultants and advocates that grow around a service.

By far the most successful company in building a community around its products is Microsoft, who over the years have attracted hundreds of thousands of developers and partners to support Windows.

Microsoft’s thousands of partners are the company’s greatest asset in beating back the threat posed by Google, cloud computing and Apple. The sheer size Microsoft’s supporter base gives it a natural buffer against competitors.

Apple too have that buffer, in the company’s darkest days during the late 1990s it was the true believers who kept the flame burning. The ecosphere that has developed around the iPhone and iPad has now cemented Apple’s iOS as being the dominant mobile platform.

The same thing happens around various industry software packages, as one company becomes identified as the leader in their sector they develop a following among users in that industry.

At the Xero conference last weekend, the cloud accounting software company showed how an ecosystem of developers, accountants and bookkeepers are developing around their software platform.

Companies as diverse as inventory management, point of sale system and document scanning services are plugging into Xero’s accounting data which adds functionality for customers.

In turn, those third party services makes Xero more attractive to the bookkeepers and accountants looking for ways to make their jobs, and those of their clients, easier.

Xero’s biggest competitor, MYOB, also has that strength with an army of certified consultants from long being the incumbent in their market.

The battle between Xero and MYOB for dominance in the business accounting software market will depend upon how well the incumbent can hold onto their existing markets and the effectiveness in the incumbent building a ecosphere that makes the newer product more attractive.

Disclaimer: Paul travelled to Melbourne and attended the Xero Partner conference courtesy of Xero.

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Quitting our email addiction

What can we do to reduce the size of our electronic inboxes?

This post originally appeared in the Xero Accounting Blog on December 9, 2011.

With 74,000 staff, you’d expect the CEO of French technology company Atos to be buried in email, but Thierry Breton hasn’t sent an electronic mail message for three years.

As the US ABC news service reports, Atos and Breton are implementing a zero email policy for their employees, steering them to use instant messaging and collaboration tools that reduce the need to send attachment heavy messages.

Breton claims only one in ten of the 200 messages his employees receive each day are useful and 18 percent is spam which – given some security companies estimate over 90% of world email traffic is unsolicited messages – shows Atos has a pretty good spam filter.

Email has been one of the main applications of business technology for the last twenty years, so how feasible is it really to move away from the inbox as being the first and last thing you check each day?

Instant Messaging

The ability to send quick messages between computers has been around since they were first networked in the 1950s but consumers and business largely ignored these clunky features until they were made popular in the late 1990s by the web based AOL and MSN Messenger services.

Most business communications platforms like Microsoft Office, Google Apps and  Novell Groupwise have an Instant Messaging (IM) tool built in which can be easily turned on.

None of this is new technology and it’s probably one of the most used business features in the Skype Internet telephone service.

A downside with IMs is they generally demand immediate attention and can distract someone from their work. They also leave detailed logs so don’t for a minute think your rant about a customer or staff member hasn’t been recorded.

Social media

Many of the social media tools have their own built in instant messaging with LinkedIn, Facebook and Google+ having their own services with Google’s service offering the Hangouts feature to create impromptu video conferences.

By definition Twitter is an instant messaging service offering both public and private channels. The Yammer platform is a grown up corporate tool that offers all the social media functions for a business environment.

The downside with using social media platforms as mission critical business tools is their reliance on the best efforts of external providers that can raise security and reliability issues.

Wikis

Atos makes specific mention of their company wiki. Simply put, a wiki is a website that can be easily updated by anyone with permission to do so.

It’s possible to lock wikis, restrict access or to undo any changes that aren’t suitable so all the information is controlled and subject to review. These can be run on your own office server or hosted on an outside cloud service.

Wikis are a fantastic tool for building a corporate memory and developing standardised procedures and policies across an organisation.

Collaborative tools

One of the big changes in the modern office is the rise of cloud office software services like Google Docs, Basecamp and – of course –Xero Accounting that allow people to work together on the same files at the same time.

In the past, office software has locked individual documents while one person used them and that aspect alone has probably been responsible for many of the emails spinning around corporate offices.

Another benefit of the new breed of collaborative tools is they make it easy to control documents as all team members are working only one version of a file, meaning there’s no uncertainty of who has the latest version.

External risks

There are some outside risks with some of these services as they are cloud based so Internet access is important and there can be some questions of security and reliability with trusting processes to outside providers.

Email itself is evolving into a cloud based commodity as many businesses move to Gmail or hosted solutions rather than running their own email servers.

If those external risks are a concern, then it is possible to run these services on your own networks although most businesses are comfortable with outsourcing their technology.

Discovery

One of the first things that jumps to mind from a business IT point of view is that moving to a non-email environment reduces the risk of having to provide masses of data in the event of a legal dispute.

Many organisations have been caught out by a “smoking gun” message hidden within the pile of emails sent within an organisation every day.

The reality is that instant messaging, wikis and collaborative tools all leave their own “digital fingerprints” and if anything the non-email platforms may make it harder to hide evidence from a determined investigator.

Outside parties

Atos aren’t banning electronic mail with outside parties though, with a company spokesman quoted saying their goal is focused on internal emails rather than those from outside the company.

This makes sense as email is still a key business communication tool and not using it to talk to suppliers and customers wouldn’t make sense. For most organisations such a ban would make it impossible to send invoices.

Email is a key part of business and probably will continue to be, what we are seeing though is an evolution of how it is used in the workplace as new tools are developed.

The last word goes to Thierry Breton who said when announcing the policy, “We are producing data on a massive scale that is fast polluting our working environments and also encroaching into our personal lives”. He has a point.

How are you managing your business email and would you abolish it if you could?

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The creative deadbeat

There’s some terrific excuses for not paying bills, some are worth collecting once the pain of extracting the money is over.

This post originally appeared on the Xero Accounting blog under the title “Sorry, we’re not paying you”.

“Your star readings were negative after you serviced my computer,” the astrologer said sweetly, “so I’m afraid I will not be paying you.” Then she hung up. It was a good start to the week.

In business, bad payers are an unfortunate fact of life, one of the redeeming features is most of us end up with a great collection of reasons deadbeat customers give to justify not paying their bills.

Along with the downright strange is the quasi-legal; “your tax file number is in the wrong format, so we can’t pay your invoice” is one of the better excuses I heard in the years of running my business.

“I gave your technician a cup of coffee while she was here, so you’ll have to give me a credit” was another great claim.

A teacher once threatened to report my business to her union on the basis we were exploiting low paid women workers. The funny thing was we’d cut her a big discount because I realised she’d struggle to pay the full rate.

Big boys’ excuses

Those excuses were from smaller customers, but the corporate sector can be no better, some of them treat their suppliers as banks who give them an interest free loan

One multinational suffering cash flow problems decided to pay all bills after 270 days, regardless of the agreed payment terms. They didn’t bother with excuses and their accounts team were blunt – if suppliers didn’t like it, they could sue and wait five years for their money.

That company had its come-uppance when every supplier in the country put the company on a cash up-front basis to avoid a nine month wait.

Another big corporation decided to tangle their contractors in knots by implementing an arcane system involving submitting an invoice by the 30th of month one, backing it up with a statement of account by the 20th of month two paying thirty days later. Make a mistake or miss a date and the whole cycle started again.

Probably the most irritating excuses can come from government departments, a common one being, “our budget has run out for that item, so we can’t pay your invoice until the next financial year. Would you be able to reissue it under a new purchase order for paperclips?”

Chasing the bad news

A truism with collecting debts is the longer we let them slide, the less likely it is they will be paid so we have to be on the ball in chasing those late payers.

In Xero’s accounting software you nominate the due date when creating the invoice and this will appear on the copy the customer receives.

As soon as the due date has passed without payment, follow up with a reminder or a phone call.

Whenever you have a slow payer, it’s best to talk to them. Showing you watch our money closely indicates to the customer that you are serious about your bills.

Identify problem customers

The good thing about late payments is it’s a pretty reliable guide to who is a bad customer – if they constantly pay bills late, then you don’t need them in your business life and it’s time to get rid of them.

More insidious is the good client gone bad – a previously good payer who suddenly starts making excuses could be in financial trouble. If so, it’s worthwhile making sure your business isn’t too exposed if that client suddenly goes under.

At one client the secretary insisted on paying most of our bill out of petty cash. Two weeks later the company, a Scotch whisky broking service, closed shop and left thousands of angry customers and suppliers out of pocket. It took the creditors ten years to get a fraction of their money back and the secretary did us a great favour.

Not every late payer is a bad guy though, even in the best of times good customers can hit a bad patch so making arrangements with a good customer who has hit a rough patch can be a good long term strategy.

Incidentally, the astrology lady eventually did pay her bill. Attached was a note explaining something about planets transiting Scorpio during a waxing moon. We never heard from her again.

At least with bad payers we get to have a laugh at their excuses later, what the best stories you’ve heard from deadbeat customers?

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