XeroCon
In case you missed it, XeroCon US was held in Denver the first week of June, right in the middle of show season. I have mentioned this in a couple of other posts already, but I thought the event was well executed and it had a tremendous amount of energy on the show floor and in the sessions. If you don't go to events like this, you really should attempt to make it. You can learn so much about the companies that are participating and you learn about operating your business, too.
My focus in this post is mainly about the exhibit hall, but I do have a couple of specific items to share regarding Xero. While at XeroCon the company announced their global user base (paid) topped 500,000, a huge leap from the 10,000 the company had in 2011. During his opening
session Rod Drury, CEO of Xero, candidly stated that last year was the most difficult year for the company as they scaled physical and human resource infrastructure to meet their growing demand. The company now has 1,161 employees globally including about 600 in the US if I understood correctly. Additionally, the company currently has 16,000 members in its advisor program, 2,100 who are in the US.
The exhibit hall comprised of 40 or 50 exhibitors, most of which were new names to me. Virtually all of them have integrations with QuickBooks, which was a little surprising to me since so many were from "the land down under". (I mention the QB intgration in a Xero focused article because most of our audience members support QB, so you may want to check these vendors out for the QB integrations if nothing else.)
So who was exhibiting?
Avalara - Avalara automates your sales taxes
Bill.com - Reduce you bill approval and payment time by 50% and get pad faster
Dear Inventory - Inventory solutions
Entryless - Automatically updates your GL as bills are submitted. You just audit and approve
Expensify - Expense management through "expense reports that don't suck" according to the company
Exsalerate - CRM
Float - Cashflow forecasting and analysis
Fundbox - Business lending without going to the bank
The Institute of Certified Bookkeepers - The UK based bookkeeping association is making its push into the US with Jan Haugo leading the charge domestically.
Rerun - Rerun is for any business, organization or association that wants to automate their recurring, subscription or membership billing.
Payment Express - Payments technology provider
Payment Evolution - Payments technology provider
Practice Ignition - Practice management software for your business
ReceiptBank - No more data entry. Remove the hassle of receipts and invoices
simPRO Software - Job management for construction and trades
What about Xero? My take away from XeroCon as it is related to Xero the company is pretty simple. The people who work there are top notch professionals. Their vendor partners love working with them and their accounting partners are crazy about them. I am going to leave the product information for Murph to touch on after we have had a demo. In the meantime, however, it seems like Xero has a lot of energy, is building a following and it's own ecosystem. Competition is healthy, so it seems SMB's and accounting professionals may be in a really good position to take advantage of some of the benefits that healthy competition seems to drive in markets in which healthy competition takes place.
It should be fun to watch and report on as this competition continues to heat up.