Viridity Blog

Inventory in the Cloud

Sun, 20 May 2012 21:06:00 GMT

Viridity has been working with Unleashed for more than a year now (we are very proud to have been accredited as the Premier Partner for Unleashed in Australia).

During that time we have seen dozens of new features released with today's release being one of the biggest. Just a few of the new features over the past year have included:

Multiple warehouses
Bill of Materials / Assembly
An ever increasing list of ecommerce integrations
Improvements to partial receipting & backordering
Improvements to discounting options
And lots more besides!

One area that hadn’t been upgraded until now was the “look and feel” (as you'll hear it referred to the "UI", or User Interface). Here is an image of one of the screens released today.

The rest of Unleashed looks just as good, and the system is packed with great features too! If you think Unleashed could help you reduce the cost of managing your inventory please contact Viridity.

Xero Payroll

Mon, 23 Apr 2012 07:14:00 GMT

A few weeks from now Paycycle will be fully integrated with Xero. For those of you already using both Paycycle and Xero the changes will be pretty minimal - rather than logging into Paycycle as a separate site you will now have a payroll tab on your Xero file. For those of you using Paycycle only you will now log into Xero (but use the payroll section only).

Here is a sneak preview of the new Xero screens including Paycycle.

I was reminded again a few days ago of one of my favourite features of Paycycle - we processed super both for our own employees and for a number of clients. All bar one of those clients was on Paycycle - the exception was one recently acquired client who had been reporting their super manually. That one client took longer to process than all the others put together - run reports, log into super fund websites (lots of them), upload payment details by employee, create BPays. Yuk!

By contrast the reporting out of Paycycle involved:

One click to add the super batch
Select all pays in the quarter
Submit for approval
Enter security code (received by SMS)

So quick, and so easy! Payments direct debited, reports lodged electronically.

If you'd like to know more about how much time Paycycle can save you please contact Viridity.

Small Business Failures?

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 23:37:00 GMT

Subject to the usual proviso about lies, damned lies and statistics the latest “Counts of Australian Businesses” makes for interesting reading.

Over the past 4 years the number of businesses in Australia (measured by the number of ABNs) has grown by just under 4%, with all that growth coming in the 2010 year. At the same time Australian GDP has grown by just under 10%, which suggests that the growth in GDP has been absorbed by existing businesses doing more, rather than more businesses.

As usual the ABS has provided an analysis of “failure” rates measured by the longevity of those businesses that closed during the previous 4 years. They report that of all business in existence as at June 2007 almost 40% had cancelled their ABN by 30 June 2011. But if you look at just the 300,000 ABNs that were issued in the 2007/08 year 52% of those had exited after 4 years.

The big unknown amongst all this is how many of these businesses are “failures” (either went bust or closed because the owner wasn’t able to make a go of it) as compared to how many were “successful closures” (retirements, business sold profitably, etc). There are competing schools of thought on this, but these numbers certainly do seem to support the case that surviving the first 1 to 3 years in a new business is tough.

I recently came across an interesting study looking at predictors of business failure for SMEs, which is too long to cover in this blog (besides I haven’t finished reading it yet). But sometime soon I will put up a blog relating to this article - it should make for another interesting read.

Paycycle & HTML

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 23:30:00 GMT

At the beginning of January Paycycle released the new HTML version of their software to all users (we had been running our payroll on this release since the early December as part of their beta testing). As of this week this is the only version available – they have now shut down the old Silverlight version (the “black and green” screens many of you will have been familiar with).

The new “look and feel” of the product is in line with Xero – lots of blue! My first response was a bit negative but after running 4 payrolls in the new release I can scarcely remember the old screens and am really impressed with this new version. This video shows an introduction to the new release, plus there are extensive help notes on the Paycycle website.

The next major objective for Paycycle is a full integration with Xero, so for those of you who run both these products you will have the option within a few weeks of running your payroll inside Xero, it will just be a separate tab (and yes access will be controlled by user log on, so your payroll data will remain confidential). Keep an eye on our blog over the next few weeks for news of this.

If you need any help transitioning from the old version of Paycycle to the new, or are interested in implementing either Paycycle or Xero in your business please contact Viridity.

How many customers on Xero?

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 12:12:00 GMT

With the Xero dealer conference coming up in NZ next week Xero have released updated customer numbers, with total paying customers up from 50,000 just 4 months ago to 60,000 now.

That is a pretty staggering growth rate - up around 20% in 4 months. Customer numbers have more than doubled every 12 months for the past 4 years (don't have March 2012 figure just yet obviously, but I am pretty confident it'll be a bigger not smaller than today's).

Xero Customer Numbers

It seems to me that there is a huge amount of growth yet to come. Xero haven't released a geographic breakdown, other than to say that 50% of those numbers are outside of NZ. My guess - and it is only a guess - is that in Australia they currently have a market share of not much more than 2% - that is maybe 10,000 customers out of more than 500,000 businesses running an accounting solution of some sort (MYOB, Quickbooks, Saasu or other - and my focus is really on SMEs, so I am ignoring the larger systems run by most larger businesses).

These figures are reflected in Viridity's experience over the past 12 months (obviously on a much smaller scale). We have more than doubled our Xero sites in the past 12 months, and every one of these has been a new client to Viridity - we are not simply churning existing clients to Xero from other solutions. It is tempting to think the growth is all about the technology - that it is just about being a cloud solution. But the message I get most frequently from clients is that this is not of itself enough. What clients want is good quality, timely, commercially focused financial information.

Viridity's focus has always been on commercial accounting. We take the view that whilst compliance is of course a requirement, it is never more than the essential minimum. Rather it is the ability to deliver management information to assist business owners understand and control their business that is of value to our clients. And I have yet to find a better tool for this than Xero!

Yes Xero may be "the world's easiest accounting software", yes it may be "beautiful accounting software", yes being "in the cloud" is funky, but this is just the enabler. What my clients love about Xero (and the services we provide them) is the shift in focus from backward looking tax and compliance to forward looking financial business management advice.

Right now I have to say I am enjoying what I do for a living more than ever before. Xero is the key tool that Viridity needs to really add value to clients. And it is just going to keep getting better.

Christmas Greetings

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 11:05:00 GMT

Mid December last year I decided I didn't want to be responsible for more trees chopped down, more greenhouse gases released all in the name of a Christmas card mailout, when most of those cards were going to get binned during the first week in January. But just doing a zero cost email campaign in lieu of Christmas cards seemed very cheap!

After discussions with my partner and my team the solution we hit upon was to figure out how much we would have spent on Christmas cards and donate that sum to a charity of which we all approved. After lots of discussion we settled on one in the area of childhood cancer.

So this year we are doing it again. This year (for reasons I won't go into, but which have significance for a number of people involved in the decision) we have settled on MS Australia. It is a great cause & one which I am delighted to support - and if anyone else wants to contribute to this organisation you will find their details at www.msaustralia.org.au

I am looking forward to the Christmas break which I will be spending with some members of my family (whilst also thinking of and missing some others).

I hope you all have an enjoyable and hopfully special Christmas.

Xero Wish List #6

Tue, 29 Nov 2011 20:39:00 GMT

I have been a bit distracted this week with a couple of large new clients coming on board, so only now getting back to my wish list.

My next wish list item is really quite minor, and is driven not so much by the time saving (although that does add up) but by the consistency it gives to your accounts. With consistent data going into your accounts you can generate meaningful information out of your accounts – and meaningful information gives you a critical advantage over your competitors.

One of the great features of Xero is that you can give your suppliers a “Xero key” so that their invoices to you can push straight into your Xero database, no need to rekey them. They come in as draft so that you get to review and approve them (of course), but one thing is missing – the General Ledger code to allocate the expense to. This is very often (although not always) the same code for any given supplier, so wouldn’t it be good if when I provide my supplier my Xero key I can also attach to it a default GL code? When the invoice reads into my Xero file it is pre-coded, and of course if I do want to change it I can do so prior to approving the invoice.

Xero Wish List #5

Thu, 24 Nov 2011 04:03:00 GMT

Budgets & Forecasts

The budgeting module in Xero is easy to use and has some great time saving features – like that you can automatically copy data from one period to another, or that you can do so adjusting the amount (either by a percentage or a fixed amount). Nice!

But there are some areas this could really be improved. At present a budget can only be set up at a GL level. Being able to create budgets at a tracking code level (where the sum of the tracking codes then automatically creates the GL budget) would be a great feature. This would be especially useful for the many Not for Profit clients we work with (although I can think of lots of other clients who would benefit from this also).

It would also be great if a budget could be imported from Excel (hands up who doesn’t use Excel when creating a budget)! I know Xero have on the drawing board the ability to “round trip” your budget – to export your current budget from Xero to Excel, to edit in Excel and then import back into Xero.

As this is a wish list (so I can wish away) I would also love to see multiple budgets (or forecasts). Again thinking mainly of not for profits, where we frequently have to create a budget (that needs to be held as is for the whole year), but then also to set up and report against a forecast.

And finally enhancements to the integration with some of the add-on report writers. At present we use a combination of add on reporting tools for reporting and forecasting to various clients. Spotlight Reporting is a good tool for both board reporting and forecasting, and Calxa is great creating budget plus a wide range of management reports. But both of these are hampered by the Xero API not allowing (as yet) access to the GL by tracking codes, so we can only report / budget / forecast at the GL level, not by tracking code.

Would you make use of any of this? Do you run a Not for Profit that needs to report at a more detailed level (acquitting funding, or reporting by program)? Please leave your comments below.

New Xero Release

Wed, 23 Nov 2011 01:26:00 GMT

I had intended to continue my “Xero wish list” posts all week (and probably next week too) but in this post I am going to write a few thoughts on today’s new release from Xero – it includes a lot of new features (some of which were also on my wish list).

Over Payments & Prepayments

This was high on my wish list! Until now users have needed to use a manual solution for over or pre payments. For example the customer owes you $300 but pays you $400 or they pay you a deposit for work you have yet to invoice. In both cases the solutions involved crediting the payment to a balance sheet account (which you needed to keep reconciled) and then double handling the payment once the invoice was created, or to pay a refund.

Now you can enter the payment (as either an over payment or a prepayment, and if you are not sure which to use please get in touch), then when the invoice is raised Xero will prompt you to allocate the payment (or you can arrange a refund).

All of this works on the supplier side also, for example if you need to make a payment as a deposit but haven’t yet received the invoice.

Grid layout on send / receive money

Whilst this is a minor enhancement it does make data entry of spend / receive money transactions easier especially when they have to be split over multiple lines.

Wish List!

But that then brings me to a wish list item that I was going to put up next week – being able to attach documents to spend money. When a supplier invoice is entered to Xero the user can attach a PDF (or various other file formats) to the transaction, saving the supporting document in the Xero database. But you can’t do this with a spend money transaction, which is how many smaller businesses enter their payments to suppliers.

Would you like to be able to attach documents to spend money transactions? It seems to me that this is a feature lots of smaller businesses could use.

Duplicate AP Invoice Check

Simple, but nice – enter a supplier name and their invoice number, if it has been entered before you’ll get a warning. This will help you to minimise the risk of duplicated payments to suppliers.

Lots more besides

There are a whole bunch of other new features released I’m not going to list them all here as I wanted to keep this post brief, plus you can read these at on the Xero blog at http://help.xero.com/#Changes_23November2011

Xero Wish List #4

Fri, 18 Nov 2011 03:50:00 GMT

Customer Contacts

I love the way a contact in Xero is just a contact, not specifically a customer or a supplier – so you don’t need to set the same contact up twice if you both sell to them and buy from them.

But the fact that you can’t have multiple contacts (people) on the contact (customer or supplier) is a pain. What about when you want to have the contact’s accounts department and the person who contracts your services. Or what about when you sell to a large organisation and want to have each of their offices set up as a delivery address.

Related to this is the fact that the contact (customer / supplier) does not currently have a code, just a name. This makes it very easy to use but also creates some problems – like if you have multiple contacts with the same name you cannot set them up using just their name. This can also cause problems interfacing from other solutions if your customer changes their name.

So Xero, I would love to see Customers / Suppliers with (optionally) a code, then within each the ability to link to multiple contacts (which could be either delivery addresses or people).

Would you find this feature useful in your business?

Performance lessons from Sport

Sun, 20 Nov 2011 21:39:00 GMT

I wrote an article some time ago (published at www.flyingsolo.com.au) in which I looked at some of the issues around measuring business performance. In that article – almost as a throwaway introduction – I wrote:

“In other areas of life this [measuring] is taken for granted: think of how sportspeople obsess over their times run, heights jumped, runs scored and so on.”

I was reminded of this a few days ago when I went to see the movie “Moneyball” (which by the way is very enjoyable). The movie charts the story of the relatively poor (at least by the multi-million dollar standards of US sport) Oakland Athletics baseball team in 2002 as they adopted a new system for selecting players (Wikipedia has good artciles on both the movie and the “sabermetrics” system the Oakland A’s adopted).

Rather than relying on the “expertise” of club scouts, they turned to an analytical approach of assessing a series of skills – measures such as (and whilst I sort of get these measures I am sure they mean far more to fans of baseball) “walks”, “getting on base” & “avoiding strike outs”. From this analysis they picked up players who were undervalued (based on these statistics). For the record they got to the playoffs in 2002, although this article in not about the outcome but the process.

I have long been fascinated by the post-match analysis by sports people from a whole range of sports. Their emotional state (in crude terms happy / sad) is determined by the outcome (win / lose), but when they are asked to comment on the game they have just played they almost never mention the result. They talk about the things they can control, the things they are coached to do in the game. They talk about yards gained, sets completed or tackles made (rugby league), first serve percentages and unforced errors (tennis), fairways hit and putts taken (golf) and so on. Their focus is on the things they can control that – if done right – will lead to success. They focus on a similar range of measures to those used by the Oakland A's.

It seems to me that this is a lesson that the business world can usefully learn from sport. All too often when sport is discussed in a business context it is in terms of the result (winning or capturing territory) or about commitment (“taking one for the team”, going "that extra yard" and so on). But this misses the point that these are not what the sports people themselves discuss – whilst any (team) sportsperson will trot out the cliché of how the team result is more important than their performance, you know that come Monday morning when they debrief on the game with the coach they will be focusing on their personal contribution to the result.

In my own business I am developing a series of metrics to measure the indicators of performance that I can infulence. Website visits and enquiries from those visits, conversion rates on leads, client retention rates, turnaround times on questions from existing clients, meeting client expectations and so on. I don’t think all of these metrics are quite right – I’ll keep on working on this – but I do know that judging my staff based on the profit the business makes (the result) does not make sense. Even judging my own performance on the basis of profit doesn’t give me any insight as to why the business has done well or less well in any given period.

Instead I need to judge the team (and myself) on performance against those things we can control. If I can get that right I can continue to attract and convert new clients, to provide great service to (and hence retain) existing clients and to provide an interesting and rewarding environment for my staff to work in (hence enabling all of the above) – and if I manage to do all of that the results will follow.

What are the indicators of success in your business (other than the bottom line)? What do you measure to know if your business is performing well?

Xero Wish List #3

Fri, 18 Nov 2011 03:24:00 GMT

Enhanced Expenses Claims

Just one more wish list item in the area of “money going out” (for now at least) is to do with employee expense claims. Currently an expense claim is automatically flagged as payable to the person entering the claim, and it has to be paid individually (it cannot be included in an accounts payable batch).

Within Viridity the entire company has access to the expense claims function, myself and my team enter our expenses via iphone (and with Xero Touch we can upload receipts into Xero at the same time). You can see what a great feature this is in this video.

But some businesses want to have one person doing data entry of expense claims, or maybe the owner or a manager wants to get his/her PA to enter these.

So in my ideal world an expense claim can be entered on behalf of any employee, and then when it comes time to make a payment the expense claim should be visible in the list of accounts payable invoices and can be included in an ABA file.

Would these enhancements help you? Do you already use expense claims? Would you be more likely to do so with the changes above?

Xero Wish List #2

Wed, 16 Nov 2011 20:03:00 GMT

Purchase Ordering

Another one right out of the accountants manual! Whilst Xero will let you enter customer orders and convert these to invoices, you cannot do the same thing on the supplier side.

Most organisations that use purchase orders do so with inventory, and for those clients Viridity almost always recommends Unleashed which does support purchase orders. But we do have a number of clients that want to raise purchase orders on suppliers for services. This helps them control what they are purchasing, and get costs on projects and events (so frustrating to send out the final invoice to a client on a project and then get more supplier invoices in). It also speeds up the backoffice accounts payable - rather than having to manually key and code invoices, your bookkeeper can just check the invoice & if it is ok convert the order.

So please Xero can you give us purchase ordering? Would you use purchase orders in your business? Do you think this would be a good addition to what is already a great solution?

My Xero Wish List

Wed, 16 Nov 2011 09:21:00 GMT

I do so love the speed with which Xero releases new features. So far this year we’ve had a basic payroll (with a major upgrade now just a few months away), ability to save documents as PDFs live in the database, preparation of annual account, Xero Touch (awesome) and thousands of direct bank fees to name just a few.

Does that mean I’m satisfied? No of course not! I want more, I want more features in Xero, I want more features in the wonderful apps that integrate with Xero, I want better integrations. The good news is that lots of these are on the way.

I tried to write my top 5 wish list of new features, but a) I couldn’t stop at 5 & b) I ended up with a thousand words, which is pretty long for a blog post! So for the rest of this week and most of next I’ll put up a blog a day on new features I’d love to see in Xero. Feel free to agree or disagree, roar with approval, howl me down or simply add your own suggestions.

# 1 - Remittance Advises

Ok, so it’s not very sexy, it’s not one of those funky features that stretch the boundaries of what’s possible in the cloud. But gee, for simple value-add this feature is hard to beat.

Xero handles paying supplier invoices really well – you tick the invoices you want to pay, create an ABA file and upload that to your bank account and that’s it, your suppliers are paid (and when the payment reads in from the bank the following day it auto matches as a reconciled item on the bank account). But what if you need to tell your suppliers exactly which invoices you just paid? If you pay lots but not all open invoices, or if you part pay some of them this is a problem. There is a work around (printing a report and pasting it to an email to send to the supplier) but an elegant built in remittance advice would be so cool!

If you want to see what the current AP solution looks like take a look at this video.

If you are in favour of what the AP solution could look like leave me a comment - I'll feed these back to Xero in due course.

Staff updates at Viridity

Wed, 26 Oct 2011 02:00:00 GMT

The last few months have been so busy that I haven't had time to update all the changes to staff at Viridity. I am pleased to be able to write that we haven't had anyone leave the team, all the changes are about new staff or existing staff acquiring new skills.

Anastasia is the newest member of our team, she joined Viridity in August in a bookkeeping role. She has an undergrad degree from Moscow State University, and a Masters in Accounting from Charles Sturt university. In her 2 months with us she has proven very quick in picking up new skills - it is great to see her contributing to clients now, and knowing that she has the skills and ability to develop within Viridity beyond her current role.

Gaining experience within the team is Sushama who has now been with Viridity for 8 months. Sushama also has a Masters in Accounting. In addition to providing bookkeeping services to many of our clients, she has just completed her first Xero set up for a new client, and is continuing to learn new skills every day. Another employee who I am sure will continue to grow and develop within Viridity.

The two more senior staff in Viridity - Justine & Elizabeth - have both recently completed Xero certified consultant training. They both passed the certification test with flying colours, congratulations to both of them.

At Viridity we place a huge emphasis on training and development, it is one of the most important tools we have available in providing outstanding service to all of our clients. You will see ongoing updates on this topic in this blog.