Xerocon 2024

Over the course of the two days, our staff heard from various Xero workers and developers, including the CEO Sukhinder Singh Cassidy, as well as other leading industry experts and guest speakers. One of the guest speakers who gave our staff some food for thought was Sam Conniff an expert in uncertainty and dedicated to helping people navigate change. Sam conducted a study with the audience at Xerocon on uncertainty and how it affects them. Through this experiment, our staff walked away with a greater understanding of fear, as well as some new tools to help them face uncertainty.

Our staff had a glam time at this year’s London Xerocon and have come back to the office feeling more inspired and updated on what Xero can offer our Xero users. While our outsourcing team work on developing and integrating these ideas, we wanted to share some of their key moments and takeaways from the conference.

Xero Payroll

Xero’s payroll feature has been around for a long time but was always one of the features Xero wished to develop into a more complex and competitive software.

Xero have now announced that their payroll feature is getting a major investment and upgrade over the next year. While some of these features are already live, there is still plenty more to come.

Key new features are:

• Working patterns - Xero now allows you to set up and allocate working patterns for staff that differ from the standard working week.
• Leave and holiday calculations - The payroll feature can also handle holiday calendars that do not coincide with the tax year. While also using working patterns to calculate accrued holiday.

Xero are investing their resources heavily into their payroll offering and is looking to release new features.

JAX is entering the chat....

AI has been an ever-growing topic recently as the technology advances and becomes more widely used. Now while there are some negative views on AI, Xero have embraced the use of the technology in many aspects of their software.

While Xero already uses AI to perform tasks like predicting bank reconciliation postings, they are about to take AI’s uses one step further and are currently Beta testing their AI chat bot, Just Ask Xero.

Just Ask Xero or as Xero are calling it – JAX. JAX allows users and advisors to ask the AI bot to perform tasks like raising or amending invoices or even gathering and collating information for you, all from within the JAX chat feature. You will also be able to chat to and instruct JAX through WhatsApp, meaning there is no need to log in to Xero.

Currently, this feature is in the testing stage with select Xero users, but you can rest assured that once we hear more from Xero we will pass on the updates.

Applications

Xerocon is also a great opportunity to get to know the apps that connect to Xero and add value to the data we input. Here are some of the application stands that our staff visited.

Dext

Stripe:

• This connects to Xero and allows you to take payments electronically via invoices and digital wallets. However they now offer a ‘Tap to Pay’ service that allows Android users to take contactless payment using their phone. This revolutionary technology eases the hassle of taking payments as you can now take payment on the go while at the client’s premises.

• Although this service is only currently available for Android issuers they are developing this for Apple users later this year.

• This feature is also going to be built into the Xero app allowing you to raise an invoice, take the payment

Carbon Footprint

One of the key topics that is becoming more of interest to businesses is their carbon footprint and what this looks like.

Xero gave a talk on how we can use a business’s bookkeeping data to analyse and generate their carbon footprint. This works via integrated apps that connect to Xero as well as working with your accountant. These apps use the data already captured in Xero to produce reports that show the carbon data businesses are looking for.

This is an area of accounting and advisory services that is becoming increasingly important to businesses, especially with the potential reporting requirements that businesses face as the UK moves towards being net zero. However, there is also potential upcoming legislation in Europe that could require UK businesses to provide their businesses carbon footprint in order to trade in the EU.

As such new apps and companies are now getting involved and investing in carbon accounting.

Xero Plans

Xero has also recently announced that they are changing their plans from this September in an aim to simplify their offerings. We will be in touch later on with more information on this.

Roundup

It’s safe to say that our staff thoroughly enjoyed their time at Xerocon 2024 with Forrester Boyd Partner, Matthew Priest stating,’ It was a great event. The improvements in technology look really exciting and something which will be a huge help to business owners!’