There has been a lot in the press about Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence replac­ing work­ers (it was even the focus of Doc­tor Who last week) and the accoun­tan­cy pro­fes­sion is appar­ent­ly first on the chop­ping block! Whilst the automa­tion of some of the more rou­tine tasks may strike fear in the hearts of some oth­er peo­ple in the pro­fes­sion I see it as a mas­sive oppor­tu­ni­ty — some­thing that was strength­ened fol­low­ing my vis­it to Xero­con last week where the theme was Human at Heart.

Yes, tech­nol­o­gy is mak­ing it eas­i­er to pro­duce accounts and keep on top of your records, but this should give us more time to work with our clients and add real val­ue as advi­sors. There also scope to advise which Apps and add ons will inte­grate best and every busi­ness needs sys­tems — Xero just makes it eas­i­er to imple­ment them.

With real time infor­ma­tion you can do pre year end tax plan­ning for the com­pa­ny and the direc­tors, you can noti­fy the direc­tors of their upcom­ing VAT and poten­tial cash­flow issues, you can help imple­ment cred­it con­trol, the list is end­less! So yes, whilst some of the more rou­tine tasks might be removed from the work­ing day there will still be a role for accoun­tants to play (the same scare­mon­ger­ing hap­pened when Sage was first intro­duced into the mar­ket place!).

One of the exam­ples used was dur­ing a great talk by Gerd Leon­hard, a futur­ist, who talked about if you looked at an aver­age record store they could hold 20,000 songs (based on the aver­age shop floor space, the num­ber of records that could be stored and the num­ber of songs per record). The intro­duc­tion of the iPod was one thing but now with stream­ing there are 40 mil­lion songs avail­able to you with Spo­ti­fy! The record stores may have gone but there are a lot of new jobs that nev­er exist­ed before at Spo­ti­fy includ­ing meme mak­ers, playlist mak­ers, social media man­agers etc etc. The rate of change in the last 20 years has been phe­nom­e­nal and it is only set to increase — Gerd argues that human­i­ty will change more in the next 30 years than it has in the last 300!

So back to Xero and the prod­uct itself. It already has the abil­i­ty to cater for a huge num­ber of small busi­ness­es and indus­tries but there were some new prod­uct announce­ments that will enhance this even fur­ther. I’m going to run through some of these fea­tures (new and old) and how they can help your busi­ness.

• First­ly a brand new user inter­face is com­ing which will make it even more intu­itive and eas­i­er to nav­i­gate.
• Sales is get­ting a makeover as well to make it eas­i­er to invoice from any­where.
• Sales already has a basic cred­it con­trol func­tion and auto­mat­ic chasers, help­ing you get paid faster.
• Xero already has basic inven­to­ry giv­ing you the abil­i­ty to track your stock if need­ed
• You can cre­ate pur­chase orders and con­vert them to invoic­es.
• Email to bills is a great new fea­ture, and with the updates to projects you can assign expens­es to a project / cus­tomer to be recharged at a lat­er date.
• Xero have also acquired Hub­Doc which can fetch your invoic­es from your sup­pli­ers — nPow­er, Voda­fone etc — and process them direct­ly into Xero.
• With both email to bills and Hub­doc your invoice is attached to the account­ing record, mak­ing it eas­i­er to trace and remov­ing the need for hold­ing onto paper records for 7 years and acquir­ing lots and lots of fil­ing!
• Projects is con­tin­u­al­ly improv­ing and new reports are avail­able to track your work in progress / unbilled time (hope­ful­ly they’ve sort­ed the issue that you could only run a report based on the date the time was entered rather than the date the work was done!)
• Xero expens­es has had a major upgrade with fur­ther improve­ments to come — includ­ing mileage (which accounts for 60% of all expense claims).
• Any bills allo­cat­ed to fixed assets allows you to cre­ate your fixed asset reg­is­ter and set the depre­ci­a­tion rate to process auto­mat­i­cal­ly.
• Xero pay­roll is con­stant­ly improv­ing and process­es the pay­roll jour­nal direct­ly in to your accounts and links with some of the pen­sion providers for auto enrol­ment.
• The VAT returns are get­ting an over­haul and with MTD for VAT Xero are ful­ly com­pli­ant with HMRC.
• In addi­tion to this, CIS fil­ing with HMRC is also com­ing.
• The mobile App is con­tin­u­al­ly evolv­ing and you can now get a snap­shot of your busi­ness prof­its in your pock­et!
• Xero’s lat­est acqui­si­tion (InstaFile) allows you to pre­pare your accounts and cor­po­ra­tion tax in the prod­uct now (admit­ted­ly this is prob­a­bly more excit­ing for bor­ing accoun­tants like me!).
• Find & Recode is an accoun­tants favourite — if some­thing has been allo­cat­ed to the wrong code all the trans­ac­tions can be updat­ed in a bulk change rather than amend­ing each trans­ac­tions indi­vid­u­al­ly — a huge time­saver and allow­ing you to cre­ate more rel­e­vant report­ing.
• The report­ing in Xero is also improv­ing and has changed dra­mat­i­cal­ly since we start­ed using it more than 5 years ago. You can now edit reports, change the lay­out, add in com­par­a­tives and vari­ances and for­mu­la — almost any­thing you want.
• And last (for this roundup — there are a whole host of oth­er fea­tures), but not least, Xero bank feeds have always been great. With the bank rec­on­cil­i­a­tion func­tion these have been the real dif­fer­en­tia­tors, in my mind, between oth­er cloud prod­ucts and with the new bank feed API and open bank­ing this is only set to get bet­ter.

So whilst this is very excit­ing for us as a firm and where it can take us (clos­er work­ing rela­tion­ships with our clients, even more proac­tive advice etc) it is also excit­ing for busi­ness own­ers who can reduce their admin time and have more time to work ON their busi­ness­es. Not only that but they can make near real time deci­sions that can influ­ence change and impact the growth of their busi­ness. As Char­lie Sheen once said — What’s not to love?