Xero is running a series of online seminars to explain how they are rolling out changes to sope with the imminent increase in the NZ GST rate.

Xero GST Update Webinar – Business Owners

Great opportunity to see how it will work and to ask questions

Good article on how to manually (rather than using a module) add Google Analytics script to your Joomla template.

Google Joomla

In the article they suggest pasting the Google script just before the closing body html tag. The Google Analytics site actually says to paste the script just before the closing head tag.

Had an interesting meeting recently with a guy who helps people with succession strategies and business exits. He has an interesting approach – one of their strategies involves looking for potential buyers with strong business skills to take an initial interest in the business (potentially partially funded by the vendor) with an agreement in place for the remainder of the business to be sold to the buyer over a period of time, say 1-3 years. By reducing the emphasis on upfront investment the vendor is exposed to a greater pool of candidates who may bring more to the party than just cash. This approach recognises that it is in the interests of customers, suppliers, staff and the vendor that any business sale is handled professionally and that ultimately the business continues to prosper.

If you want multi currency, Xero will cost you $64 per month plus GST. If you can live without multi currency then next price down is $49 per month and then $29 per month if you can work within certain volume limits.

Xero Pricing Plans

There are some other alternatives within the Xero world that may also work for you – these are the Xero Partner Edition plans. These plans are more focussed on a situation where your accountant does a lot of your regular accounting work for you – in the right circumstances these plans can provide excellent value for money. If you would like more info, just give us a call or Contact Us.

Well worth a look if you have anything other than the most basic inventory management requirements. Unleashed offers a stock management system that can integrate with Xero.

Click on video below for an introduction.

We see this approach of connecting up selected technology providers to build a solution that works for your business as the future. Bear in mind there is some upfront pain, as with any new system and there is an ongoing monthly cost. Over time we would expect to see some “special offers” in the market as software providers partner up to offer better value.

Little bit surprised to see that as part of the monthly $25 sub for LiveAccounts you only get 100 free transactions fed through from linked bank accounts. After that it costs 11 cents per transaction. I suppose 100 is quite a lot but strange that Xero can manage to provide unlimited (as far as I know) number of feed transactions via its bank feeds.

Hmmm – not sure about all of this – I don’t think one single approach can be expected to deal with all the different cultural and personality challenges that customer service has to deal with – however there are definitely some good ideas here. Having one or two key phrases up your sleeve can really help cool an angry customer and open the way toward a successful resolution.

Great article on the crucial importance of small business in the New Zealand economy…

SME’s

Of 477,000 total NZ businesses, only 228 businesses have more than 500 employees. Self employed people make up more than 10% of the workforce.

It was only a few years ago that the Software as a Service model was considered too slow, too expensive and too scary to represent a viable opportunity for the SME market. How times have changed!

The next step in extracting value from Saas solutions is in integrating various best of breed solutions together at a business level to provide an end-to-end, customised solution. Huge steps have been taken in this direction with amazing tools now available to connect the dots.

In an NZ sense I would say these solutions tend to be beyond the reach of an average SME – but as with the underlying applications, prices are only heading one way – down – and fast. In addition, most vendors are also making API’s available to allow easy connection to nominated partners and in many cases this will be sufficient for many small businesses.

Boomi is a big US player in this market – following is a recent article discussing some of their approaches to integration. It is a matter of time until we can deliver services of this nature at a price that makes sense for the average NZ business.