That means especially strengthening its accounting software.  “We need to close key gaps in core accounting in the U.S. and Canada,” Cassidy said during her keynote, but added, “We have made a tremendous amount of progress.”

It also means relying more on third party software developers for extending functionality. We will leverage our ecosystem,” Jolly said.

Xero has work especially hard on expanding the number of direct bank feeds, Jolly said. In the last 18 months, Xero has gone from offering 20 direct feeds to 700 and it intends to add hundreds more feeds over the next year, along with working with multiple aggregators. 

Xero is also making it easier to report bank feed disruptions. A beta test is enabling those who believe they have experienced a disruption by press a button within Xero. “We will investigate the disruption immediately,” she said.

In addition, it added bank reconciliation to a period feature which enables users to more easily identify discrepancies between bank statements and entries in Xero.

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Bob Scott

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Bob Scott has provided information to the tax and accounting community since 1991, first as technology editor of Accounting Today, and from 1997 through 2009 as editor of its sister publication, Accounting Technology. He is known throughout the industry for his depth of knowledge and for his high journalistic standards.  Scott has made frequent appearances as a speaker, moderator and panelist and events serving tax and accounting professionals. He  has a strong background in computer journalism as an editor with two former trade publications, Computer+Software News and MIS Week and spent several years with weekly and daily newspapers in Morris County New Jersey prior to that.  A graduate of Indiana University with a degree in journalism, Bob is a native of Madison, Ind