Here’s to Xero partners around the world

Johnny MacAvoy for Xero writes: While our main focus is in four key markets – New Zealand, Australia, the United Kingdom and United States – the rest of the Xero world covers well over 100 countries. We’re happy to report that this “Global” region is going gangbusters.

We have over 150 accounting partners (many of whom are shown in the map above) who are ready to help out business owners outside our four main regions. It’s important to have Xero Partners in-country so that local businesses have trusted advisors to turn to with their accounting and tax affairs, advisors that use Xero as their core accounting platform.

Some regions are showing notably strong organic growth; namely Canada, Singapore and South Africa, where we recently welcomed our first Global Gold Partner – Colin Timmis from Real Time Accounting. We also have Partners in other beautiful locations like Seychelles, Curacao and the Maldives – all places that in the name of equal and fair partner treatment may require Xero staff visits in the near future…

But I digress. Xero Global is being ramped up and kicks off this financial year in a great position with heaps of new partners on board and our core operations such as training and marketing in place and ready for action.

The flexibility to choose your own currency and create your own tax rates lies at the heart of our ability to grow outside of our main regions. This is in tandem with making sure most of our features are regionally agnostic. We continue to extend our reach to wider audiences, over greater distances and no one gets left behind.

We have Add-On Partners who also serve global customers, for those unique organisations that need a little bit of salt in their software setup. Whether it be CRM integration, advanced inventory or project management, we can help out by working alongside the applications they love to use. We’re constantly looking to make the business environment in our global regions more and more comfortable for partners and users alike. For instance, our recent integration with Checkeeper has enabled our global users access to cheque/check-printing functionality.
We’re also really interested in working with local payroll providers and want to fill this key gap; Singapore cloud payroll solutions, this one’s going out to you. There’s a real opportunity for local software providers to integrate with us to support our Xero users in areas like payroll and to piggyback each other’s regional growth.

Direct bank feeds, a feature we’ve all come to love and expect are not common practice in many countries. Through our Yodlee integration, we’ve been able to connect with over 300 global financial institutions, with plenty more in beta, to deliver bank statements directly to your Xero account and automate the way you handle your data. Where there is demand, we’ll look to make the connection. We’re always looking to support the main banks in a country growing in popularity so it’s worth getting in touch so we can add your bank to the list.

We’re seeing a lot of interest from outsourced accounting offices in regions like Malaysia, the Philippines, Pakistan and India. They are also engaging with our current partner channel and offering low-cost, outsourced solutions to them. This is a great example of how remote collaboration is simplified by leveraging the benefits that cloud solutions bring.

We now face the task of growing out our globally-targeted team and placing them strategically in our offices around the world so that we can cover the full range of time zones. I still find it amazing that we can reach the world with a few early mornings/late nights on Skype, all from New Zealand.

On this note, I’m happy to announce that we’ve recently welcomed our new Global Direct Account Manager Stephen Burgess, who resides in our UK office. He’ll be like our Xero missionary, spreading the good news to the masses.\