Xero piles on the users but MYOB leads by a country mile

Daniel James for Business IT writes:  Xero has just released its results for the first half of financial 2014, and the rapid increase in Australian paying customers caught our eye.

 

Overall customer numbers rose 89% from 111,800 to 211,300. But Australia was the best performing market on this measure, shooting up 143% from 32,500 to 79,100.

 

It's interesting to put that into perspective. MYOB claims to serve 1.2 million businesses in Australia and New Zealand, excluding accounting practices. Xero's combined Australia and New Zealand customer tally is 164,600, though that's clearly growing as Xero gets more popular.

 

With new products arriving from Reckon (Reckon One is expected in November) and Intuit (the new QuickBooks Online is available later this month), new features being rolled out by Xero (like this great Small Business Guides page and new features like Online activity statements for Practice Manager) and MYOB rolling out a program for accountancy practices to move to their practice solutions to accredited cloud hosting providers - these products are improving at a rate of knots.