Xero set to cash in on big new features

David Swan for ITWire writes: New Zealand-based cloud accounting firm Xero, which recently hit a monthly aggregate payroll of $1 billion for the first time, has announced a number of new features that should make its disruptive offering even more compelling.

The headline feature, first announced at Xerocon in Sydney last month, is batch deposits.

"For those of you dealing with customers paying by check/cheque or paying multiple invoices at once, this feature will be a huge time saver," wrote Andrew Tokeley, Xero Product Manager.

"Batch deposit is the accounts receivable equivalent to batch payments. From the Sales dashboard, simply select the invoices to be paid and press the ‘Deposit’ button.

"Once you’ve confirmed the batch, payments (or part payments, if you’ve adjusted the amounts) will be created for the selected invoices – no more need to drill into each individual invoice (yes!)."

Xero also today added a feature allowing for deposit slips, meaning if your batch deposit was created from a number of checks/cheques you can choose to print a simple deposit slip to take to the bank.

A third feature was Receipts (invoice payments), which now allows Xero users to send receipts to customers for their invoice payments. Xero said these can be initiated from a batch deposit, where a separate email for each unique customer will be created, or from any single payment record.

"Xero will attach a copy of the receipt to each receipt email. Receipt documents can have their layout edited – so you can easily apply your branding. You can also customise the standard text used for the email body from the email settings," the blog post reads.

"Note that we don’t yet support sending receipts on cash (Receive Money) transactions – this is something we’re considering for a future release."

Other new features include faster spend/receive transactions, new inventory item fields, CSV invoice exporting and the authorize.Net eCheck support.

The company said back in July it is likely to list in the US early in 2015 on the back of strong growth in the cloud market and its announcement that annual revenues have now reached over US100 million.

For more information on the new features check out the blog post on Xero's website.