Thursday, October 9, 2014

In a marked heating up of the battle currently being waged between small business accounting software providers MYOB and Xero, MYOB chief Tim Reed has questioned Xero’s latest numbers and planted a stake in the ground when it comes to any claim by his Kiwi upstart rival to market leadership.

Peter Dinham for ITWire.com writes: New Zealand-based Xero is pulling out all stops to build its Australian business and challenge the market dominance of the 800 pound gorilla MYOB.

But according to MYOB boss Reed, Xero’s claimed numbers do not say anything about the type of customers the company has compared to the MYOB customer base, with a significant portion simply being non-paying customers of accountants using Xero.

Xero’s announcement today that it has doubled its Australian customer numbers over the past 12 months, with 158,000 Aussie customers (up from 79,000 one year ago) now using its online accounting platform, appears to show that it may be starting to make some inroads into the MYOB marketshare.

Xero says today its total customer numbers for the combined Australia and New Zealand market have now topped 277,000 and that a recent survey of its new customers who had joined the software since September 2013 found 67% of those who responded had switched from a “rival accounting software provider”.

Of course, that rival software provider is MYOB which just last month said it had “surpassed a record client milestone” of 100,000 online subscribers, and “further cementing its leadership in cloud accounting”.

Commenting on Xero’s numbers, Tim Reed says “It’s important to differentiate between Xero’s clients that are on simple ledgers through accountants (practice ledgers) and those that are similar offerings to our do-it-yourself cloud solutions (business ledgers)”.

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