Mark September 2016 in your calendars. It was the month when Artificial Intelligence (AI) officially went mainstream in SMB accounting tech. This month saw #XeroCon South in Brisbane and the MYOB Partner Conference Roadshow across AuNZ, both raising the future of “coding free data entry”.
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The rules of Blogging state that positive articles get more Reads, Likes, Tweets and Shares than critiques (unless you’re Matt Barrie from Freelancer and hitting onto a meme that connects like his crack at the Sydney lock-out laws #NannyState).
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The accounting software conference season is upon us, with Xerocon, QB Connect, MYOB Partner Conference all hot on the heels of Sage Summit. Apart from the likes of Clayton and Wayne racking up even more frequent flyer miles and social media posts, what can we expect from these events? Much of the same I expect. I don’t see any major announcements being likely.
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Yesterday’s announcement of MYOB’s acquisition of ERP provider Greentree, won’t be the end of MYOB’s buying spree, according to their CFO Richard Moore. Moore, courtesy of Yolanda Redrup’s AFR article, states:
we do have a list of potential acquisition targets and we’ll keep reviewing that list in the coming months
This got me thinking, who else might be on that list? Based on what we know in the public arena, throw in some gut-feel and some muck-raking, here’s my guess at the MYOB shopping list:
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I had the pleasure of attending my first Xero AGM this morning. With the share price up 6.5% today, I wasn’t the only one who got swept up in the positive vision, confidence and passion that was presented!
Whilst there wasn’t a lot of new information above and beyond the already released Annual Results (which I wrote about in my subsequent article), I took a few tasty titbits away that I thought were interesting:
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At the start of 2016 I had a crack at being a futurist, by publishing 16 Predictions For 2016 for the #biztech / #accountingtech industries. Here’s my mid-year update with my current “gut-feel” probability of occurring in 2016, reviewing my predictions with the benefit of 6 months hindsight:
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In my role as an advisor to a number of app developers and service providers, I am regularly quizzed on the question of speeding up sales to SMBs.
“We have the best _________[insert product/service offering] on the market. Our existing SMB customers love us/it. Everyone we talk to loves it. But the challenge is getting new customers to act in a timely way, en masse… how do we speed up adoption?”.
In this article, I share my thoughts on how to compete effectively with Status Quo, as a key success factor in accelerating growth, particularly within the SMB space.
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This morning (Aussie time), Wednesday May 25, Intuit released their Q3 update to the NASDAQ. Acknowledging its a quarterly update, rather than full year results, it doesn’t say much, but there is some interesting commentary particularly in the conference call, rather than the Fact Sheet, that clearly lays out Intuit’s strategy for QBo into the future.
Just a note upfront: Intuit is a much bigger company than QuickBooks Online (QBo currently accounted for only 3% of revenue in the quarter OR $78m of the total quarterly revenue of $2,304m), but when looking at industry trends and for a comparison with Xero, this is my focus.
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I jumped off a plane last Thursday morning after an overnight flight back from Asia, turned on my phone and had throughout the day a flood of SMS; Emails; LinkedIn Inmails; Facebook Messenger messages; Tweets and voicemail messages all asking my opinion on Xero’s full year results.
At first it was – how awesome, some people want to know what I think – they’ve actually been reading my blog. 🙂
Then, wow, how awesome is the Xero brand?! People have so bought into the company and what they are doing that they care about stock market announcements – something most don’t concern themselves with in their day-to-day lives.
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This coming Thursday the 12th of May will see Xero release its Full Year results for 2015/16. As a shareholder and eager amateur commentator, I’m quite keen to see what they have to say.
Those of you that have read some of my previous articles (like 7 Xero Xero k and Xero+Q3=?), will know that I have raised concerns regarding Xero’s growth trajectory since the release of their Q3 cash flow report.
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