The world is changing. The pace of this change is increasing every year so it's important as a small business you are keeping up with this change. The way we all consume is changing. From Uber, to Netflix, to AirBnB to Facebook to Google telling you it's going to take 20 min for you to travel home, we are all changing the way we consume information. 

Robots by 2035 will outnumber humans globally. By 2018 there will be 35 million personal service robots. We now talk to Siri, Alexa is learning to answer our questions and the watch that was once used to tell time only can now give us directions! 

1 billion messages pass between businesses and people on Facebook messenger every single month. Yep that is 1 billion. 

With all the excitement and changes to our behaviour it's awesome to see Xero working on some cool new features. 

Chatbots

Imagine being able to press a button on your phone and ask Siri how much money you have in your bank account. Or having a notification pop up on your watch to say overnight you were paid $12k, there are still 3 people who have overdue invoices. 

You type in the chatbot Send Reminders and everyone with an outstanding invoice is sent a reminder. 

This is the future Xero are working on. This means you will easily be able to do so much more on the go without having to be at your computer. The exciting part is this is just the beginning. The future with bots will be taping your watch and saying Bruce (i think Bruce is a cool robot name!) I'm just finishing up at Alan's house. Can you please invoice him 5 hours for cleaning today. Bruce will Invoice Alan and you won't have to do a thing. 

Now that's exciting! 

Machine Learning + Robotics + AI

The future is all about machine learning. Xero are working on auto reconciling some transactions, knowing when the Optus bill arrives it should be allocated to Telephone expense and picking up who has paid you when. At some point in the future the data entry, the matching and reconciling in Xero will be 99% automated. 

The less time we have to spend on the data entry side of things the more time we have to learn and react to our data and work on the business. 

Contacts

While chatbots and machine learning are really cool there are a few features that will be released in the next few months that are great for small businesses. 

The 1st is an update to contacts. Xero are working closely with Vida to pull information from a central business directory. You will type in the name and or ABN of a business and the addresses + phone numbers etc will automatically pull into Xero. You will then be able to click on the contact and get a snapshot of the credit rating of that customer and supplier! Not getting paid is one of the riskiest parts of being a small business owner so to know the rating of your customer before you do any work for them will be really helpful. 

Early Payment Discounts

Another new release feature will be Early Payment Discounts. This is great to encourage people to pay on time and will save a tonne of time when reconciling and calculating the correct amount for people to pay. 

Mobile : Quotes + Invoices

With more and more being done on the go it's great to see Xero dedicating some resources to make quoting and invoicing on the go much easier. The mobile app will have a new facelift which will make it much easier to quote and invoice. 

BPay + Paypal

Xero will be introducing BPay as an option for your clients to pay you. This is great news. People love choice, and everyone likes getting paid on time. The easier you make it for your clients to pay you, the quicker you will get paid. 

There are new improvements to PayPal integration as well. This will help ease the pain of the reconciliation process ensuring the fees charged are allocated to the correct account and invoices marked as paid. 

Add-Ons

As always a huge highlight of Xerocon is spending time with the add-on partners. We love Xero but accounting software doesn't run your business. It's POS, Retail, Rostering, Time Tracking, CRM, Job Management etc that really run a small business. 

There are now over 500 apps in the Xero marketplace! This is amazing news for small businesses. You can find an app that really helps provide you the data to make smart decisions as well as #banadmin. With over 500 apps it can certainly be a confusing place! 

We have a dedicated Ninja at Growthwise (Beau) to help our clients find and implement the best apps for their business, so don't be afraid to get in touch :)