As Sans Drinks expanded its business and launched new products, it needed to replace its existing manual and disconnected systems including Xero and Dear Inventory to meet demand.

To address inefficiencies, Sans Drinks selected NetSuite.

“NetSuite has helped us increase efficiencies by automating manual processes and has also enabled us to gain the insights we need through robust and customisable reporting capabilities that give us confidence in the accuracy of our financials to make more informed decisions,” said Sans Drinks founder Irene Falcone.

Sans Drinks will have a single business platform to manage its operations and centralise its data by using NetSuite.

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The insights NetSuite provides will give Sans Drinks a real-time view into the health of its business, enable it to identify areas for new product developments, and help guide more informed decisions about its traditional retail and distribution channels.

In addition, NetSuite will help Sans Drinks build its online retail store to accommodate 90% of its expected $10 million in sales this year with all data being integrated and managed within NetSuite.

“Our mission has always been to help entrepreneurs build successful businesses and with NetSuite, Sans Drinks is in a strong position to continue its success and deliver on its ultimate mission of providing consumers with healthy drink choices,” said Oracle NetSuite general manager ANZ Jason Toshack.

Sans Drinks’ expansion plans include opening the business to franchisees this year. With NetSuite, Sans Drinks will be able to establish new franchises, provide franchisees with business management capabilities, and continue to offer a centralised view of the overall business.

Founded in 2020, Sans Drinks is focused on the alcohol-free drinks market. In addition to selling and distributing non-alcoholic beers, wines and spirits around Australia, the business has also launched its own brand product range.

Xero has offered flexible working for more than a decade, according to the company, and switched to fully remote work during COVID-19 lockdowns.

Over the last 18 months it has been developing "a policy that's clear, designed for the future and ensures there are no surprise catches or fine print."

The company is actively recruiting, and new and existing employees in a variety of disciplines including engineering, data science and design will be able to choose to work remotely, in an office, or in a hybrid manner.

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The new policy is being rolled out progressively, starting with the product and technology teams in Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the UK. It will then be extended to the US, and to other roles.

Current vacancies allowing remote work can be seen here.

Significantly, the new policy isn't set in stone, and Xero intends to adjust it to meet the evolving needs of the remote workforce.

"We've always been huge advocates of flexible work at Xero," said Xero chief people officer Nicole Reid.

"We know we get the best out of people when we empower them to work how they like and choose their own career adventure. We've put a lot of effort and research into ensuring we're creating policies that make a difference to our people.

"Our new program is designed to support the Xeros of today and the future so we can support every type of worker, from wherever they are.

"We've been quite particular about creating a policy that is clear and easy to understand. We've taken on research and feedback from our employees, and through our Future of Work group, developed a policy that is clear and upfront about what employees can, and can't expect, without the fine print."

Image: Trendz 4 Friend via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

The growing program integrates companies within the fintech ecosystem and networks them with its key players.

Amazon Web Services (AWS), Mastercard, EY, Facebook, Google, eftpos, Idemia, Regional Australia Bank, RSM Australia, and the Newcastle Permanent Building Society are members.

“We look forward to working with Xero to reinforce the company’s strong connections in the Australian fintech industry,” FinTech Australia CEO Rebecca Schot-Guppy said.

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“Having welcomed Xero as a partner is yet another indicator of the strong demand for collaboration with Australia’s booming fintech sector, reinforcing its position as a driver of overall economic growth,” she adds.

“We look forward to working with FinTech Australia to drive greater visibility of the innovation being led by fintechs in Australia, and to coordinate with others on technology related policy, concludes Xero director of partnerships APAC Ian Boyd. “The recent Intersekt conference was a key example of the vibrant industry engagement FinTech Australia is fostering.”

What interested me the most was how FinancialForce is symptomatic of an important evolution in the industry’s widely used class of enterprise software.

First, a bit of history. It’s now 30 years since the ERP revolution of the early 1990s, when an upstart German company called SAP virtually invented a whole new class of software.

ERP, which stands for enterprise resource planning, is the software at the core of any business. The term has come to include integrated financial applications such as accounts payable and receivable and a general ledger, and their integration with inventory and other applications like manufacturing or supply chain management, depending on the industry sector.

SAP introduced the concept of integration – bringing all these applications together into one suite – and in the process transformed the enterprise software industry in the 1990s.

Since then ERP has undergone many changes. After SAP a host of integrated ERP packages arrived on the market, but by the end of the decade vicious competition and rampant rationalisation saw most of them out of business or acquired. The top end of the market was dominated by SAP, which is still a major vendor today, and Oracle, which moved beyond databases to the application software market.

The buzzword back then was client/server software, a fancy word for mainframes and PCs sharing data. ERP was the ideal client/server application.

With the rise of the Internet in the late 1990s and into the new century ERP evolved further. There was a slow movement to the cloud, but many users resisted. In the early years cloud had performance issues and there were doubts about security. ERP is the most mission-critical of applications, and there was a strong feeling in the user community that it was one application that should remain in-house.

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That is now changing. Performance and security doubts about cloud processing are dissipating. Many organisations are now moving core applications, including ERP, to the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model. A new breed of SaaS ERP vendors has emerged, and traditional vendors are offering cloud-based versions of the software – slowly and reluctantly in many cases.

Now FinancialForce is at the vanguard of another major change in the long evolution of ERP software. It is a SaaS based ERP package built on top of widely used CRM (customer relationship management) software Salesforce.com.

Salesforce was the first widely used SaaS package, launched at the end of the dot.com boom back in 1999. It was founded by ex-Oracle executive Marc Benioff, who is still its CEO today, with Oracle’s Larry Ellison an important early investor.

Salesforce pretty well pioneered the concept of Software-as-a-Service. In the two decades since it has become one of the largest and most successful software companies in the world, and has built an ecosystem called Force.com which enables other vendors to build applications that tie in with its CRM software.

This is the key to the evolution I’m talking about. Traditional ERP packages are based on invoices and inventory and receivables and payables. FinancialForce has built an ERP package that centres around customer information, which is the focus of the Salesforce.com platform.

It has become fashionable now for all software vendors to say their focus is on the customer. It’s an easy thing to say, but most are constrained by the underlying architecture of their product. This is particularly true of ERP, which is structured around transaction processing. Customer information is secondary data.

In the Salesforce.com ecosystem customer information is the primary data, with transactional and other information an adjunct to it. A CRM based ERP system such as FinancialForce is customer based by design. It represents the latest phase in the long evolution of ERP.

I’ve long been a student of ERP. I even once wrote a White Paper on the history of the technology. I’m convinced the customer centric focus of FinancialForce really does represent a new type of ERP. All this became apparent to me as I talked to CEO Tod Nielsen.

He was in Australia for the annual Salesforce.com Australian conference, usually one of Australia’s largest IT events, which was turned into an ‘online only’ event because of the Coronavirus scare. “I’m here already,” he told iTWire, “so now I can spend more time with our local people and our customers.”

He told me that FinancialForce has been around for ten years, but the message about customer centricity is only now really starting to resonate, since the release of its ERP software in 2014.

Before that the company specialised in Professional Services Automation (PSA), software for companies whose revenues come mostly from billable hours. “Now we offer full ERP, but still with the focus on how we interact with the customer.”

Nielsen joined the company three years ago from Salesforce to spearhead the growth into ERP. The company still remains closely associated with Salesforce, which was one of its original investors. “We’ve got lots of ex-Salesforce people – we’re very much part of the ecosystem. We were only the third company to build our software on the Salesforce platform – now there are nearly 6000.”

FinancialForce set up in Australia in 2015 and now has 30 local staff and 85 customers. Sydney is Asia-Pacific headquarters, under managing director Simon Peterson. It sells directly in Australia and through reseller and systems integrator Agilyx, which has become a significant partner in Australia and Asia.

“We are moving much more strongly into the enterprise space,” Nielsen told me. ”Our target market is organisations that have already implemented Salesforce. These are usually service-oriented businesses where our customer centric approach works best.”

When I interviewed Neilsen one of the company’s major new Australian customers was in the room. Novotech is a fast-growing contract research organisation which undertakes clinical trials for drug companies. It has recently signed with FinancialForce and is implementing a major application across its global operations. It is still based in Australia, with significant operations in Asia and North America.

Brad Campbell is Novotech’s CFO and is driving the FinancialForce implementation. “We’re growing very quickly and we’ve long been a big Salesforce user,” Campbell explained. “We undertook a substantial due diligence process and were happy that FinancialForce can do the job for us.

“We don’t want a front office and a back office – we just want one office. FinancialForce Will integrate all our operations and enable us to implement best practice across our organisation. It was important to us that it be cloud-based, secure, and customer oriented. That’s the way our business works.”

It is unusual for a vendor to expose a customer to the press at such an early stage of implementation. It is a strong endorsement. Novotech is one of Australia’s biotech success stories, acquired two years ago by US venture capital group TPG (no relation to the telco with the same initials) for an undisclosed figure believed to be in excess of $300 million.

FinancialForce has a number of other Australian companies in its sights. The ERP market continues to evolve, with a high degree of churn as organisations in many sectors look for competitive advantage. It’s growth rate indicates that, for many organisations, it might be the right type of ERP at the right time.

And it helps to be on the right side of history.

The new Xero features and updates will appeal variously to business users or their accountants and bookkeepers.

Among these changes:

● The invoicing function has been completely rebuilt, according to vice-president of products and alliances Herman Man. It follows Material design principles, and applies machine learning to simplify and accelerate the process by automatically completing most of the invoice based on previous entries, so users don’t have to enter common inventory items or accounting codes. The updated invoicing module will be available by the end of the year.

{loadposition stephen08}● Xero's email-to-bills feature is being expanded to extract and automatically populate selected details (including supplier, amount, due date, and reference) from any emailed PDF bill into Xero, reducing the data entry load. Previously this feature only worked with bills received from other Xero users. The image of the bill and the generated transaction are displayed side by side, giving the user an opportunity to check the details and enter any fields that are not currently recognised, such as item descriptions.

In early testing, this capability reduced average bill entry time by 25%, saving each business 2.6 hours a month.

The improved email-to-bills feature is currently in beta, and should be available to Australian users in November.

● Xero's mobile apps will benefit from 20 major improvements, including the ability to manage bills and invoices, and the display of profit, income and expenditure figures on the dashboard.

● Activity statements can now be lodged with the ATO directly from Xero. This new capability is being phased in, starting with Xero partners who attended Xerocon, followed by other partner practices, then clients invited by partners, and finally users in general. A new "Submit BAS" user permission has been added to support this function.

The company says bringing BAS lodgement inside Xero can reduce lodgement times from an average of 1.4 hours to less than just minutes each month or quarter. Businesses can lodge their own returns, or leave it to their advisors.

The feature is available at no extra charge to Australian Xero subscribers who have BAS.

"Government compliance is an important part of any business but it shouldn’t be a source of pain and frustration," said Xero Australia managing director Trent Innes.

"By bringing the ability to lodge statements and payroll reports directly into the Xero platform, we can empower our partners and their clients to meet their obligations quickly, across a single ledger that gives them one source of truth for all their payroll, tax and financial information."

● ETP processing with automatic lodgement to the ATO is now live. This has been the "most requested feature," according to national partner director Rob Stone.

● Bank payments. A new API — which will initially be used by National Australia Bank — makes it possible to trigger a payment from within Xero rather than exporting and uploading a transaction list. This approach is simpler, more secure and more scalable, observed Man. It will also allow users to check the status of payments. This feature will be available in early 2019.

Xero vice-president of products and alliances Herman Man.

● Bank feed API. Previously, bank feeds have been implemented by Xero. The company will continue to "build to the banks," said Man, but the new API will allow banks to build to Xero. Man told iTWire that he expects this feature will mostly be used by small banks (especially in the US, where there are more than 8000 banks) and by fintechs.

● Automated bank rules. Xero already supports bank rules, but users will be given the option of having them automatically applied. This feature will go into beta later this year,

● Enhancements to Xero Projects - now available to Australian users - allows users to share timesheet information with the payroll functionality, saving time and ensuring consistency.

● Xero Payroll now allows the bulk upload of employee information from files such as spreadsheets, providing a "really easy, really simple interface," according to Man.

Starting on 11 September, payroll functions will require users to sign in using two-step authentication for greater security.

● Single Touch Payroll – Xero started the rollout of STP support to selected customers on 1 July, with a deferral to 31 December. The company haas been "delighted" with the stability of its own and the ATO's systems, said Stone, and so the feature is now available to all clients.

"Single Touch Payroll is a major leap ahead in the move to a digital system of record for small businesses, making it more efficient for business owners and advisors to work from a single ledger, said Innes.

"We're making it easier for businesses to meet their compliance requirements and build a better digital infrastructure that helps create a frictionless economy where small businesses can thrive."

● A new 'files required' feature will help advisors identify and collect client documents, reducing the time spent chasing information.

● The Xero app marketplace provides a new way for advisors to get curated app recommendations for their clients.

"More than a decade ago, we began building a cloud accounting platform that would revolutionise how small businesses, accountants and bookkeepers run their operations. The new products and features announced at Xerocon Brisbane show the next stage of our growth: moving from an counting software provider into a true small business platform that helps business owners save time, gain control, and focus on growing," said CEO Steve Vamos.

"These tools will also help our champion accountants and bookkeepers grow their practices, making it easier and more efficient to serve their clients, and helping them add value in entirely new ways."

Xero now has nearly 1.4 million users in 180 countries. The overwhelming majority are in Australia, New Zealand, the UK and the US.

The writer attended Xerocon as a guest of the company.

UK-based GoCardless provides a convenient way for small businesses to receive payments from their customers via direct debit.

The Xero integration with GoCardless triggers the debit on the due date of an invoice, eliminating the need to chase unpaid invoices and improving the accuracy of cashflow forecasting.

The invoice is automatically marked as paid within Xero.

According to Xero, connecting a user's GoCardless and Xero accounts is a simple process, with no additional configuration.

{loadposition stephen08}"Direct debit payments in Australia have traditionally only been available for major companies who can afford the necessary complex systems and processes," said Xero Australia financial industry director Ian Boyd.

"By working with GoCardless and making more payment options available, we are helping small business to be as efficient and effective as big business. The aim is to spend less time chasing payments and to get paid faster. This then gives small business owners more time to focus on things that matter to them, like growing the business."

The two companies have been working together in the UK. Eighty percent of small businesses surveyed there reported reductions in payment times and improvements in cash flow as a result of accepting payments through the integration.

"GoCardless is democratising direct debit for small businesses. We have modernised the process with innovative technology partners such as Xero and removed the stress and complexity," said GoCardless founder and chief executive Hiroki Takeuchi.

"We're delighted to extend our existing successful partnership beyond the UK and help small businesses take control of payments to ensure they get paid on time, every time."

GoCardless charges a 1% transaction fee, with a minimum of 35c and a maximum of $3.50.

Its Plus plan costs an extra $100 per month, but has the advantage of displaying the merchant's name in customers' bank statements.

As previously reported, the idea is to make it easier for educational institutions to train accounting and bookkeeping students on contemporary accounting software, as firms have been complaining that recruits have only been exposed to outdated systems.

This will allow participating institutions to provide the profession with new entrants — both those at the start of their careers and older workers who have decided to reskill — who have up-to-date skills.

A total of 370,000 businesses are started in Australia and New Zealand each year, said Xero founder and chief executive Rod Drury, so there is a clear demand for skilling, reskilling and upskilling.

{loadposition stephen08}The platform is (naturally) based on the Xero cloud accounting system, and will be kept in step with that product while remaining completely separate from the production system, said Xero Australia managing director Trent Innes (pictured). Xero is able to do this thanks to the flexibility and scalability of the cloud. Xero runs mostly on AWS, with certain parts on Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure.

But the Lifelong Learning Platform also includes intensive guidance about the use of Xero, and includes a programming language invented by Xero that allows instructors to set up different scenarios with minimum effort.

The education sector has been asking for something like this for years, said Innes, and Xero is collaborating with Swinburne University to create content for the platform.

The Xero Lifelong Learning Platform is currently being piloted, and should be ready for the 2018 academic year, said Drury.

More than 3000 accountants and bookkeepers attended the Xerocon 2017 conference in Melbourne, leading Xero chief executive and founder Rod Drury (pictured) to exclaim "Holy shit, there are a lot of you!" when he walked out on stage to kick off the event.

The New Zealand-based company has more than one million subscribers worldwide — more than 500,000 in Australia — and has processed transactions totalling more than $1.5 trillion.

As previously reported, Xero used the event to announce a raft of new capabilities (including Xero expenses and Xero projects) and feature updates.

{loadposition stephen08}Some of the updates were quietly delivered in the last couple of weeks, some are scheduled for release in the next 90 days, and a few are further ahead.

While Xero projects was launched with professional services firms in mind, Xero plans to extend its features to other sectors including the construction industry. As usual, the plan is to provide the basic functionality, leaving developer partners free to create add-ons for those with more complex requirements

A mobile Xero projects app for iOS and Android will be released in the coming weeks or months, according to Xero projects lead Levi Allan, and this will allow on-the-spot time recording.

Smaller but significant changes announced for Xero — some just implemented, others due in the next 90 days, a few somewhat further away — include:

• Increased granularity of user rights (the introduction of Xero projects and Xero expenses required changes in this area - just because employees can claim expenses or record the time they spend working on a job, there's no reason for them to have access to other parts of the system);
• The inclusion of a QR code on invoices to make it easier for customers to pay invoices delivered on paper, or when they choose not to use the Pay Now button;
• The increased use of machine learning, for example to reduce and hopefully eventually eliminate the need for users to manually code transactions to particular accounts;
• Closer integration with banks to do away with the need to transfer transaction files – instead, payments made in Xero will be pushed to the bank account, but won't actually be made until authorised on the bank's platform; and
• Xero's implementation of the new simpler BAS is already live, with direct lodgement to be added.

The warning comes from accounting software firm Xero which says the “astronomical” levels of debt has brought a call from 86% of SMBs recently surveyed for the federal government to do more to fix the problems of late payments.

According to Xero, the survey of more than 500 Australian small business owners and managers found nearly four in five (79%) supported a government-backed policy to shorten the time it takes big businesses to pay small businesses.

And the majority of small business managers surveyed said they also want to see the government encourage a fairer system for small businesses to compete with big businesses for contracts (84%), and level the playing field with big businesses (70%).

{loadposition peter}Late payments can cause major strain on small businesses, who are unable to hire more people, purchase more equipment or grow faster when there is a cash flow gap, Xero notes.

And according to Xero, the findings provide the strongest support to date for a payments code aimed at solving the cash-flow gap between big and small businesses in Australia, ahead of an anticipated report into the payment times by the Australian Small Business and Family Enterprise Ombudsman.

While most small businesses have payment terms of 30 days or less for their suppliers, the survey reveals that many big businesses mandate terms of 60 or more days, with some refusing to pay faster than 120 days after invoice, according to Xero.

Xero Australia managing director Trent Innes says red tape is often acknowledged as the scourge of progress, and the same is true when it comes to big businesses paying small business – with ”process” touted by small business as the most common reason for late payment by big business (83%).

“In our experience, increased regulation and red tape do as much harm as good, particularly when the increased burden on small businesses is taken into account,” Innes said.

“Rather, we’re looking to the government to bring about non-legislative measures that foster and encourage big businesses to do the right thing, and pay fairly.”

According to Xero, an analysis of the company’s combined invoice statistics found that, over the past six months, one in five invoices payable by ASX 200 companies to small businesses had been overdue by more than 30 days, with more than 3.8 million invoices currently overdue to small businesses on the Xero platform around Australia.

And, most small businesses that took part in the study (84%) said that big businesses had too much negotiating power, and as a result were found to “suffocate small business cash flow, while facing few consequences”.

The consequences for small businesses, however, are critical, Xero says, with almost half (49%) of businesses saying that late payments hinder growth, while 34% could not purchase more equipment and one in five could not hire as quickly as they needed to.

Xero warns that, most critically, poor cash flow could put a small business’ solvency at risk.

“Our study found that 6 in 10 small businesses would not survive more than three months if all invoices went unpaid. Some 6% of businesses wouldn’t even last a week,” Innes said.

“While the upcoming payments inquiry hints at possible governmental intervention in the near future, small businesses need viable solutions now.”

According to Xero, small businesses are turning to technology in order to get paid faster, and to bridge the cash-flow gap.

Around two thirds of businesses (63%) are using technology and software to monitor and manage payments while the same amount now offer customers an option to pay online, with the most popular options including PayPal, BPAY and mobile payments.

Xero maintains that the impact technology is having on payments is, “in the eyes of Australia’s small businesses, overwhelming”.

According to the survey, almost every business offering one of these online payment options (95.3%) says technology methods are “very” or “somewhat” effective in reducing late payments, while another 59% of businesses said allowing online invoicing is a major solution to late payments.

“We use technology to make pretty much every part of our lives easier, and business payments has finally caught up,” Innes said.

“While technology provides a good solution now, Australia’s small businesses need — and want — to see the government fighting their corner.”

 And, technology plays a role for many small businesses when attempting to get paid faster. However, there are still around 37% of small businesses not implementing these solutions that are finding payment terms getting stretched further.

Xero says late payments create a domino effect among small businesses, increasing the impact on the economy. Small businesses acknowledge that their biggest cash flow concerns due to late payments are ability to pay suppliers (38%), the ability to pay staff (15%) and declining profitability (24%).

“We’ve seen some big businesses improve their payment terms in recent months. However more still needs to be done. The conclusions from the payment inquiry will likely act as a catalyst for change, with more big businesses moving away from restrictive payment terms,” Innes says.

The listed (ASX:RKN) cloud accounting company reported overall group revenue of $97.8 million for the FY 2016 — up 7% from $91.4 million in FY15 — and solid profit growth on the back of increased subscribers.

The company also reported EBITDA of $35.3 million, which it says was at the higher point of full-year guidance, despite being affected by the exchange rate and business sold part way through 2016. The existing business EBITDA growth was 5%.

Reckon chief executive Clive Rabie says all areas of the business are performing well as a result of continued investment in development, sales and marketing initiatives for the company’s online business, document management and practice management products.

Reckon’s online business division user growth was 18% to reach 39,000 as its next-generation Reckon One solution — built in-house using Amazon Web Services — gained momentum, while document management revenue of $14.8 million was up 52% from $9.8 million in FY15, assisted by the acquisition of SmartVault.

According to Rabie, Reckon One is proving to be the best solution for the self-employed and small business market. “Our newly released Reckon Loans, powered by Prospa, (business lending product) is rapidly growing,” he said.

And, Rabie says acquisitions and strategic partnerships have also put the company in a “powerful position” to capitalise on the strong take-up of cloud accounting which, he says, has significantly increased Reckon’s subscriber base and positively impacted revenue growth.

“Reckon is a strong, stable and consistently profitable company with exciting future growth opportunities locally and overseas with good progress made in the competitive UK and US markets. We’ve executed our strategy and proved we can deliver on new market initiatives.

“During the year to 31 December 2016, Reckon continued its investment in growth and launched the new the payroll feature for the Reckon One platform in Australia which offers a game-changing pricing model and a smarter breed of online accounting software.

“Significant progress has been made towards achieving our development goals in 2016 as we enter the final year of above normal investment in our product suite. This reinforces our ability to deliver top quality and relevant technology to the largest accounting and legal firms in the world and business customers,” Rabie said.