Xero,
the global small business platform, today announced a partnership with Stripe
to develop new innovations that help small businesses get paid faster,
in more ways, and gain more visibility over their business performance.
The global partnership, announced at Xerocon San Diego 2019, will enable
new payments experiences that are more seamless and efficient for small
business owners and their advisors around the world. Xero and Stripe are
building new tools to invoice customers more efficiently, bring
additional insights on their business performance and get paid, no
matter how or where they do business.
The first two innovations announced today that are being developed under
the new partnership include:
-
A new Stripe feed, designed to bring comprehensive transaction
data for all Stripe payments into Xero for easy reconciliation and
greater insights, whether a small business invoices from the Xero
platform or an ecommerce site, and -
Auto pay, allowing small businesses to set up and receive
recurring payments for repeat billing customers directly through Xero
Aggregated and anonymous data from Xero found that, on average, 51.88
percent of US small businesses were cash flow positive each month, and
they were paid 8.49 days late on average during 2018.1
Small businesses that enable Stripe payments in Xero invoices are
currently paid up to 15 days faster globally, and up to 16 days faster
in North America compared to those without a payment gateway.2
“Small businesses are fundamental to the growth of major and developing
economies around the world; and ensuring that they get paid on time is
vital to their survival and growth,” said Craig Walker, Founding CTO &
Executive General Manager Platform Business Technologies at Xero. “We
built the Xero platform to help small businesses grow with better tools,
smarter insights and comprehensive connections to the information they
need to run their business. Our partnership with Stripe today brings us
even closer to helping small businesses spend less time chasing
payments, and more time focusing on doing what they love.”
Seamless data flow and better cashflow visibility with the new Stripe
feed
A new data feed from Stripe — a first-of-its-kind integration with a
major cloud accounting platform — will make it easier than ever for
small businesses to receive comprehensive transaction data on sales and
invoices within Xero.
Xero previously enabled automated Stripe reconciliation for customers
who accepted credit card payments with Stripe through Xero online
invoices. With the new Stripe feed, the small business user will see all
transactional data processed through Stripe — whether an online invoice
from Xero or an e-commerce platform such as Shopify — this includes
automatically seeing all payment transaction data, processing charges,
flow into Xero as individual items.
Smart machine learning features in Xero can automatically reconcile
transactions in the ledger, enabling greater data accuracy and providing
an up-to-date view of their cash flow in one place.
Accountants and bookkeepers will be able to work with more accurate data
through the Xero Assurance Dashboard, so they can spend less time
chasing information or fixing errors, and more time helping their
clients grow.
The Stripe feed will be available in the next few months.
Auto pay tackles forgotten bills or invoices for repeating
transactions
Small businesses will be able to set up and accept recurring payments
from customers who do repeat business, enabling greater on-time payment
of invoices. On a monthly basis, more than 1.6 million repeating
invoices globally are paid in Xero.
While small businesses can already schedule and automatically send
recurring invoices from Xero, the new auto pay feature means they can
now be paid automatically by their own customers as well. Professional
services and other business-focused firms will particularly benefit from
the ability to set-and-forget regular billing cycles with customers who
opt in, resulting in receipt of regular payments without worrying about
forgotten bills or invoices.
Auto-pay will be available soon to businesses in the United States
before rolling out globally.
Deepening the Xero-Stripe partnership
Xero and Stripe are continuing to explore new payments experiences and
will announce more features in the coming year.
“At Stripe, we build payments infrastructure that enables new kinds of
businesses to start, run, and scale,” said Jeanne DeWitt, Head of
Revenue and Growth for North America at Stripe. “Together, Xero and
Stripe will bring sophisticated payments tools to the growing community
of small businesses, advisors and entrepreneurs who use Xero daily and
who are critical drivers of our internet economy.”
About Xero
Born in the cloud, Xero
is a beautiful, easy-to-use platform for small businesses and their
advisors. Xero provides its 1.8 million subscribers with connections to
a thriving ecosystem of 700+ third party apps and 200+ connections to
banks and financial service providers. On the inaugural 2018 Financial
Times FT1000 High-Growth Companies Asia Pacific list, Xero was the
fastest growing tech company in the $200 million+ segment. Xero won
‘Bookkeeping software of the year’ from the Institute of Certified
Bookkeepers UK in 2018, and was rated by Canstar Blue as Australia’s
best accounting software over four consecutive years, 2015-2018.
About Stripe
Stripe is a technology company that builds economic infrastructure for
the internet. Businesses of every size — from new startups to public
companies — use the company’s software to accept online payments and run
technically sophisticated financial operations in more than 100
countries. Stripe helps companies get started and grow their revenues,
and also helps established businesses accelerate into new markets and
launch new business models. Over the long term, Stripe aims to increase
the GDP of the internet.
_____________________________
1 Based on aggregated and
anonymized data from a large sample set of Xero’s United States small
business customers from 1st January – 31st December 2018.
2
Data is for paid invoices of all Xero customers using Stripe vs invoices
that are not paid with a payment service between 1 November 2018 and 30
April 2019.
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