Corporate Interactive Announces Strategic Partnership With Xero

Corporate Interactive Announces Strategic Partnership With Xero

Thursday, we were pleased to announce a new strategic partnership with New Zealand accounting-software provider Xero. The deal will see full integration of our WebDirector data management platform into Xero’s cloud-based accounting software.

Xero, a relative newcomer to the tax accounting-software market, has attracted a great deal of attention globally, and currently serves 250,000 businesses worldwide, according to a February Forbes.com article. Its innovative accounting software has been a game changer in the market by allowing businesses to share accounts seamlessly with their accountants and with tax offices via the cloud.

Counting super-investor Peter Thiel among its backers, Xero’s innovations have made it a major competitor of longtime market players like MYOB in Australia, and Intuit in the United States – the latter of which has begun integrating cloud-based sharing systems more fully in reaction to Xero’s success, rather than continuing to rely on its legacy products.

As proof of Xero’s success in Australia alone, it announced in February that it had signed up its 100,000th Australian customer. What’s more, nine of Australia’s top 10 accounting firms have switched to using Xero’s software. Weeks later, Xero’s stock price soared to $44.49 per share when British stock-market indices and data provider FTSE included Xero in its FTSE Global Equity index.

‘We have seen a real shift in accountants, bookkeepers and small-business owners wanting to use a pure cloud-based accounting solution to manage their finances’, said Chris Ridd, Xero’s Australia managing director, explaining his company’s success. ‘Our customers are tired of managing software installs and paying for the required hardware upgrades that typically follow new releases’.

We chose Xero as a partner over more traditional tax accounting-software vendors because Xero built its cloud-based solution from the ground up. We preferred this to the work of Xero competitors who ‘tacked on cloud or Web access’ but did not specifically design their products with cloud-based solutions in mind. Xero’s software is a true best-of-breed, cloud-accounting solution.

Furthermore, we preferred Xero because it offers application programming interface (API) integration, as a standard part of their software; all other existing vendors charge for such API middleware.

Notably, ‘(Xero) understands the world should be integrated in the cloud and all systems should talk to each other’.

The partnership will allow for full integration of the Corporate Interactive’s customer-details CRM features and invoice-transactions ERP features with Xero’s cloud-based tax-accounting software. Consequently, Xero customers will be able to send one-off and recurring invoices and synchronize all their customer data for no additional cost.

To learn more about Corporate Interactive’s CRM and ERP integration features, or to learn about how Corporate Interactive can tailor make software solutions for your business, visit the company’s contact us page or call 1-300-662-553.