Overcoming barriers and pain points

Overcoming
barriers and pain
points

Beautiful business

Page 1
Barriers to success
This document helps you identify any barriers to the success of implementing Xero for your practice. Your Account Manager
is on hand to discuss these with you further. Just email sales@xero.com to arrange a suitable date or contact your Account
Manager directly.

Have a think about some of the reasons why Xero isn’t widely adopted within your practice. What’s caused this? If it’s been
resolved, what was the solution?

What challenges has the practice faced? What did you and others do in the practice to resolve them?

Below you’ll find the common barriers to success that we've heard and some suggested solutions. Let’s take a look.

Barrier 1:
Lack of Xero-appropriate clients.

Details:

• Staff aren’t aware of the clients they can move across to Xero as they don’t understand the flexibility it gives.

• Managers and/or partners are not willing to spend the time working through their client lists to identify clients that
would be better off on Xero.

• There's a misconception that Xero is for businesses somewhere between micro and large or complex businesses.

Page 2
Solution:

• Run staff awareness sessions to ensure the team knows about the available pricing plans. Have certain staff
accountable for ensuring a certain number of clients are migrated to Xero each month or quarter.

• Prepare the client profiling as soon as possible within your journey. Often client lists aren’t worked through
because they're not kept up to date or key pieces of information aren’t recorded in one system.

• Ensure that the champions within the practice are aware of the transaction limits of Xero, and know which apps
are appropriate to integrate with Xero. Just because Xero doesn’t have a particular feature doesn’t mean a
client isn’t appropriate for Xero. It means the Xero app marketplace needs to be explored to see what products
will integrate to fulfil the client’s requirements.

Barrier 2:
We don’t have the resource internally.

Details:

• The partners are reluctant to have staff time dedicated to converting and onboarding clients. Either due to
recoverable fees or budget restraints.

• Staff are still completing timesheets and have spent too much time in the past migrating clients, and we weren’t
able to charge the client.

• Staff aren’t comfortable with training clients. It requires different skills to their current job.

Solution:

• Talk to your Account Manager about building a deployment schedule with realistic time frames.

• Look at outsourcing the conversions where possible to third-parties.

• Is it time to take a wider look at the way clients on Xero are billed? Monthly ‘bundled services’ or ‘advisory
services’ packages mean that the client is paying a set fee regardless of time spent on the job.

• Have staff been asked if they want a slightly different role? They may feel like they’ve been pushed into the role
and even if they enjoy it, they're not giving that impression. Empower staff to develop their skill sets further,
especially more junior staff who wouldn’t normally get face-to-face time with the client.

• If budget requires, recruit for someone to take on the training aspect.

Page 3
Barrier 3:
We're struggling to get buy-in from managers and/or partners for dedicating non-chargeable resource.

Details:

• Management aren't willing to take a member of staff who has a fee base, and put them into a non-chargable role
to dedicate their time to setting up and training clients on Xero.

Solutions:

• Educate your management team on the digital practice journey – it sounds like they haven’t fully bought into
the Consider and Align stages we’ve covered in CAPMO. Any mass migration requires time to dedicate to
workflow re-design, and that takes time to build and train staff.

Barrier 4:
Staff lose focus due to distractions.

Details:

• Deals made when the practice was quieter, are put on the back-burner during busy periods (tax season,
tax deadlines etc). Staff then struggle to get their focus back.

Solutions:

• Work with your Account Manager to build out a deployment schedule/plan.

• You have your client base profiled and know which clients to convert. Work with us to then put a timescale in
place. When you're going through those quieter periods, that’s when more clients should be converted to give
staff more time in the busier periods and focus on demand.

Barrier 5:
Clients don’t want to move to the cloud, they don’t understand double entry, or they don’t want to do bookkeeping.

Details:

• There's an assumption here that all businesses want to grow and require detailed planning and bookkeeping
software. Many clients just want to know what tax they have to pay.

• Not everyone understands double-entry bookkeeping. Even if you automate the process, mistakes can still be
made (eg a sales invoice coded to the wrong account). This can lead to frustrated clients. It also increases the
cost to serve clients regarding the time and resources teaching them how to correctly account for transactions.

Page 4
Solutions:

• For clients who don’t want to do any bookkeeping, use it as an opportunity to process their data more efficiently
and offer additional services.

• Host client events for your clients. Your Account Manager can assist. They could even present Xero’s features to
your clients, to help them make an informed decision on what accounting software they should use.

• Setup an obligation-free 30-day Xero trial for your client so they can test drive themselves and make a decision.

Barrier 6:
Staff and/or clients are resistant to change.

Details:

• The notion of doing things this way, because ‘this is the way we have always done them’ is difficult to
overcome.

• Using Xero the same way as desktop software that staff are used to means that the full value of Xero is
sacrificed, and they'll miss out on many benefits. This leads to frustration if people don’t understand how Xero
works, not only for processing staff but for those managers and partners trying to recover fees on a client’s
job.

Solutions:

• Hold monthly or quarterly updates of Xero. Incorporate this as part of a team meeting. Use Xero product
update webinars and recordings.

• Prepare an internal processing document for using Xero (a how to guide). This should combine Xero’s features
with the practice’s workflows to maximise efficiency and get the full value of Xero.

Barrier 7:
You're time poor – how do you keep up with Xero?

Details:

• Either as staff processing in Xero, the champion(s), or the project lead, you're struggling to find the time to
keep up to date with what’s being released in Xero.

Solutions:

• Read the Xero blog. Here you'll find Xero news, up-to-date information for advisors and small business, and
our technical and product updates.

• Bookmark the Xero releases page in the Xero Central.

• If you aren’t receiving the Partner Update emails from the team, contact your Account Manager. They’ll check if
you’re on the mailing list and subscribe you if you’re not.

• Attend the quarterly product update webinar or videos.

Page 5
Barrier 8:
Everyone comes to you for questions on Xero, big and small, they don’t know any other way to find answers.

Details:

Your time is spent fielding questions from other staff and clients on Xero. They don’t know where to go to find help
themselves.

Solutions:

• Encourage staff to become a Xero-certified advisor. The more certified staff you have, the less they rely on you
for support queries.

• Make staff aware of Xero partner resources and our community of customers, accountants, and bookkeepers on
Xero Central. They can self-serve by searching for a topic or asking a question. There's also live and online
courses, webinars, and events on Xero Central to learn all about Xero and how to use it.

• Encourage them to ask for extra support within Xero using the question mark icon (?) at the right of the menu
bar. Or click ‘Get in touch’ on any page in Xero Central.

• Set up an online knowledge base such as an intranet where the team can share all things Xero.

Barrier 9:
Staff are afraid of, or don’t trust the security of cloud technology.

Details:

While internet banking, emails and social media are all widely used, the concept of storing financial data in the cloud is still
not accepted by some staff and/or clients.

Solutions:

Education is key. This is a mix of objection handling and highlighting opportunities. Points for discussion with staff can
include:

• Audit trail: Make sure that each user has their own login to Xero. Sharing logins isn't recommended as you lose
the audit trail to see what each user has done.

• Journal report: This gives you full details of each transaction that's gone through Xero, including transaction
reversals when you recode items.

• History & notes: This shows the non-financial data changes made, including when a contact's bank account
details are changed or when bank rules are edited.

• Security: Xero connects with all the major banks. Our security measures need to meet the most stringent
conditions set by them. No one has access to the banking data in the organisation unless it's specifically shared
with them by the customer.

Page 6
 • Backing up data:

Data with multi-level data encryption is hosted on multiple servers around the world. The level of investment
spent by Xero on protecting data is considerably more than what the typical small business can afford. It also
mitigates the possibility of the computer crashing, the USB being corrupted or missing data, etc. Having data
securely on the cloud is a great advantage thanks to continuous backup.

• Did you know that when a Xero subscription is cancelled, Xero keeps a data backup even if you delete the
subscription? It means you can re-activate or access the data at a later date.

• Consider using your Account Manager to present or host a meeting on key features and to give colleagues the
opportunity to discuss their concerns.

Barrier 10:
Clients and/or staff have concerns over Safe Harbour rulings for the EU Data Protection Directive.

Details:

• In 2015 the European Court of Justice ruled that the ‘safe harbour’ agreement that allowed the transfer of
European citizens data to the US is no longer valid.

Solutions:

• At Xero, nothing is more important to us than maintaining the love and trust of our customers, including through
our full commitment to protecting the privacy and security of our customers data.
On October 6, 2015, the European Court of Justice invalidated the US-EU Safe Harbour Framework which
thousands of companies relied on as a means of legitimising transfers of personal data from Europe to the US
Similar to many Software as a Service (SaaS) companies, Xero uses top-tier, third-party data hosting providers,
Amazon Web Services (AWS) servers located in the US, to host Xero's online and mobile services, including for
Xero's European customers.
For our European and other non-US customers, this means that your personal information is transferred to those
hosting providers’ servers in the US. Rest assured, Xero has in place EU Model Clauses with each of these hosting
providers, which continue to be recognised by the EU as a means of satisfying the requirements relating to the
transfer of data from the EU to the US.

Page 7
Barrier 11:
We have to pay for a subscription even if the client ceases business or moves to another accountant.

Details:

• Staff might not quite grasp the concept of SaaS, where you only pay for a service you require. When you
don't need it any longer, you just cancel the contract.

• Staff might think that there's no way to export the data from Xero. So if the client ceases trading, you have to
keep paying for the subscription for a required period so you don’t lose access to the data.

Solutions:

• When you sign a client up to a pricing plan, you don’t have to keep them on that plan for their lifetime. You can
upgrade and downgrade within the pricing plans as required using the ‘Upgrade’ option from My Xero. Once you
upgrade a client to a higher pricing plan, you do need to stay on that plan for 30 days, but then you can
downgrade as you need.

• If the client doesn't need Xero anymore, you can cancel the subscription.

• Please make sure you've exported any the data and reports you need so the subscriber can cancel the
subscription from the Info option on My Xero.

• If you need access to an organisation again, contact our Billing team. They can re-instate access to the
organisation and its data.

• To transfer the Xero subscription to another user, the subscriber can use the Info option in My Xero. Just select
Transfer Subscription and enter the email address of the nominated person to take over the subscription. Once
the person accepts the transfer, remind them to remove your access if you no longer need it.

Page 8
Barrier 12:
My client's business turns over millions every year.

Details:

• Turnover shouldn’t be the deciding factor in whether a client is a good fit for Xero. We have companies on Xero
that have high revenues; it’s all about the number of transactions that are processed.

• We recommend the following regarding the number of transactions. Keep in mind that these are soft limits for
some clients. Some might not see any decrease in performance:
1,000 bills per month
1,000 sales invoices per month
2,000 bank transactions per month
10,000 contacts over the lifetime of the client
500 fixed assets over the lifetime of the client
4,000 tracked inventory items over the lifetime of the client
100,000 un-tracked inventory items over the lifetime of the client
100 category options per tracking category

Solutions:

• Have a chat to your Account Manager. They might be able to give some guidance, or run the numbers by our
Customer Experience team to get advise on whether the client should look at a different solution.

• If a client has more than this number of transactions, look at the apps that integrate with Xero. One of them
might import summary transactions into Xero, with the main processing done through the app and Xero
recording totals to update the general ledger balances.

Page 9