Xero delivers integrated books to Silver Lining

When Jamie Potter’s IT services company grew to 50 staff he moved from MYOB to Great Plains for its better reporting capabilities.

He later sold the company and started five businesses under the Silver Lining Group, but this time he decided to use only software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications for running their internal operations.

Potter chose cloud-based Xero as the accounting program which he says is exceptional value at $40 per month. He runs five instances, one for each business, and says the $200 a month is far cheaper than the thousands of dollars a month he was spending on Great Plains.

“It’s just ridiculously cheap. The cost is inconsequential based on the value you get from the system,” Potter says. Potter estimates that by using SaaS programs he is spending 10-15 percent of the cost of equivalent on-premise systems in his last business.

Although Xero is designed to run a small business up to 20 staff Potter says the program “in no way, shape or form” is near its limits with his 45 staff.

Xero’s best feature is that it is a “single version of the truth”, he says. Melbourne-based Potter and his Adelaide accountant can log into the program at the same time and discuss over a phone call financial reports created within Xero.

Xero has invested in native integrations with many popular SaaS programs. Potter switched from a workflow management SaaS program called Replicon to competitor WorkFlow Max because it was better integrated with Xero.

Consultants working for Silver Lining Group businesses fill in their timesheets online in WorkFlow Max and, once approved, they are pushed into Xero as a draft invoice with one click.

Contact information is automatically shared between CRM systems (Silver Lining Group businesses use either SalesForce.com or Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online), Xero and WorkFlow Max.

“If we win a new client we can put that information into the timesheet system (WorkFlow Max) which will push that information to Xero and through to Salesforce, or the other way around. It means I have consistent information between those systems and I don’t have to import three times,” Potter says. “It used to be a fairly manual process which creates opportunities for errors. There is now no manual intervention between time sheet creation and invoice creation.”

Potter’s businesses have grown from scratch to 45 staff in 15 months with minimal disruption thanks to the supporting SaaS infrastructure.

“If we were replacing systems all the time in a normal business (running on-premise software) that would be difficult. But now we get a small incremental cost in a linear fashion based on the systems we use. When someone new starts we add them to the appropriate systems and off they go. It’s pretty easy to do."