Xero Partners with Manilla and Squarespace

Cloud accounting application Xero announced new partnerships today with personal bill tracking application Manilla and web hosting company Squarespace. The company’s announcement comes close after the December launch of Xero Payroll, the announcement of the product’s support for file attachments, and integrations with non-traditional lending sources like Kabbage and FundBox.

“Squarespace is aligned with what we do at Xero,” the company's U.S. President, Jamie Sutherland, told CPA Practice Advisor. “This is a great add-on to Xero and an excellent partnership for small businesses.”

Manilla is a personal finance application which simplifies the process of tracking and paying personal bills. Like Xero, Manilla directly communicates with over 3,500 companies, and helps customers manage, store logins and pay creditors. Manilla is a web application which is designed to help people manage details associated with bills, including due dates, payments, amounts, and statement copies using a “digital mailbox.”

Manilla users will now be able to choose which of their linked bills and other provider accounts should be connected to Xero. Xero will then automatically aggregate the data for those accounts and suggest which bill payments should be reconciled with each corresponding bank and credit card transaction. The product integration will also allow Xero users to access their business account documents directly through Xero by automatically retrieving the full documents from Manilla.

Squarespace is a web design and hosting engine which provides small businesses with tools and hosting services which create and manage websites for their customers. A key feature of interest to accounting professionals is the automated creation of Xero accounting transactions from the online sales captured by Squarespace’s eCommerce tools. Squarespace also has a website template which is designed to create a web presence for accounting and bookkeeping professionals and their firms.

In a call with CPA Practice Advisor, Sutherland confirmed many items on the company’s roadmap for later this year, including the rollout of payroll support for additional states and the expected US release of the Company’s Spotlight Workpapers application. Sutherland also confirmed the company’s commitment to accounting professionals, and indicated that accounting professionals contribute more than half of the company’s new customers in the US market.

Xero’s online accounting software is available at www.xero.com. The company’s most recently released statistics indicated that the software was used by 211,300 companies globally, including over 16,600 companies in its business segment which includes the US and Canada. Xero is a public company listed on the New Zealand Stock Exchange.