Xero Enhances Online Invoicing Features

The small business accounting company Xero has released a major update to its online invoicing feature, making it faster and easier for small businesses to receive payment from their customers.

Online invoices sent through Xero now feature a beautiful responsive design, ensuring that recipients of those invoices can pay small businesses more quickly, across any device and with enhanced security.

For customers who have turned on Xero’s Two Step Authentication (2SA), sending an online invoice from Xero is an inherently more secure method than sending an invoice by email because payment terms cannot be changed without logging into Xero. As phishing attacks on small businesses continue to increase, hackers are gaining entry into email accounts and altering the bank details in invoices before sending to an unassuming client. Online invoicing would deter this, so long as the customer sends the invoice directly to their customer from Xero, and not via their own email box.

“Ensuring our customers get paid as quickly as possible is vital to the small business economy,” said Craig Walker, Xero’s Chief Technology Officer. “With today’s release, we’ve embraced responsive web design to ensure that our customers can not only send their customers online invoices, but that those invoices are displayed beautifully, regardless of the device their customers are using.

“As we see an increase in penetration of mobile so to do we see an increase in phishing attacks on small businesses. Xero encourages customers to use Two Step Authentication (2SA) and to send an online invoice from Xero as a more secure method than sending an invoice by email because payment terms cannot be changed without logging into Xero.”

As smartphone penetration grows, more than a third of global online payments are now completed via mobile, according to the Adyen Mobile Payments Index. We’re seeing an increase in Xero mobile users recently surpassing more than 100,000.

Xero is helping small businesses meet their customer’s needs, by ensuring that their invoices can be seen, accepted and paid no matter what device their customer is using. Xero’s invoicing helps small business get paid quickly and easily by enabling them to send an invoice as soon as the job is finished, instead of a particular time of the month which can slowdown the cashflow of a small business.

This update builds on earlier investments Xero has made in 2016 to help small businesses get paid faster, including easy online payments through integrations with Stripe and PayPal, or dozens of other payments providers that small business already works with.