Diya Jolly on templates and sharing in Xero Force:

Now, what we will also do is we will provide templates for some of the common things we’re hearing, so people don’t have to create it from scratch. They can customise the templates, but it’s shorter. So we started with templates like GST templates. There are a bunch of other templates in there before we add payment follow-ups, invoice chasing templates, things like that. And we will also allow people to share their templates over time. Not yet, but over time, if a practice or a partner does something, they can share it within their practice. They can share it more broadly. So for you, you could publish a bunch of templates

— Diya Jolly, Chief Product and Technology Officer, Xero

Xerocon London 2026 marked a significant moment for Xero, with the company unveiling a suite of AI-powered innovations designed to reshape the way accountants, bookkeepers and small businesses work. During this special episode of the Accounting Apps Podcast, I sat down with Xero’s Chief Product and Technology Officer, Diya Jolly, to explore the thinking behind the announcements and what they mean for firms using Xero every day. Rather than presenting AI as a futuristic concept, Xero demonstrated how artificial intelligence is becoming deeply embedded into everyday workflows, helping reduce manual effort while improving the quality of financial information. The conversation also offered valuable insight into how Xero is balancing innovation with trust, reliability and practical outcomes for its customers.

One of the biggest themes throughout the discussion was that AI should remove repetitive work rather than replace professional judgement. Diya explained that Xero’s approach is to automate low-value administrative tasks so accountants and bookkeepers can spend more time advising clients and building relationships. That philosophy underpins many of the new features announced at Xerocon, from automated reconciliations through to document processing and intelligent workflow recommendations. Instead of introducing AI for its own sake, Xero is embedding it into familiar processes where users will experience immediate productivity gains. It’s a measured approach that feels grounded in solving genuine customer problems rather than chasing technology trends.

Among the headline announcements was the introduction of Xero Partner Hub, a new workspace designed specifically for accounting and bookkeeping practices. The vision is to bring together the key activities firms perform every day into a single location, beginning with Book Health and compliance-related workflows. Rather than discovering problems at month-end, practices will be able to identify issues much earlier, giving them more time to resolve missing information and improve the quality of client records. Diya shared that the long-term roadmap includes around fifty different health checks, although the initial release focuses on practical areas such as unreconciled transactions, duplicate entries and missing supporting documents. It represents a shift towards more proactive bookkeeping, where software highlights issues before they become bigger problems.

The conversation also explored how AI is improving bookkeeping itself through features such as Auto Bank Reconciliation and Smart Document Capture. Automatic reconciliation continues to learn from both broader transaction patterns and the behaviour of individual organisations, making suggestions increasingly accurate over time. Smart Document Capture moves beyond traditional OCR by using contextual AI to understand documents, extracting information based on meaning rather than simply recognising characters on a page. Combined with enhancements to document management and attachment workflows, these developments have the potential to significantly reduce the amount of manual data entry still required in many bookkeeping practices. The overall message was clear: AI is becoming another member of the bookkeeping team, quietly handling repetitive administrative work in the background.

Perhaps the most talked-about announcement was Xero Force, a new AI platform that enables accountants to build their own AI agents using natural language rather than code. Rather than relying solely on pre-built automations, firms will be able to create assistants tailored to their own workflows and client needs. Whether answering routine client questions, preparing information for month-end, or automating repetitive internal processes, Xero Force aims to make AI more accessible to firms regardless of their technical expertise. Alongside this, Xero introduced Xero Ultra, a new subscription tier designed for larger and more complex businesses that have traditionally outgrown standard small business accounting software but were not yet ready to invest in a full enterprise resource planning system. Together, these announcements demonstrate Xero’s ambition to support customers across a much broader range of business sizes while continuing to strengthen its ecosystem.

Another interesting part of the discussion focused on Xero’s product philosophy. Rather than trying to build every possible feature itself, Xero continues to see its extensive app ecosystem as a strategic advantage. The platform will increasingly use AI to identify gaps and connect customers with the most appropriate solutions, allowing specialist developers to continue innovating while Xero concentrates on its core strengths. This collaborative approach has been one of Xero’s defining characteristics for many years, and it appears that AI will strengthen rather than replace that ecosystem. It is a reminder that successful technology platforms are often those that enable others to innovate alongside them.

The interview also touched on a more difficult topic: the recent Australian service outages. Diya spoke candidly about the AWS infrastructure event that triggered the disruption and explained the combination of technical issues that contributed to the incident. More importantly, she acknowledged the impact the outages had on customers and discussed the work Xero has undertaken to improve resilience and reduce the likelihood of similar events in the future. It was refreshing to hear a senior executive address the issue openly rather than avoiding the conversation. Transparency during challenging moments is just as important as celebrating product launches.

As Xero celebrates reaching five million subscribers globally, the announcements from Xerocon London 2026 paint a picture of a company investing heavily in the future of accounting technology. AI is no longer being positioned as an experimental feature but as an integrated capability that supports better bookkeeping, stronger workflows and more efficient practice management. Whether it is helping firms prepare for month-end, automating reconciliations, improving document capture or enabling custom AI agents through Xero Force, the common thread is reducing administrative effort so professionals can focus on delivering greater value to clients. If these announcements are any indication, the next chapter of accounting software will be defined not simply by automation, but by intelligent collaboration between people and AI.

Heather Smith

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Accounting Apps podcast. I’m your host Heather Smith, and today I’m coming to you from London Xerocon 2026, where I’ve had the opportunity to sit down with Diya Jolly, Xero’s chief product and technology officer. Fresh from the keynote announcements, Diya joins me to unpack some of the product updates revealed at this year’s event, and there was a lot. So buckle in.

Heather Smith

We talk about Xero reaching the milestone of 5 million customers, which, as the author of Xero for Dummies, I’m very excited about. Just means more customers for my book. We also talked about the new Xero Partner Hub, Book Health, Smart Document Capture, and how AI is becoming embedded across the platform to help accountants and bookkeepers work more efficiently. We explore Xero Force and Xero Ultra, and alongside the talk, we talk we talk about the updates. Alongside talks about updates, Diya shares how customer feedback influences Xero’s product roadmap. I think this is really important insight for those who are invested in Xero’s roadmap.

Heather Smith

Towards the end of the conversation, I also asked Diya about the recent service outages that affected Australian customers. She explains what happened behind the scenes, the lessons Xero has learned, and the work that’s been done to improve the platform’s resilience. So, a few of my tech-savvy friends had asked me specifically to ask that question, and she did indeed share a bit more detail than we have seen publicly. I will confess, I am not as tech savvy to understand everything, but was able, but but happy to sort of follow up and ask those questions on behalf of the community. There’s plenty to unpack.

Heather Smith

Before we head to London. I’d like to remind you to subscribe to the podcast. Just click and hit subscribe right now. Jump across and join the Accounting Apps community, and subscribe to the newsletter at accountingapps.io. Now let’s head to sunny London and hear directly Diya Jolly.

Heather Smith

Thank you so much, Diya, for joining me on the Accounting Apps podcast today.

How are you doing this morning, Diya?

Diya Jolly

Thank you for having me. I’m doing fantastic. Yesterday was an awesome day.

Heather Smith

It was. So we’re here together at Xerocon London 2026. You’ve now been at Xero for three years plus.

As you look back over that time, what’s been one of your greatest moments of achievement or satisfaction?

Diya Jolly

What has been what launch has been?

Heather Smith

No, no, no. Just what what from a career perspective.

Diya Jolly

From a career perspective. Yeah.

Diya Jolly

Okay. I actually think, honestly, being able to to get the team to be able to meet what customers want. So, like I don’t know if you’ve heard about our voice of customer process. We basically take customer feedback from every air, like every channel, whether it’s NPS surveys, Xero product ideas, even conversations-all the laundromat stuff here is going into voice of my friends, and and we stack rank it, and we we actually every quarter do the top 10. So just the fact that you’re able to get back to customers with the things that they want the most. Yes, we launch a bunch of other things as well, but just the fact that you’re able to like go in, as I talked about, like reconciling credit notes from a page, right? Those things I think are very rewarding,

Heather Smith

and very appreciative of the credit note reconciliation ability. I have used that myself.

Diya Jolly

I’m glad you like it.

Heather Smith

And for those listening in, there is a laundromat area at Xerocon on the floor. Some people thought it was about laundering money. Are we laundering something?

But yes.

Diya Jolly

We should have thought of the name before we did that. Now, in retrospect.

Heather Smith

You’re cleaning. You’re cleaning the things.

Heather Smith

So look, the as you perhaps realise, I speak to a lot of staff, and they always, I think, speak to me quite honestly, and they always speak about you with great respect in what you’re doing. So kudos, kudos to to you and what you’re doing. So yesterday, day one, you were on the stage, and we heard a lot of announcements, which must be very exciting to finally get them out the bag and do the media releases. So the first one was that Xero now powers 5 million customers.

Diya Jolly

Yes,

Heather Smith

Very, very exciting. Yes. So as the author of a book that kind of is alongside Xero, I was excited about 5 million potential customers. For my book,

What I would like to know is how the platform copes with now 5 million customers, because that’s just going to continually grow.

Diya Jolly

Yeah, I think from a volume perspective, we are architected to keep adding more capacity. Three years ago, we weren’t, and over the last three years, we we’ve done a tonne of things that allow us, as customers come on board, to keep adding capacity. And a good example of that is what is a good example of that? A good example of that is the reason we’re able to do Ultra is because we can add capacity in certain places because we’re completely on AWS. Adding capacity is as simple as being able to say, “Hey, I want another database, or “I want another an instance of a cloud server.

Heather Smith

Okay. Well, that is really interesting because I know I’ve spoken to vendors over the years, and they hit this point, and they’re like, “We can’t do anything. We’re going to have to rewrite everything. So, so that is interesting that you have been able to to to do that.

Diya Jolly

Yeah. I mean, the good thing is we were cloud always, and then we were architecting to the point of being, or we were, we were as we launched, we rewrite to the point of being able to do this.

Heather Smith

Yeah, fantastic. Thank you for sharing that. So let’s talk about the new Xero Partner Hub.

Will this be available in the Australasia region?

Diya Jolly

Yes.

Heather Smith

Okay. Excellent. I was…

Diya Jolly

It will first launch in the UK, then in Australia, and then in the US. The needs are similar, 80% of the needs are similar. Like, did you do your book health? But like, as an example, is U.S. sales tax. Australia, and here is that, right? Or here is that Australia’s GST.

Heather Smith

Yes.

Diya Jolly

So, so I think it’s just the nuances that we have to work through for each of the countries. So it’ll be UK, then fast forward on Australia.

Heather Smith

Yeah.

Diya Jolly

US. I don’t have a timeline for yet, but sometime this year.

Heather Smith

Okay. Well, that’s that’s really really interesting. It so for for those listening in, and you add to this if I don’t cover it,

It’s going to be a central place from book-to-tax compliance workflow, and one of the things that I picked up was there’s going to be 50 checkpoints over the health of the books. Was that right? 

Diya Jolly

Over time. We were starting with two.

Heather Smith

Okay, okay, yeah. Over time, and so and and the health of the books. That’s such an important thing to do as accountants, whether custodians of small business data, AI doesn’t work if the data is not correct. So, so that is really exciting, and that I thought that was really great.

Diya Jolly

Just to clarify, the first like two will be: Are you ready for month end? So it’ll be a bunch of things like unreconciled item, duplicates, things like that, missing documents, and then the other will be whatever checks need to go into GST for Australia.

Heather Smith

Fantastic.

Diya Jolly

And New Zealand. Yeah.

Heather Smith

Yeah, excellent. Thank you for sharing that.

Heather Smith

So then another one of the announcements was talking about auto bank reconciliation. So we’ve had this for a while, but I feel that the technology is still evolving. So, and I have it switched on. Had it switched on since the beginning.

Heather Smith

Now, one of the things. So I’ve had it switched on, and I think many of our listeners will understand what it is because it has been available for a little while now. So they’ll understand what it is. I find sometimes it’s not matching exactly as it should do.

Diya Jolly

Yeah.

Heather Smith

Even though I have a very unique number, it goes cash transfer rather than match against the supplier bill that it was there.

How long does it take to not do that? How long does that take?

Because I’m kind of like trying to do the right thing here.

Diya Jolly

Yeah. So I think in when we look at, so the way we measure accuracy is if it auto matches a transaction for the next three months, has anybody changed the auto match, right? So we give it like a whole quarter so you get through quarter end.

Heather Smith

Okay.

Diya Jolly

And 90 days. If like you’re mid quarter, then it’s another it’s another 90 days. We have seen 4% of transactions being changed.

Heather Smith

Oh.

Diya Jolly

The other 96 are not changed, and that is a global number, but it’s a pretty high number. So when people say, “How do you know what the accuracy is? There is a check. If nobody changes it in 30, in 90 days, the chances are pretty strong that it’s a correct reconciliation.

Heather Smith

That’s great to know. Sorry.

Diya Jolly

Yeah. So I think in terms of training, you still. So the way we have this set up is we have a what we call a global model. That looks at similar transactions across all customers and how they matched it, and then we have a local model. The local model means it’s specific to your orgs, your org, and your orgs, right?

Diya Jolly

So, from a training perspective, I think I’d say a couple of months, two to three months. So I want to look at your specific problem because look, when when it’s accounting, there are always edge cases, right? There are always edge cases, and so maybe the edge case is not covered, but for 60% of transactions, we are seeing 96% of them not being changed after they are auto reconciled.

Heather Smith

And that’s great to hear. And I’m actively using it, and I can see people in the community who are not using it, and so I think it’s good for them to hear how it will update and how that works because it’s sometimes it’s just magic. We don’t know what’s going on.

Diya Jolly

I mean, the other thing I would say is it’s not we did it. We just made people click okay. We’ve done it for a long time.

Heather Smith

Yes.

Diya Jolly

So that is the difference, right? Like when people are worried, I get it. But if you clicked okay on a majority of our things, if that wasn’t if the suggestions weren’t incorrect, it’s the same technology barring it.

Heather Smith

Yeah, and I go into that screen and then sort by what’s auto reconciled, and just you know do a scan of that, and then do another scan at the end of the month. And I figure I’m training it, and it’s going to get there.

Diya Jolly

Yes.

Heather Smith

So one of the things I was actually really excited about, which you you probably didn’t even notice, was an exciting thing for us, was that one of the screenshots indicated that we’re going to have an extra column there indicating whether there is an attachment to the document.

Diya Jolly

Yes, always. Yeah, so you can see, you can do it in real time.

Heather Smith

At the moment, that’s not there, so that’s okay.

Diya Jolly

I’ll double check.

Heather Smith

In the well, it was on. I took a photo, so I have proof.

Diya Jolly

I double check that it’s not there. I thought it was there, but I’ll double check. It’s that’s how it matches.

Heather Smith

The word auto reconcile and attachment are now on the same screen. That wasn’t. I don’t believe.

Diya Jolly

Okay.

Heather Smith

Everyone’s everyone’s now triple checking. I’ve got everyone triple checking that. But that was one of the things we always need an attachment if it’s over $75 in Australia, and that was one of the things we weren’t. But your screen said it’s going to be there, so we’re excited about that.

Diya Jolly

Yeah, I thought. Let me double check. I thought it was live. Okay.

Heather Smith

Yeah. So that will be good. And I think you said something like, “There’s going to be an alert if a document should have attachment”, and we would be able to put criteria in.

Diya Jolly

So what the feedback we got from most of our partners was, hey, when a transaction is missing a document, we have to chase the document. So we started building. Okay, how do we how do we identify transactions for you that are missing a document? So that was one, and then the other thing from there was well, if you’re already identifying the transactions, can you actually email my customers and help me get the document,

Heather Smith

Yes.

Diya Jolly

So those were the two pieces. Yes, that will that actually parses your book health, right? Till we know it’s one of the signals. Till we know that you are all the docs you need are not there, that are material are not there, you cannot close the books.

Heather Smith

Yeah.

Diya Jolly

So when book health launches or month-end readiness launches, that is one of the signals.

Heather Smith

And that will be great. And and as I mentioned, and I’m sure it’s different for all jurisdictions in Australia, we need an attachment over $75, and some people will be pedantic for under, but I’m like, let’s get what we need at a bare minimum as a requirement for compliance. So, that is that is great.

Heather Smith

Let’s talk about smart document capture. So, as our listeners probably understand, this is extracting data from a source document, populating it into Xero. Now you mentioned this was I found quite interesting that OCR was old technology, which I was like, oh okay, and now you’ve got new AI-powered context recognition technology that’s going to be used.

Talk about AI-powered smart document capture. Can you describe that a bit to us?

Diya Jolly

Sure. So OCR has been used forever and ever, but it’s essentially it essentially, for lack of a better word, is ML machine learning that looks at the data on the page and then copies it. But unlike an LLM, it does not understand what it’s reading, LLMs are ChatGPT. If you write it something, it understands what it’s reading, so it can do more things. So in smart document capture, we use LLMs, and we’ve trained those LLMs essentially to not only be able to understand the document, it does a couple of things. It looks at your history to. Understand your context. So, for example, if you are a if you are a supplier, sorry, if you’re a customer and and you generally have amounts that are less than $100, right? And you suddenly get an amount for $1,000 from a supplier, it can pick that up. It know like it it can match that context. It can understand it’s 1000 on the page, and it was 100 always before. So really, it is essentially an LLM working underneath. It’s like it’s powered by Claude. It’s working underneath, tuned for our specific customer set and use cases, as well as as well as the individual customer.

Heather Smith

Oh, that’s really interesting. I actually use Claude. I have trouble with one bank account, and I have to put an image of the statement to get the CSV file out. And I actually do that in Claude, but Claude also knows I’m an airline member, and so I’m always trying to chase my velocity points. And it’s like, and you should have done this through get your you should have tagged your velocity card to get this, these are these points here. So it’s interesting how Claude looks at it, not what you’re doing, but what Claude looks at it and says, okay, this should have had velocity points to it. You’re paying too much in bank charges, foreign bank charges, and stuff like that. So it is very good. So currently, in terms of document capture into Xero. We have Hubdocs. We have Jack’s inbox. We have emails to bill. We have e invoicing. We now have this.

What’s going to happen? That that’s kind of five, isn’t?

Diya Jolly

Yes.

Heather Smith

Are they all going to hang around?

Diya Jolly

Well, so I think not. I think for Hubdoc. It will eventually get powered by the same technology because it goes cross-platform. So I don’t think we’ll take that capability away from customers. We do LLMs are are yeah. So we have to figure that out. It’s a bigger issue for. It’s not as big an issue for ANZ. It is a bigger issue in the UK where there are more platforms. It’s a bigger issue, definitely a big issue in the US. So Hubdoc, I think, will converge. It’ll just be you want to enter from here, you want to enter from here, right? I think on email to bills that’ll get combined. Jack’s inbox is not just documents, right?

Heather Smith

I don’t think so. Yeah.

Diya Jolly

Yeah, it’s not documents.

Heather Smith

Yeah. Yeah.

Diya Jolly

I think we will have a files area and a message area. That’s what’ll happen. But I don’t know if we’ll mix files and messages because it gets confusing for the user. But yes, so email to bills will get combined. Like that, that’s a Hubdoc thing which will get combined.

Heather Smith

Okay, so we’re not going to be going, you know, having to train people in five different things.

Diya Jolly

Yes.

Heather Smith

It’s going to merge together and it’s going to make sense. So it appears that this is going to happen in the files inbox area.

Diya Jolly

Yes.

Heather Smith

Since the very early days, years and years and years before you joined Xero, we were always told that we had unlimited storage in the files inbox area, and we were encouraged to upload all sorts of documents into there. We were encouraged to load leases and insurance documents, and I, like a lot of people, did that. And then, and I have them all sitting there, and then, overnight, about five or six months ago, suddenly it changed. I had everything sitting in files and folders, and it just went like confetti into the air. And I now have 2000 documents sitting out, unfiled.

Diya Jolly

What do you mean it went like confetti in the air?

Heather Smith

All of the structured filing, we lost it. A lot of it we lost, and so for me it was quite small. It was 2000, but for other people it was quite significant. And I have spoken to product about this multiple times.

Diya Jolly

Okay.

Heather Smith

So for the people using it, for that to happen, they were told we could use this for years and years and years, and then it changed. For me, it was 2000. For some people, it was 80,000.

Diya Jolly

Yeah.

Heather Smith

And that’s kind of when you’re using something for a decade, that’s kind of overwhelming. And we didn’t have, we weren’t told it was going to happen, so sort of how did they? It was that was quite stressful for them.

How can Xero users be assured? How can they feel that they can trust the platform to use it in this new way when they were told it was going to work one way for quite some time?

Diya Jolly

I need to go back and check because I’m not exactly sure what happened here, but so two things there. So I need to go back and check why the files disappeared because they should have migrated.

Heather Smith

They haven’t disappeared.

Diya Jolly

Okay,

Heather Smith

They were in structured file areas, and it all moved. And they all populated out. They all sort of jumped out of their file structure.

Diya Jolly

Okay.

Heather Smith

Because we could go in and create folders. We could go and create folders. We no longer did that. And things like if I went through and then deleted them in the files inbox area, it deleted them on the attachment over there.

Diya Jolly

Okay.

Heather Smith

Okay.

Diya Jolly

I need to look into this.

Heather Smith

I have submitted many, many extensive things, but you’re not. Yes.

Diya Jolly

Yeah. Why don’t you send them to me? Yeah. Look into this. That sounds weird. I do know we don’t. I will say this: the the intention was the old file structure was limited. The old like document area was very limited from a how you could search how what like eventually what how many documents you could store because of the technology it used. So the intention was, hey, can we give you something? The last 10 years, technology has changed dramatically, right? Can we give you something? Can we combine a bunch of the? Because we had multiple areas where you could store documents. Can we combine all of them into one area so you don’t have to go searching all over the place?

Heather Smith

Yeah.

Diya Jolly

And then can we apply more of the latest search technologies? Is really what we were trying. What I don’t know is what…

Heather Smith

…has happened there. Yeah.

Diya Jolly

…what went wrong in the migration, or if something went wrong in the migration, and that I need to track.

Heather Smith

Okay, thank you very much for acknowledging that, and we’ll I can give you further information about that.

Heather Smith

Let’s move on. Let’s talk about the very exciting Xero force.

Diya Jolly

Yes.

Heather Smith

So Xero Force seems to be using natural language to custom-create AI agents. So you must be very excited about that.

Diya Jolly

Yes.

Heather Smith

How did you come up with the name Xero Force?

Diya Jolly

It is. So the thought was use Xero to multiply the force of the partners for themselves, right? Like so Xero helps give you more power.

Heather Smith

Okay, I thought it was like Xero flow because you’re like creating all these slides.

Diya Jolly

Yeah, it was more about the it was more about the people using it more than about Xero, which is like can Xero double your like your power or triple your power.

Heather Smith

Yes, fabulous.

Would you like to just explain a little bit about how Xero Force will work for people?

Diya Jolly

Yeah, absolutely. So when you think about how partners work in their practice, there are lots of things they do repeatedly that are that probably they would like someone else, a junior employee, a workflow they write to just take care of it. So, for example, if your client asks you the same question, “Hey, how much money did I make last month? as an example, or being able to check if certain documents are submitted or if VAT is ready, And as we started talking to our our partners, the feedback we kept hearing was like, “Man, this takes a lot of our time, right? And so we started thinking, “How do we make this easy?

Diya Jolly

And what we built essentially is a platform where that has understanding of accounting and finance and payroll payments compliance, so you can go in there and you can define: “I want…this is what I do every day. I want you to execute it”, almost like you’re talking to someone who’s out of college, right? An example, like I said, could be every time my client asks me for what is my month, what what did they make last month? Go into their Xero org, match that client with their Xero org, go look at the P&L report, and tell them what they made last month. So I don’t have to answer the question, but do it as me, right? So that is essentially what we’ve built.

Diya Jolly

Now, what we will also do is we will provide templates for some of the common things we’re hearing, so people don’t have to create it from scratch. They can customise the templates, but it’s shorter. So we started with templates like GST templates. There are a bunch of other templates in there before we add payment follow-ups, invoice chasing templates, things like that. And we will also allow people to share their templates over time. Not yet, but over time, if a practice or a partner does something, they can share it within their practice. They can share it more broadly. So for you, you could publish a bunch of templates.

Heather Smith

Wow!

Diya Jolly

Yeah. So that will come over time.

Heather Smith

That’s kind of like the design studios, like the Canva, and you can share the design.

Diya Jolly

Exactly.

Heather Smith

Wow. And I guess they share. They could also potentially sell.

Diya Jolly

You could. We haven’t gone that far.

Heather Smith

I realised that. Potentially.

Diya Jolly

Potentially sure, yeah.

Heather Smith

Because it does seem, you know, as someone coming. If you sit at a high level, looking in at the bookkeeping and accounting industry, a lot of this should be templatised. A lot of this should be exactly the same. It’s not. We know it’s not, but…

Diya Jolly

It’s not. And and the the, I mean, and and people working in different practices do share with each other. Like when you come to Europe, like you see people share with each other, right?

Heather Smith

We absolutely do. It’s such a supportive community, and anyone needs anything, we’ll find someone who who will share it with them. So yeah, absolutely, and that I love it. I love it, and you can sort of you know share and and brand them out, and you know really help people. So that’s that one is really really exciting, I think.

Heather Smith

Let’s talk about Xero ultra.

Diya Jolly

Yes.

Heather Smith

Um. So that is moving into a bigger space for xero, and my understanding of it was it is using leveraging Syft for multi-entity reporting.

Diya Jolly

Yes.

Heather Smith

Okay.

Is that it? Will it enable an increase in the number of invoices you can process a month?

Diya Jolly

Yes, the number of transactions you can process.

Heather Smith

Oh, it will. Okay.

Diya Jolly

Yes.

Heather Smith

Okay. I didn’t. I…

Diya Jolly

Total number of transactions. Yes.

Heather Smith

Oh well, that’s very exciting, is it?

Diya Jolly

Yeah.

Heather Smith

Was there a cap on that?

There’d have to be a cap on that.

Diya Jolly

We are figuring out the cap for that.

Heather Smith

Okay.

Diya Jolly

We’re figuring out the cap for the bid. Okay. I think we are. It’s not so. It’s total transactions. We are going to do the cap on total transactions so that you can use it. Like if you don’t use bills, you can use more like more of invoices. So we do do a more of a capacity model because I think it works better for the customers we’ve talked to.

Heather Smith

Yeah. Yeah.

Diya Jolly

And other partners we’ve talked to. I am hesitant to throw out a number of transactions right now because that is what the beta is testing.

Heather Smith

Absolutely, and you know I’m speaking to the ERPs in this space, and they’re kind of pushing down to get more market share into the smaller business software space, and you know it’s it’s smart to be moving into that space as well, and it’s such an expensive leap into that ERP space. If people can hang on for another couple of years, it saves them 10s of 1000s of dollars.

Diya Jolly

Yeah. I think. So, in in all honesty, like this came from our partners and our small businesses more than anything because we were more focused on the horizontal, and then we kept hearing and seeing instances of people like going, well, I need those two things and I’m going to try to go to an ERP, and then they’re like they they fail and they come back, and then they’re not. They’re going. Hey, can you make this work for me? They spend so much time building custom scripts, and and we’re like, you know what? Like, if you’ve been a customer with us for a long time, we we owe it to you to try to make these things work, and that’s where it came from.

Heather Smith

Yeah, absolutely. And and and to that point, I had a customer who was blowing out of Xero, and they made allowances that they continue could continue, and and their caps were raised for about a year until they did the the move across. But it just, it functionally they could, it wasn’t nothing to do with Xero. It’s their business was growing. It was fantastic for them. So yeah.

Heather Smith

You may not have an answer for this, but are there times that AI is bridging a gap for something in the product that doesn’t exist?

Diya Jolly

Yeah, of course, of course. So Xero force will when AI is built in internally, then you have to have it in the product. So, like, let me. What’s a good example? So, scenario planning in JAX. Technically, you could have a tab for scenario planning. We don’t. Yeah, Jacks. That’s an example. The the one that I keep throwing out to my team is with zero force. You can build prepayments. You can build accruals and prepayments.

Heather Smith

Can you?

Okay.

Diya Jolly

You should be able to build it.

Heather Smith

Okay.

Diya Jolly

Because technically today you guys do it outside, either with like a Mayday or you do it. So, so there’s no and it’s an Excel spreadsheet. Simpler work papers, yeah, like people that still use Excel should be able to do it with Xero Force. So, so I think Xero Force gives a lot of ability for people to build their own mini custom apps, more even more than workflows, and we could also do that, right? Like we could do a prepayment template, we could do an accruals template. So yes, so I think it does.

Heather Smith

So, and I think this leads on your your response there leads on to my question:

Do you think advancements within Xero mean that users are going to be able to reduce their subscriptions for other solutions because they’re going to be able to build mini apps within?

Diya Jolly

Umm.

Heather Smith

For instance, the chasing of documents. That’s sort of something you’re going to. And you haven’t had that…

Diya Jolly

Our job…I think that’s a we are very ecosystem friendly because we we never want to claim that like every partner has a every ecosystem partner has a unique angle.

Heather Smith

Yeah, yes.

Diya Jolly

And we want to be supportive of whatever our customers want. I think our job though is to because it’s easier to have everything in one place and connected, our job is to make sure that our partners can, our partners and our small businesses can can do more and more of what takes them time across systems to do within us.

Heather Smith

Yeah.

Diya Jolly

So I think it’s a it’s a balance.

Heather Smith

Yes. Yeah.

Diya Jolly

I wouldn’t. It’s hard to predict what someone is using and how they’ll how how it yeah how it impacts their and…

Heather Smith

And they all like to customise and change things yes but…

Diya Jolly

We’re not going after saying hey you’re spending this much on one part on an ecosystem partner and we’re going to move that way or whatever.

Heather Smith

I didn’t think that at all I just thought that you know there’s there’s things there and honestly, even when like the Hubdoc merger acquisition happened, and I think that was probably before your time.

Diya Jolly

Yes, way before my time.

Heather Smith

Many people still use the other solutions that were out there for various reasons. For various reasons. So, if I can, I’d like to touch on the recent outages in Australia.

Diya Jolly

Yes.

Heather Smith

So, in the Xero Australia Partner Group, we were told that there would be a summary of what caused the issues. However, what we got was an apology, which we appreciate, but we didn’t get told what caused the issues. And while we’re not all extraordinarily technical, we kind of wanted to understand what caused them.

Diya Jolly

I think that’s very fair. I wonder why you were not told. Okay, so what? So…

Heather Smith

If you want to hold off not telling me that’s okay.

Diya Jolly

No, I can tell you.

Diya Jolly

There’s nothing there’s nothing to hide here. I’m surprised we didn’t publish a post on what happened. I will. It’s one of the things I want to follow up on why.

Diya Jolly

So a confluence of three things happened. One was AWS actually had a thermal event in one of their cells. Now, given the work we did from the last AWS outage, we’ve now figured out a way to start moving traffic over to another cell, but that takes time. So, if we had not done the work, the outage would have been eight or nine hours long. It was two hours long because we were able to move off the traffic, but it was still two hours.

Diya Jolly

The other thing that happened, and I’m going in in order of what I think the impact was from lowest to highest. The other thing that happened was we have what we call or what everybody calls a router that says if you’re this org, here’s the databases you go to, here’s the the Amazon cell you go to, AWS cell you go to. The supplier of that router changed their configurations. So when we upgraded the router and didn’t like really inform their customers when we upgraded their router. Basically, the configurations clashed, and because it is so low level in the system, like it’s somebody else’s configurations. It took us a little bit of time to find it, but usually those like it’s a one-off. Like people don’t change their configs all the time.

Diya Jolly

The third thing, which were the series of couple minutes, 10 minutes outages, which happened over a month, was essentially there is this phenomena where if two databases are lying in the same in the same Amazon cell, for lack of a better word, it’s called a noisy neighbour. You can look it up online. They start interfering with each other. So Xero’s core database and the database that holds all the org subscriptions have been lying on the same cell forever. They started interfering. There was no reason to believe they interfered because we made no change to it, and so we went and we like literally had like people working around the clock.

Diya Jolly

For a month, we’ve had a lot of burnout issues because of it, and nobody could figure out what’s going on because suddenly the number of logins wouldn’t change. So we couldn’t say it’s because of traffic. We couldn’t say it’s because we’ve scaled, but suddenly they would interfere with each other, and there would be a huge spike in the perceived amount of load on the databases, and they would just stall. And so essentially, what had to happen was we had to move that one of the databases to the other cell. But those kinds of things are exceptionally rare, and I, for one, actually have not seen one of them in my lifetime, and neither had Rick, our CTO, would been at Amazon, right? So it took a little while to like just discover it. So we are very apologetic for what happened, it was an awful time, timing, and we totally understand the impact.

Heather Smith

Thank you so much for that explanation. You know, we’re partners, and we just want to understand what’s happening. So I really appreciate that. I know that you’re calling me for time there. So really appreciate that explanation, and we were kind of like sitting in Australia, contacting people in the Philippines who are who were working for us, and they could access it. And we’re like, “What is happening? We don’t understand. But we really appreciate that.

Heather Smith

Look, I need to wrap up because you’ve got places to go. But thank you so much, Diya, for for spending time with us, spending time with the Accounting Apps listeners.

Is there anything that you’re looking forward to doing today? Are you going to go down the slide after your board meeting?

Diya Jolly

I am not going to go down the slide, but I’m very excited to meet a bunch of partners.

Heather Smith

I’ve done the slide, Diya.

Diya Jolly

Is it fun?

Heather Smith

Yeah, it’s fun.

Diya Jolly

Okay, maybe I’ll try it.

Heather Smith

Do the slide.

Diya Jolly

Maybe I’ll try.

Heather Smith

Okay, we need photos of Diya on the slide.

Diya Jolly

No, but I’m very excited to meet more and more of our partners.

Heather Smith

Fantastic! Thank you so much for your time today, Diya.

Diya Jolly

Thank you.