I retired from personal blogging in July 2008.
But you can find me over at http://blog.xero.com.
Big milestone for Xero last Monday as we made Xero available in the UK market.
http://content.xero.com/pdf/announcements/080303-xero-now-available-in-uk.pdf
It’s always been important to us to be exporting so we’ve been working hard to make ourselves available in the UK as soon as we could. We are well ahead of schedule which is a direct result of taking the time to do some real Research and Development to ensure that we built a platform that allowed us to quickly enter new markets.
Our UK version is the exact same code base as what is running in New Zealand so there is minimal drag for each country. Of course it’s not just about the accounting application. Our Back Office systems, Billing, Help and Support have to be country aware. Pretty much everything above the tax engine is the same across all geographies so we can continue to look after our New Zealand customers as our target catchment grows.
So far we’ve built a great relationship with UK SaaS Accounting guru Dennis Howlett and had good profile on the UK industry sites.
AccMan: Xero - a new contender to watch?
AccMan: Introducing Xero
AccMan: More on Xero
AccountingWeb: Hosted Xero accounting system opens for business in UK
AccountancyAge: Xero latest mover in online accounts market
Early days but great to officially be an exporter again.
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Congratulations Rod! As a proud kiwi, it’s fantastic to see you exporting, and as a kiwi Xero customer, fantastic that the great local service will continue.
What about other languages, Rod? Ready for that?
My presentation layer is all XSLT. I wrote a simple utility that pulls all texts out into an Excel file. Then I give it to one or more customers to translate. Then I run the same utility to put it back in. Got German, Polish, Russian, few more European languages. The cost of additional maintenance: none. The only trouble is chasing customers now and then for translations of new phrases. :-)
I bet it’s gonna be harder for you with the amount of Flash and scripting you have on the site.
Happy to share how to build a site that is easy to translate, if anyone’s interested. There are a few considerations you need to make early in the process.
Max we use an XSLT layer as well. We have full separation of the business objects and presentation layer. Accounting in different countries is more than just flipping language strings.
Congratulations Rod, great stuff.
Max, when every country in the world adopts the IAAF standards in exactly way and all the international tax laws are harmonised, this will be probably when our secret lizard overlords reveal themselves, then it’ll be a simple matter of translation with new stylesheets.
Oops, typo, that should read IFRS not IAAF standards. My bad.