Xero hits the 1 million mark

Cloud accounting company has more than a million subscribers

XEO CEO Rod Drury.

XEO CEO Rod Drury.

Xero now has more than 1 million subscribers to its accounting software-as-a-service offering, the ASX-listed company announced this morning.

In the last year, the service has added more than 300,000 customers, Xero said.

“Five-and-a-half years ago, at 50,000 subscribers, we asked shareholders to imagine our business at a million subscribers,” the company’s CEO and founder, Rod Drury, said in a statement.

“We invested for the long term to build a business and ecosystem to achieve those numbers. It’s very satisfying to deliver on that promise.”

The company in November announced it had completed its shift to Amazon’s public cloud platform.

The mammoth migration involved moving some 1.4 petabytes of data, 59 billion records, 3000 apps and 120 databases onto Amazon Web Services.

Xero’s GM of platform architecture and delivery, Mark Rees, previously told Computerworld that a key motivation for shifting to cloud was the ability to innovate quicker.

Drury said today that artificial intelligence and machine learning will help drive the next advances in accounting software.

“Machine learning and automation will open up the next phase of innovation in accounting, driving a transition in the industry bigger than the move to the cloud did ten years ago,” the CEO said.

“With technology doing more of the time-consuming, data entry work, we will see more accountants take on advisory and virtual CFO roles within the small businesses they support.

“Rather than just keying in data, they’re interpreting the output - and with the power of machine learning, they’ll provide higher level advisory services that help clients feel in control of their finances which is a key human function that cannot be replaced.”

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