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Accounting

Xero Launches Machine Learning Automation

Building on the success of its first machine learning project, Xero announced the next step in its journey towards code-free accounting – the automation of account codes and bills for all small businesses and their partners.

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Building on the success of its first machine learning project, Xero announced the next step in its journey towards code-free accounting – the automation of account codes and bills for all small businesses and their partners.

With more than 500,000 bills entered into Xero every day, and each line of a bill edited individually, the automation of billing account codes is set to transform accounting practices, ensuring greater accuracy and reducing the time small businesses spend creating bills.

While bills is the second-most commonly used feature of Xero, it has the second-highest rate of defaults, with every small business using the system differently.  Fifty percent of businesses use 10 or more expense codes, while others create their own codes, which means that information is often entered incorrectly.  Xero’s new artificial intelligence system will consider  each individual business’s characteristics, then recommend account codes based on what it has learned.

“Machine learning is fundamentally transforming the way small businesses and their advisors think about accounting,” said Herman Man, VP of product and partnerships at Xero. “By automating account codes and bills, our small businesses and partners are able to spend less time on tedious bookkeeping and more time on their business and delivering value to their customers. This is just the first step in our promise to make code-free accounting a reality for all our small business and accounting partners alike.”

With accuracy at the forefront of Xero’s latest development, the account code automation is rolling out to all Xero users, with customers continuing to code their accounts for bills as normal. A minimum of 150 bills is required to be entered and as more bills are entered and accepted or corrected, the better the suggestions become.