Wahoo! Big milestone – launched Xero in Australia today. Product release has just finished.

Massive couple of weeks for me updating the now enormous Help Centre so that it’s relevant for Australia – I want our Australian customers to see screenshots showing AUD not NZD or GBP and the correct GST rate for their country and addresses on invoices that look like they belong to Australia, as well as help for their specific GST filing requirements as they work in Xero. Over the last 3.5 weeks I’ve updated 120 help pages and created 250 images! Believe me, that’s a LOT of work.

I’ve also created a full demo organisation in Xero so people can take a look around how Xero would work for them – there’s loads of transactions, dummy Australian bank accounts fully reconciled and nicely printing invoices and statements complete with my own homemade Australian company logo … which suspiciously looks like the theme the design guys went with for the Xero Australia website homepage … I swear mine was first … I’ve been building the demo company for weeks.

If you ever want to see the free demo companies I create, just go to the Xero website (www.xero.com) and use the green ‘Try Xero’ button to sign up for a free trial.

Huh? Everywhere else lets me have this as a legitimate name (Google, email (work and play), YouTube, errr, Xero and … I’m sure I’ve signed up to other stuff but maybe not), so why not you Facebook? I really don’t want to use it (because I have this sense I am going to bombarded with more spam that I already get telling me my friends-using-Facebook are having a birthday, yet if I’ve never signed up to the damn thing how can it assume who my friends are … anyway …) but the only way I’m going to keep in touch with a couple of travelling friends is to sign up. Not everyone has a blog or personal website like I do.

What kind of discrimination is this anyway? Do they trawl through rafts of noise words in other languages to determine if someone is a colour or a gender instead of a ‘real’ name? I wonder what orange is in Russian …