Episode notes
Xero paid an influencer. She posted that she'd spent 120 grand on accountants since 2020, 800 pounds a month, and that she now builds her own management reports with Xero and Claude for nothing extra. Six months free in the link. LinkedIn hasn't stopped since.
The anger makes sense. Accountants are the channel that grew Xero out of New Zealand. Whether Xero owes them anything for that is the uncomfortable bit. Software going straight to the business owner isn't new either. Intuit did it with Super Bowl ads and never apologised. Xero did.
Split a management report into three. Preparation, sign-off, advice. Preparation has changed, and that's where the revenue always sat, so no skirting around it. Sign-off hasn't. AI still gets things wrong and someone has to stand behind the numbers in month two. Advice is the layer worth building on.
Then there's the connector nobody checked. Xero's MCP exposes reports, not bank or card lines. No transactional data flows through. Technical stage, or protecting the accountant relationship. That answer decides how much of her claim stands up.
Jez and Cam on which part of the job actually got automated, and what to do about the parts that didn't.
Five minutes. One thing that matters. We ignore the rest, so you can too.
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