Small business accounting platform Xero announced that Xero Analytics now has industry benchmarking capabilities. The Industry Benchmarks feature turns real-time, anonymized and aggregated data from Xero small business customers around the world into comparable performance metrics. The software performs competitive performance scoring that analyzes groups of key financial ratios, which are labeled as leading, lagging or in line with peers, with performance for each business measured against cohorts at the industry and country level, and highlighted in a personalized scorecard. Further, there’s targeted metric tracking abilities. Users can benchmark nine critical drivers of health across revenue, profitability and cash management, including debtor days, growth in sales revenue and operating efficiency. The new feature also provides access to AI-generated insights on actions a business can take. Overall, the feature is meant to offer a standardized starting point for more proactive, data-driven conversations between small businesses and their accountants or bookkeepers.
In other Xero news, the company also announced an integration with Microsoft 365 to bring real-time financial data to their users, supported by its own AI “superagent” JAX. At launch, JAX will enable actions within Microsoft 365 Copilot to answer businesses’ financial questions and surface customized insights. This lays the foundation for expanded capabilities across any Microsoft 365 app, including building forecasts in Excel and drafting reports and presentations in Word and PowerPoint, all grounded in live data from Xero. This includes getting answers and acting within Copilot Chat; the ability to analyze, model and plan with Live Data in Excel; using Word to generate automated narrative paragraphs and formatted report sections directly inside the file; and automatically generate PowerPoint presentation slides with native charts, revenue trends and key metrics.
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