Xero meets Bubble.io 🤩— the perfect platform to automate and scale your small to medium business (SMB).

Photo by StellrWeb on Unsplash — Does your SMB tech stack look like this? If so…read on! 🤩

Do you run a small to medium business (SMB) and use Xero for your Invoices, Bills, Accounting, and Payroll? If so…read on!

You know the story

The typical small to medium business is carried by a combination of the owner’s sweat, determination, grit, probably caffeine, and an unlimited pool of unaccounted-for personal labor.

Sending invoices and organizing paperwork on a Saturday evening? You are likely one of the millions of SMB owners who could use better systems to better organize your business and enable you to grow, automate and win back some precious time for family or other pursuits.

But change is painful. We SMB owners are barely surviving week to week, with multiple clients, contractors, and staff depending on you as the lynchpin for your “successful” operation. Phones ringing, emails in and out, creating systems, and improving operational visibility are key priorities for SMB owners.

Enter Xero

If you’re not on the Xero page yet… get ready!

Xero provides an accessible cloud-based entry point for the typical small-medium business to take a lot of grunt work out of the day-to-day bookkeeping and financial management.

Accept payments, link your bank account, create bank rules to speed up bank reconciliation, log receipts and expenses, and create custom dashboards and views of your accounts so that you stay in control are all core features.

Xero also integrates with lots of other tools, so you can keep your data synchronized and automate lots of boring tasks.

I personally run Xero for our company MomentumGroup.tech, and I can keep on top of our accounts in less than 15 minutes a day, and this includes issuing invoices, bank reconciliation, paying contractors, and payroll for a company with around 25 headcount and a 7-figure turnover in USD terms.

It’s not that hard either. I was able to learn everything I needed to know about Xero from online documentation and about 3hrs of coaching from our Bookkeeper at the beginning.

Xero meet Bubble.io

Now it gets better!

Xero and Bubble are a perfect pair. A match made in SMB heaven.

Bubble is an affordable web platform that enables small to medium businesses to create custom web applications such as:

• customer databases
• scheduling tools
• inventory management systems
• ordering systems
• multiple user role applications
• apps for field staff
• email/SMS notification systems
• analytics dashboards

Bubble is also a perfect platform to sit between your current business Software as a Service (SAAS) tools, and create a middleware or central integration layer. It can play a small or a large part in stitching together your disparate systems, and getting them to work in synchronized harmony!

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In a recent project for an SMB owner in Australia, we created a custom web app that can:

• Link to Xero using OAuth2 (where you log in to Xero and link your web app to your Xero account) and choose which Xero tenant (account) to link with.
• Ingest Xero contacts
• Ingest Xero products and services
• Ingest Xero invoices
• Create Contacts and push to Xero
• Create Invoices and push to Xero
• Send Invoices from Xero from within the web app
• Pull the Invoice status from Xero and update in the web app
• Create notes on Contacts and Invoices.

This list is not exhaustive, only a list of what our client requested from us.

Unique advantages of Bubble.io vs off-the-shelf software

The difference between Bubble and other off-the-shelf software is the level of customization that is possible. Bubble enables small to medium businesses to define a web-based system that is exactly fit to measure for the particular business.

Off-the-shelf (OTS) software is usually a compromise on one level or another. Owners often say “it’s Ok but if only it could do X”.

By building your own software, you control the outcome of which requirements you wish to build. The unique value proposition of Bubble vs OTS is the level of customization achievable.

This includes configuring your Xero integration to do exactly the steps you require it to do (as long as Xero allows those steps!) using the Xero APIs.

• Need to track customers, but add a parent company? Easy.
• Need a customized technician screen that can generate a report? Done.
• Need to notify your customers before a job that they have an appointment? Not a problem.

Unique advantages of Bubble.io vs custom coded software

On the other hand, Bubble offers customization similar to coding from scratch, but a lot of the decision-making in code is taken away from small to medium businesses and outsourced to Bubble. You can let Bubble’s dev team sweat about whether the server is up to date and the latest version of coding tools that they run on their servers. You simply don’t carry that as a cost of your business.

Instead, you get to worry about customizing the application to the unique business logic you require. Bubble.io is a little like a modern iteration of Microsoft Access and Visual Basic, revamped for the current generation, and built on best-in-class web technologies and cloud-based infrastructure.

The end result for small to medium businesses is the ability to create a fully customized web application. This ability was previously reserved for those on the upper medium and enterprise levels of business, those who could spend upwards of $500,000 on their app builds and over $50,000 minimum on licensing fees.

In this way, Bubble creates insane levels of value for small to medium businesses.

Now SMBs can build customized software to a professional standard in say 20–40% of the upfront and ongoing running costs.

Add an integration layer with tools like Xero and your Bubble app can create efficiencies that:

• drive systemization
• automate manual tasks
• enable you to mature and scale
• reduce your stress!

Next steps

If you run a small to medium business that is profitable and is experiencing any of the pain points described above, MomentumGroup.tech has the perfect solution to build custom software for your business and integrate with Xero to perform whichever Xero functions you need from within your software.

We have a mature master application built on Bubble.io with modules for all common use cases that we have generated over 30 similar projects. We can get you a professional, custom solution that integrates with Xero for a fraction of the cost of existing competitors such as Salesforce.

Reach out at [hello@momentumgroup.tech](mailto: hello@momentumgroup.tech) or visit momentumgroup.tech for more information.

Looking to learn and build a career in Bubble? Join our for a 8-week intensive Bubble Bootcamp at Momentum Academy