Saturday 9th March 2024 | No. 75
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Introducing Mark Orttung: Projectworks' new CEO
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E’RE DELIGHTED TO SHARE THAT MARK ORTTUNG IS JOINING PROJECTWORKS AS OUR NEW CEO, TAKING THE REIGNS FROM OUR NOW PRESIDENT AND CHIEF PRODUCT OFFICER MATT HAYTER. Welcome to the team Mark! It’s awesome to have you onboard. Thank you. It really is a privilege and now that the news is out I’m really excited to be able to join the team and continue to build
the platform and product to help our clients achieve their missions more successfully. Consulting firms are such great businesses! I especially enjoy working with smaller mission-driven consultancies as they are really accelerating progress across a variety of industries through their unique viewpoints and experience. You’ve spent a lot of your career in consulting firms – can you tell us some more about your background? Sure thing. I started right out of college with Ander-
sen Consulting (which became Accenture). I started out as a programmer on a tool that helped implement Andersen’s methodology, so I learned a lot about creating a scalable, repeatable process for a global consulting firm.
I then had a lot of unusual roles including two years in a program studying AI at Northwestern and working on how to apply it to Andersen’s business, working with clients like Sun Microsystems, Intel, and Microsoft on how to apply their latest technology to
the enterprise, and later on I wrote a business plan with a colleague that led to an Andersen-funded startup. It was a software-as-a-service company for employee services, however at the time (this was 1995) the concept of SaaS didn’t even exist yet – fair to say we were ahead of the market! I then held a variety of roles across a combination of SaaS and Consulting businesses which led to becoming Chief Operating Officer and President of Bill.com.
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Xero unveils its AI vision Introducing receipt to reimagine small management in Relay business accounting T
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REVIEWS GENAI POWERED BUSINESS COMPANION ‘JUST ASK XERO’
At its inaugural Investor Day today, global small business platform Xero unveiled its AI vision which the business says has the potential to reimagine accounting and improve the lives of small businesses. This included previewing ‘Just Ask Xero’ — Xero’s new GenAI-powered smart business companion for small businesses and their advisors — that will help them complete accounting-related tasks and provide deep insights to enable them to
run their business better.
Xero outlined its approach to improve how small businesses and advisors can manage their accounting by integrating AI into business-facing tasks to automate them, help improve efficiency, and empower them with better insights to run their business. Xero is doing this by: • Introducing conversational interfaces on the apps and surfaces (i.e. mobile, email and Whatsapp) where Xero customers need support • Automating and streamlining important but re-
petitive and time-consuming accounting tasks
• Delivering the right insights at the right time Diya Jolly, Chief Product Officer at Xero, said: “Technology has changed the lives of small businesses dramatically — first with cloud accounting, then automation, and now through GenAI. We’re embracing this new wave of tech innovation responsibly, with our customers at the heart of what we do, as we deliver on our vision to be the most trusted and insightful small business platform.”
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Saturday 9th March 2024
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ODAY WE’RE INTRODUCING RECEIPT MANAGEMENT TO RELAY, GIVING YOU THE TOOLS TO CAPTURE AND STORE RECEIPTS RIGHT WITHIN YOUR EXISTING BUSINESS BANKING PLATFORM. Here’s how to save time, streamline your workflows, and stay audit-ready by centralizing receipt collection in Relay. Searching through empty pockets. Rummaging through overflowing drawers. Picking crumpled papers out of wastebaskets. Hoping that maybe, just maybe, you’ll find the receipt your bookkeeper has been emailing you about all week. It’s not just you. Collect-
ing, organizing, and reconciling receipts is a pain. Add in a handful of employees charging business expenses to company cards (because let’s face it, the reimbursement rigmarole is no better), and staying on top of those receipts goes from painful to downright agonizing. You’d be forgiven for wanting to ignore the problem entirely—why save receipts when you can just convince yourself they’re not actually that important? But you can’t escape one undeniable fact: capturing receipts is one of the most important things you can do to protect the financial health of your business. That’s why we’ve launched a suite of receipt management tools that will save you
time, put an end to chaotic and inefficient receipt “systems” (so long, shoebox!), and eliminate an expensive extra tool from your swelling list of subscriptions. It’s all part of our mission to keep you in control of your money with an unparalleled level of insight into your spending. Here’s what’s launching, and what it means for your business.
Set a receipt policy, and never lose a receipt again Forget chasing down employees for receipts, or slogging through endless pages of transactions trying to match a receipt to the right purchase.
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