Yoco, a South African payments company that officially launched in October 2015, has announced its integration with Xero, a New Zealand-based cloud accounting software for SMEs.
Yoco’s point-of-sale app and card readers enable SMEs in South Africa to accept card payments at the store or on the go with no monthly fees.
For Yoco merchants who use Xero as their accounting software, this integration means their cash and card sales, VAT, bank account settlements and processing fees will be seamlessly updated into their Xero account. This is a major step towards automated booking and making it easier for merchants to do business.
The integration is currently being beta tested with a handful of small businesses and will be live on the Xero Add-ons marketplace next month.
This integration marks Yoco’s second integration with a global tech company and is a first in South Africa and Africa.
“Cash flow is the lifeblood of any business and accounting is the means by which a business owner can answer the question, ‘How am I doing?’,” says Carl Wazen, Yoco co-founder and chief business officer. “Our integration with Xero is an extension of Yoco’s mission to empower the growth of small businesses by allowing our merchants to spend less time administering their business and more time growing and engaging their customers. We want to make running a business as easy as swiping a card.”
“Nowadays, accounting platforms are no longer an in-house facility running on a mainframe somewhere,” adds Nick Jacobs, senior software engineer at Yoco. “Xero represents a new breed of business support technology based in the cloud, specifically suited for SMEs.
“This fits in perfectly with Yoco’s fully cloud-based architecture, making this integration possible by leveraging open standards like OAuth and HTTP-based web services. Xero’s existing web services interface made integration of the Yoco back-end a straightforward development exercise.”
“Xero is committed to provide simple, easy to use and functional solutions for small businesses. We welcome when other tech companies, like Yoco, integrate with our platform and enhances the user experience,” comments Gary Turner, Xero co-founder and MD of Xero in the Europe, Middle East and Africa region.
SMEs, bookkeepers and accountants using this integration will save time and money by having their Yoco payments automatically feed into their Xero accounting package, enabling them to perform simpler and quicker cash-flow reconciliations. Less time will now be spent on manually reconciling Yoco-managed transaction flows.
This means, today Yoco merchants can:
* Run their businesses from anywhere and have complete mobility.
* Track their daily Yoco card and cash-originated receipts volume.
* Access all statements in real time – Xero converts the Yoco daily summary into an invoice with sales, tips, fees and a tax breakdown.
* Monitor the cost of using Yoco with complete fee transparency.
* Leverage Xero’s automated reconciliation tools to track Yoco payments.
* Never have to back up work, with no data loss.
Various measures have been put in place to ensure that the integration is secure.
