Xero Developer Challenge Winners Announced!
A little over 3 months ago, we challenged our developer community to build awesome innovative apps utilising cloud technologies to benefit small businesses around the globe.
Sponsored by AWS, 230 developers accept our challenge resulting in 35 submissions. We were impressed with all the submissions and our judges hotly debated the merits of each one until a consensus was reached. We want to thank all the developers who participated and look forward to working together as we help small businesses thrive.
Envelope please … and the winners are ….
For Best New Integration
The winner is Curve.
Curve built a new innovative solution for card spending that’s becoming increasingly popular in the UK, their focus towards servicing small businesses makes them a great fit for Xero, and their integration really stood out on a number of levels.
For starters Curve is mobile only, the integration connection and setup experience running through mobile isn’t typical in our ecosystem so it’s been great to see such a slick execution using our API. The design and flow is easy to use with clear steps for the user to complete the setup process. And the integration itself is both simple and complex, posting into Xero bank transactions for money spent that can be easily reconciled against your bank feed. The complexity comes from all the variations of things the user could do in Curve, make a business spend on a personal card, spend on a business card and then reverse this onto a different card, make a personal spend and later change it to a business expense, the list goes on but the team have covered all of these scenarios to make sure the user has a hassle free experience and the data just flows into Xero.
This all speaks to the impressive skills and approach from the Curve product team. Lead by Arthur Leung the team have taken a design lead approach with meticulous UX planning by Matthew Snyman followed up by some seriously talented developers in the form of Gary Grace and Paulo Caldeira.
For Best Enhancement to an Existing Integration
The winner is Exsalerate.
Exsalerate have been providing CRM functionality to Xero users for years and were prompted to update their integration by their customers that wanted to manage their customers better. Forming strong bonds with your customers is a great way to make sure your business is successful. Linking the data in Xero to account management workflows in Exsalerate helps to make sure that account managers are always having informed, valuable conversations.
The improvements made were:
- Improved Account Management Dashboard
- Comparing sales data over different periods
- Enabling easier Data enrichment
- Enabled creating of Xero invoices within Exsalerate
- An impressive solution to make up for the lack of a Quotes endpoint which allows users to email quotes from Xero into Exsalerate
The overall quality of the improvements made was impressive. We were particularly impressed with the solution to get Quotes from Xero into Exsalerate and the creative thinking that this showed. Great developers get things done no matter what the limitations are!
For Most Innovative use of Xero’s API
The winner is Tax Optimiser.
Tax Optimiser provides an easy tool to analyse future tax implications for small businesses. Using data from Xero Tax Optimiser will present the clients tax liabilities but also highlight where adjustments can be made to reduce tax or where tax relief claims again be made against schemes like R&D tax credits and SEIS in the UK. Sounds pretty simple but behind the scenes there is some smart stuff going on — Xero contains all the raw data and of course provides the business with useful reports and tools using this data to help them run their business, Tax Optimiser is applying a logic over this raw data to present insights that can help the user both understand their tax and take actions to improve how much they will pay. This is something we’ve not seen in our ecosystem before. And the really cool thing, Tax Optimiser is geared up for accountants to use with their clients, providing an opportunity for accountants to engage and have valuable conversations that can save their clients money and make them look great.
For Best Open Source Project with Xero’s API
The winner is Xero Huginn.
The Xero Huginn Agent was created by Andrew Cantino who has led engineering teams as a Chief Architect and in his spare time likes making open source software and playing with machine learning.
Andrew submitted the first ever Xero plugin for the events connector platform “Huginn”. Huginn is a system for building agents that perform automated tasks for you online. Huginn is open source and therefore you must run a personal instance of it on your own server; this way you are in control of all of your agents and data streams.
With Andrew’s submission to XDHax there is now a plugin to the Huginn platform that can connect to your Xero org and do things like consume Xero webhooks and create invoices in Xero based on other events you set as triggers.
Xero Huginn was chosen as the winner of the Best Open Source Project category because the project is not only using open source software, but contributing a whole new feature set (connecting to the Xero API) to an open source project. Xero loves open source, and we couldn’t be more excited to see passionate people making Xero API’s accessible on a free and open connector platform.
Andrew had this to say about his experience participating in XDHax:
I enjoyed integrating Huginn with the Xero APIs. The Xero APIs that I used were well documented and straightforward to integrate with. I hope that people find exciting uses for the Xero Huginn Agent!
Check out Xero Huginn on Github.
Thank you again, to all the developers who participated in XD Hax!
