By Mike Purcell, MSI Taylor, Accountants, Brisbane.

Mike Purcell of Brisbane accounting firm MSI Taylor says both franchisors and franchisees interact better via Xero software.

As a cloud product, Xero enables a franchise to offer a template chart of accounts to its franchisees – allowing consequently for benchmarking on key success and performance items.

Often the accountant acts as an intermediary so only the figures the franchisee wants to provide – that have genuine benchmarking value – are extracted and sent to the franchisor. The franchisor can then relay best practice percentages and margins to all the other franchisees, demonstrating real success in the real world from real franchisees in their system.