Keep an eye on Xero, the New Zealand-based company that markets an online accounting application. As mentioned in a prior newsletter even though this is nominally a low-end package, Jim Bourke, principal of WithumSmith-Brown, says it can compete effectively further upstream. Next month, Jamie Sutherland, who formerly ran Sage’s Simply Accounting efforts, is scheduled to take over as managing director for the United States. Meanwhile, CEO Rod Drury continues his American buzz building and is speaking at the Sleeter Group’s conference in Las Vegas in early November. Also, the company recently completed a significant upgrade to its hosting architecture, which it said represents a major step in the scaling of Xero’s database platform and a faster underlying storage layer.

A survey of more than 10,000 businesses by the Sage Group found that there is a decline in confidence in global and local economic conditions. But the poll, taken across much of the world including North America, showed that many businesses are cautiously optimistic about the prospects for their own operations and that the performance of most businesses held steady or improved over the last six months.

Intuit has been fighting outages that affect its payment processing operations. And while this isn’t specifically about mid-market financial software, it points out the difficulties that companies in general, and Intuit specifically, face in the move toward online services. The Intuit problems have included both outages and slowdown in service for Merchant Services and the company’s Billing Manager.

Avalara has completed a $21-million-funding round that the sales-and-use-tax vendor began in the spring. Documents filed with the SEC show that only $30,014 in equity remained unsold out of the original offering of $21,250,001. The first sale of stock by the privately held company was completed on April 15 in a year in which it has been stocking up on executives, including its new president, Kevin Riegelsberger.