Zenbooks has been named Large Firm of the Year and Community Champion at the Xero Partner Awards Canada 2026. The winners were announced at the awards ceremony at Xerocon in Denver in August 2026. We were also a finalist in a third category, Advisory Innovator of the Year.

We have been a Xero partner since we founded the firm in 2015, and we have been a finalist in these awards before without winning. This is our first win, and it is two of them.

Award details

• Awards: Xero Partner Awards Canada 2026
• Categories won: Large Firm of the Year; Community Champion
• Also shortlisted: Advisory Innovator of the Year (finalist)
• Eligibility for Large Firm of the Year: Canada-based Xero partners with more than 16 employees
• Assessment period: April 1, 2025 to March 31, 2026
• Announced: August 2026, at Xerocon Denver
• Firm: Zenbooks, Ottawa, Ontario. Fully remote. Xero Gold Partner.

How the Xero Partner Awards are judged

Nominations are reviewed first by an internal Xero panel, which scores each application and puts forward the finalists. Final judging is done by external industry specialists who score those recommendations, and winners are selected through that scoring system.

For Large Firm of the Year, firms are assessed on five written submissions: business vision and purpose, how the firm uses the Xero product suite, client care, Xero advocacy, and adoption of the Xero app ecosystem. The assessment looks at demonstrated Xero expertise, client satisfaction and retention, and innovation in the use of technology to improve service delivery.

We mention all of this because "award-winning" on its own is close to meaningless. What matters is what was assessed, over what period, and by whom. Below is a summary of what we actually put in front of the judges.

The other finalists

Awards mean nothing without the field. These were the shortlists in the three categories we were in.

Large Firm of the Year: ConnectCPA LLP, Twenty Eighty, Zenbooks (winner).

Community Champion: MOD Accounting & Tax, Zenbooks (winner).

Advisory Innovator of the Year: Accounting Plus Financial Services Inc., Vizhen Books Inc., Zenbooks.

Every firm on those lists wrote a full set of submissions and put a year of their work in front of an external judging panel. MOD Accounting & Tax won Community Champion in 2025 for its work with women entrepreneurs and social enterprises, and it is a category we are glad to be judged in alongside them. Canadian cloud accounting is a small enough community that we know most of these firms. The standard in these categories is the reason the result is worth anything. We want to also acknowledge and congratulate the hard work these great firms are also doing and raising the bar.

Large Firm of the Year: what we submitted

The conversation is the product

For the large majority of our clients, a monthly or weekly call is mandatory. It is not an upsell and it is not optional. Reports do not change anyone's behaviour. Discussions do. We sit with the owner, work through what the numbers mean, and leave with a decision rather than a PDF.

Making that call a requirement of working with us is the single delivery decision that most shapes the rest of the firm. It sets our pricing, our hiring profile, our capacity planning, and how current the books have to be.

Cloud-native since 2015

We were among the first accounting firms in Canada built fully on Xero rather than migrating to the cloud later. Live bank feeds and continuous reconciliation mean a client's numbers are current now, not six weeks after quarter end. That is the precondition for the advisory calls, because you cannot have a useful conversation about a real decision on top of stale books.

We match Xero's features to what each of our verticals needs. Tracking categories and project reporting for agencies and professional services. Multi-currency and disciplined sales tax handling for e-commerce. The same tracking tools become fund and program reporting for non-profits. We file in TaxCycle, now part of Xero, connected to the same ledger, so compliance is not a disconnected exercise at the end of the year.

Around that core we run a deliberately integrated stack: Dext and Hubdoc at document capture, Plooto for payables, Ignition for proposals and engagement, a dedicated forecasting layer on top of the ledger, and Karbon for the practice itself. We have also built our own application connecting to the Xero ecosystem.

Advisory that does not depend on partners

Most firms deliver advisory through partners, which is why most firms cannot scale it. We defined the roles, hiring profiles, and delivery standards so that senior accountants and managers deliver planning and guidance consistently, without a partner always in the room.

Saying no

We are disciplined about who we serve. During the award’s assessment period we walked away from roughly ten percent of our revenue, including two of our largest clients, because those files required exclusive partner time that could not scale and we were not the right fit for them. It strained onboarding and it tested morale. We would do it again.

We also tell prospects the truth about what they need. Most small businesses asking for a virtual CFO actually need controller-level work: clean books, a reliable close, real systems, dependable numbers. Recommending the less expensive service feels commercially backwards. It is also the fastest way we know to earn someone's trust.

How we de-risk the relationship

Fixed fees, so cash flow is predictable. All work performed in Canada, with no offshoring. One point of contact rather than six. A 100 percent money-back guarantee: an unhappy client inside 30 days gets a full refund and our help transitioning out.

Internally, we protect a 37.5 hour work week and a firm-wide year-end shutdown. We sell clarity, so we are obliged to run the firm with it.

Community Champion: the open banking campaign

The second award recognizes work that sits outside our client base entirely.

In August 2025 we launched a national, volunteer-run advocacy campaign through OpenSME with one goal: make sure small businesses were included in the first phase of Canada's open banking framework. Decisions were being made in rooms full of banks, fintechs, and consumer advocates. Nobody was organizing the 1.2 million small businesses that generate roughly half of Canada's GDP.

The campaign was run on evenings and weekends. It brought together more than 250 small business owners and supporters, along with national associations including CFIB and the Canadian Queer Chamber of Commerce, nonprofit leaders, accounting voices, and fintech companies, Xero among them.

What we did during the assessment period:

• Researched and filed a federal pre-budget submission with three recommendations: include SMEs in phase one, set an enforceable implementation timeline, and require a national business awareness campaign
• Hosted a national roundtable of business and policy leaders
• Published op-eds across five regional, national, and policy outlets
• Chaired the payments stage at Canada's national open banking conference

On November 4, 2025, the federal budget confirmed timelines for open banking and a framework that explicitly includes small businesses, with secure data sharing beginning in 2026 and payment capabilities targeted by mid-2027. Two of our three recommendations are reflected in it.

We will not claim sole credit for that. Many people pushed, over many years. What we can say is that the campaign pulled small businesses back into a conversation that was drifting away from them, that a senator amplified the concerns, and that a national business federation publicly endorsed the effort. The campaign reached more than 100,000 readers through earned media, plus 18,000 impressions on LinkedIn.

The rest of it

Community work at Zenbooks is not one person's project. Our director of operations volunteers as treasurer of her local elementary school's parent advisory council and of a minor hockey division. Our senior tax manager's advocating on modernizing a small business tax threshold reached more than 87,000 Canadians. We publish French-language commentary for francophone SMEs. Two team members volunteer with the Canadian Queer Chamber of Commerce, where we deliver free finance, payroll, and tax education and donate mentoring time to 2SLGBTQI+ entrepreneurs. When someone refers us work and cannot accept a gift in return, we donate to a charity in their name.

Eric serves on the national board and the Finance and Audit Committee of Cystic Fibrosis Canada, a cause that is personal to his family, and the Saumure family endows the Ronald Saumure Award of Excellence at Algonquin College in memory of Eric's father.

Advisory Innovator of the Year: finalist

We did not win this one, and we are including it because the work behind it is the work we care most about.

Business owners do not buy "advisory" and they do not search for it. They search for problems. Should I pay myself salary or dividends? Is my contractor actually an employee? Do I need a holding company? We rebuilt our website, our funnel, and our sales conversations around those problems instead of the industry's vocabulary.

We also gave the diagnostic away. Our Financial Clarity Assessment takes about three minutes, requires no email address, and produces a personalized report showing what to fix first, what it costs, and free resources to fix it yourself if you never hire us. Six ungated calculators sit alongside it, covering worker classification, income splitting, salary versus dividends, contractor versus employee costs, holding companies, and incorporation readiness.

By the end of the award’s assessment period, 104 Canadian business owners had completed the free assessment in its first ten weeks.

What we are doing next

The assessment became the Zenbooks Financial Clarity Index, Canada's national benchmark of small business financial clarity, published in 2026 from a survey of Canadian business owners with methodology reviewed and endorsed by independent economists and academics. The national score is 56.7 out of 100. More than half of Canadian small businesses score below 60.

The 2027 wave is already in design, with a planned restructured instrument and a preregistered validation program. Any Canadian owner can measure themselves against the benchmark for free, with no email gate and no sales call attached.

Thank you

To our clients, who let us into the hardest decisions in their businesses and who are the reason a category like Large Firm of the Year was winnable at all. To our team, who deliver this every day across the country. And to Xero, who bet on Canadian cloud-native firms early and who have been a partner in the open banking fight rather than a spectator.

If you want to see where your own business stands, take the Financial Clarity Assessment. It is free, it takes three minutes, and we do not ask for your email.