At any life stage of a company, being truly open and transparent about your finances can be intimidating. If you’re doing well, you may be happy to show them off. But if you’re starting out or going through difficulties, you’re opening yourself up to scrutiny. What if our accounts show we’re wasting money? What if we’re not making enough money? What if our competition finds out and is doing a lot better than us? It’s understandable to be paranoid. At last week’s XeroCon in San Francisco, Xero’s inaugural conference, the idea of being financially transparent emerged in a conversation with founder and CEO Rod Drury. For startups raising money from an investor or a bank, sharing financials is expected. But with Xero’s online accounting software, customers can share a read-only version of accounts in real-time with anyone all the time. Xero accounting dashboard “ Startups  should be capturing data to build up value. They should have a clean set of financials to g...