Xero is a cloud-based accounting software designed to streamline financial management for small to medium businesses and accountants. Offering real-time visibility of financial positions with features like invoicing, payroll, and expense tracking, it simplifies day-to-day operations by integrating with a multitude of third-party apps. Xero's intuitive interface and powerful analytics tools help users make informed decisions, ensuring financial health and growth. By automating key processes, it allows businesses to focus more on strategy and less on manual tasks.
Segment |
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Ease of use |
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Deployment | Cloud / SaaS / Web-Based |
Support | Email/Help Desk, FAQs/Forum, Knowledge Base |
Training | Documentation |
Languages | English |
The software automates the process of reconciling purchases based on previous entries, which can be helpful. Everything is available on mobile, And your accountant can login to see your activity in real time, which is cool.
The software is anything but beautiful. Let’s be honest, Excel is prettier that their platform. Xero is boxy at best and doesn’t have the reporting functionality of something like Google Sheets. Best for small businesses.
Doing basic accounting and tracking funds flow.
It is online and reasonably easy to use.
The product is incomplete. it is missing a lot of features that the community have been asking for for over 3-4 years and they have not made any progress. No changes, updates or improvements except at the high end obviously for their favouritre "large" customers. Then they implement price increases on the lowend users who've received no improvements at all
trying to run my business accounts. only partially solved them - a lot of manual workarounds required
It's easy to use. If you've used accounting software before, you will be able to learn how it works quickly.
There is no phone support if you have a problem.
Low cost for use, which is a benefit to start ups. It has alot of features similar to QuickBooks Online.
Hate the not caring or listening to customers attitude. Doesnt care about customers, does not listen to customers, so many features broken from last so many years, all of the attention given to UI instead of actual features
Multi factor authentication Broken features
Filing taxes
At the outset, it seems incredibly helpful across invoicing and accounting.
The customer service is terrible. There are threads on their help pages with hundreds of customers complaining about terrible features – or functionality they're desperate to have, dating back years. Xero seems to do zero about it. When you finally get through to them, they're unbelievably unhelpful. Their expenses plugin was expensive and a total farce – it was hard for my team to onboard, kept insisting that we needed to offer mileage, and also kept crashing to the extent that I couldn't invite my whole team. We killed it and switched to Zoho, which was effortless. Small things are super irritating – I have to do a 2-factor auth pretty much every time I log in, even on the same day, on the same device, and after ticking a box that says, remember this browser. Why have the box if it doesn't work? The reports are awkward, I have everything exported to Gsheets so we can organise them properly. The multicurrency functionality is again expensive and doesn't work well. It's extremely difficult to run a single entity with clients in multiple countries. And the problem is that it would be unbelievably painful to get off Xero because our whole sales history – and forward bookings – are already in there. It's a trap.
It's great for invoicing. It was great when we were a smaller business without clients overseas paying in foreign currency. I thought it would be better to run payroll and expenses through the one platform but that was a disaster. We're now just back to invoicing and accounts, and manually working around all the problems Xero creates.
Xero used to have valuable functionality around 3rd party integrations that helped automate our accounting processes - but this is no longer available.
Xero has completely stopped working due to a 3rd party vendor they use for several months. They've been in business for ~15 years and do not run their own bank integrations. We are not able to perform bookeeping, tax planning, projections, analysis, or any of the core functions we pay for. They do not seem to be fixing the problem or even care much about it.
We use Xero for accounting.
- Set up was easy - lower cost than alternatives - plenty of integrations - sales team were helpful
- The UI was very clunky, especially the invoice feature. Since this is a new SaaS product i was expecting a much cleaner interface - The integration with my bank (Novo) wasn't very good. It didn't pick up the vendors name in transactions, so I had to manually add each vendor as a contact and then manually reconcile each transaction or create bank rules. This was tedious. Quickbooks handled that automatically - The integration with gocardless wasn't very clear and it didn't flag up a potential ACH limit, which rendered the feature useless to me. - Method for contacting support wasnt as good as other products
Bookkeeping cashflow and profit statements invoicing accepting payments
I liked that Xero's wording is more for the business owner and not just for the bookkeeper or accountant. It was more easy to understand what was what.
I didn't care for the layout of Xero or the marking of everything as an invoice. Also, reconciling was often very labor intensive and not clear.
I thought I was solving the problem of finding good accounting software, but the only benefit really was hubdoc.
Simple to use, made business tasks easyer
The price has increased out of small businesses price range. There's nolonger a plan for sole traders or small business. The starter plan also dose not allow for growth with a limit on quotes. Also the invoices and transactions are limited so much so, business can't be achieved, so it's just a paid test trial. Leaving us to use the middle plan that has features small business don't need with a huge cost.
At tax filing time, reports can be simply printed out and sent in. We can see how business is ticking along with charts. However all other online accounting software offer the exact same thing.
It does stuff well enough. But in terms of comparing it to other options ... they offer the bare minimum.
Lack of useful functionality, lack of responsive support. The Xero team seem more interested in gaining new customers than listening to existing/paying customers, or implementing effective tools to make a better product.
Managing small design studio, staff, invoicing, Profit and loss statements etc. general internal accounting
I own a small business with 1 employee and decided to go with Xero cause it had great reviews and seemed like a good user friendly option. Nice features are tax payment reminders and creating rules for certain transactions to make reconciliation faster as you go on.
Unfortunately, after using Xero for two months the bank feed stopped working. After going back and forth with Zero support for about a month they finally called me and told me that my problem was a known one that affects a handful of Xero users and at this time they have no workable solution for my account except recommend I manually import my bank transactions indefinitely, because they pretty much had no solution to my problem. I was told it could take days, or months or even never to resolve the problem. Had I known this would happen I would have gone with Quickbooks. When I asked if I could receive a discount on my service since it was handicapped they offered 30 days free for the month it took them to tell me they couldn't fix my problem but otherwise could not offer any further discounts.
None, I hate the software.