Accounting Seed is accounting software that is native to Salesforce.
N/A
Xero
Score 8.3 out of 10
N/A
Xero is an online accounting software product for small businesses and personal finance. Its features beyond general ledger and double-bookkeeping include quotable invoicing, bank reconciliation, purchase order and expense management, and tax management. Third party apps can extend its features further.
$13
per month
Pricing
Accounting Seed
Xero
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Early
$13
per month
Growing
$37
per month
Established
$70
per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Accounting Seed
Xero
Free Trial
No
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
Pricing starts at $3,960/year.
Prices in table are in USD and just apply to the US - other markets & prices are listed below:
Canada - Starter $18 CAD/month, Standard $45 CAD/month, Premium 5 $58 CAD/month
UK - Starter £14/month, Standard £28/month, Premium £36/month
AU - Starter $29 AUD/month, Standard $59 AUD/month, Premium 5 $76 AUD/month
NZ - Starter $31 NZD/month, Standard $66 NZD/month, Premium $84 NZD/month
Well, while I have not interacted with many accounting solutions, I know Accounting Seed is more affordable and capable. I have used it for a long time and I can say it works as expected.
I wouldn’t recommend Accounting Seed to enterprise companies. However, Accounting Seed is the best cloud accounting tool for small and medium-sized companies that are yearning to automate accounts payable and receivable, inventory management, and invoice customization in one integrated platform.
In my opinion Xero is well suited for: 1) Standalone organisations, 2) Organisations where the accounting team bench strength is thin, 3) Organisations which are able to leverage on new technologies and apps 4) Organisations which get most of their tech infrastructure within the APAC region Xero may not be as suitable for: 1) Organisations with group structures (especially complex ones) 2) Organisations which are constrained in their use of startup technologies and apps by startups 3) Organisations which get most of their tech infrastructure from the US or EU
Repeating invoices (most of my business is monthly recurring invoices) - it does these very well.
Reporting - particularly being able to dig into the different lines of the P&L statement.
Tracking categories - I assign a category to every line of every invoice so it's easy to see how much has been sold of each type of service every month and year, and compare them to previous periods.
Custom reporting seems cumbersome, but it could just be that we need better instructions, more examples, maybe some more canned reports. My company needs the ability to compare multiple years, and more than one budget in a report - we start with an approved board budget and then we reproject each quarter.
Non profits need to print financials by restriction level - this has also been very awkward - all the data is there but I have to piece it together in an excel spreadsheet every time I want it.
In general, the materials needed for non profits is not as accessible as it could be.
Having different email addresses for different parts of a customer's business (eg invoices and statements to different places)
Easily seeing the text of emails that have been sent through Xero
More easily archiving old pay items. Our HR software updates rates when awards are updated which means a lot of old pay rates are in the system and they have multiple clicks to archive each one. Clicking the ones to archive in bulk and then just click archive for all would be much more efficient.
In addition to the matters covered in this review, my reason for renewing this product is that Xero's functionality and the constant updates that the company provides, makes the software even more business friendly. The software therefore builds a brand loyalty among customers.
It always works well. We've never had programming issues. Never. It is easy to customize. The system can grow with you as your business grows and changes. Being cloud-based you can work from anywhere. It is intuitive. You have all the features of Salesforce, like workflows, that work perfectly in Accounting Seed. Having that full integration with Salesforce allows you to see all our data in one platform
The dashboard is a simple design where all accounts can be seen from the same screen, unlike other softwares that makes you search for bank accounts that you want to work in. Our clients love that they can easily find their way around their books without having to call our firm to help them.
We have been actively using and 100% Xero based for our ecommerce accounting practice for over 4 years. There has on been one real outage for more than 5 minutes. Xero was open and transparent about the outage, what they were doing to resolve the issue, and provided 15 minute updates. Showing how they care about their customers and partners. Plus, showing that their customers care too, were understanding, and went surfing or in our case took a nap. Couldn't run our business without Xero as a partner.
Pages generally load quickly, but it's a fairly common occurrence to have pages taking a bit longer than I'd like to load (as in, 4+ seconds). Occasionally I have to refresh a page to get it to work. Bank feed and integrations tend to be slow in general, but that could easily be due to API latency on the side of the other parties. Most of the time, though, the bank feeds refresh before I login so it's not a huge problem. Not necessarily good performance compared to a local app like QuickBooks desktop, but definitely good performance for a cloud application. Room for growth? yes.
We seldom have had to use their support but when we have, they have been responsive and actually were able to answer our questions in a simple, nontech language. You don't have to be a programmer to talk to them!
Always respond and keep issues open until you are satisfied with the result. Generally good responses, in the past, I had some support responses that were really basic and really annoying. They type where "have your tried restarting your computer" style of answers. Well, of course, I went through all the basics before contacting them. Duh, but I suppose not everyone does. Otherwise, it would be a 10. The last year has shown a marked improvement in the support responses however.
All of Xero's training is online and available for anyone (business owner or accountants) to learn and become experts in their system. There is a range of content from product training to real world webinars from their partners. Xero is beautiful accounting software and their training is the same.
If it can be done, time the implementation near a new fiscal year so you can start clean. Otherwise, you have to go back and do historical data from the beginning of the fiscal year, which can be brain draining.
Honestly, Accounting Seed was the only one I focused on when looking to switch from our existing program. It showed in the partner app store and stated it was created native to SalesForce. As I read through it's capabilities, cost, etc., I knew it was the right choice.
Each of the products I listed had their own list of drawbacks, but the one thing they all had in common, which was right on top of that list of drawbacks, was ease of use. I struggled to get myself accustomed to each system and struggled, but when it came to getting a client to even try and use it was when the true struggle started. Just found it easier to make use of Xero from the very beginning.
I have yet to fully stress test the product given the size of the company where I am using it. I am sure as we scale to more customers, more vendors and more reporting requirements, I will have a better understanding of what it is capable of in terms of bandwidth and processing
We have saved 1 hour per month on reporting on one of our not-for-profits, which is 12 hours a year at minimum from an investment of 30 minutes on initial setup.
On cleanup files, we are able to save at minimum half the time we would spend and be able to get them cleaned up and moved to a monthly file quicker
Using cash coding on one client as an example it would take us a week to do their bookkeeping last year it took me 8 hours from start to finish.
