BILL Spend & Expense vs. Xero

There is a lot of functionality available for any company, and when you combine it with their A/P processing software, I'm sure the value of the software only increases. If you don't look back through your credit card receipts often, or don't have a lot of volume, the receipts not uploading into the accounting software isn't as much of an issue. For us, with roughly $200k of credit card spending each month, it became an issue. The rewards program was hard for us to take advantage of also, mostly because of our spending being spread across multiple companies. Even though we had everything set up together as one business, they still recognized each one as it's own, with it's own rewards requirements. I wouldn't deter anyone from going with Bill Spend & Expense, it's a solid program with a lot of capability, there are just a few small items that mattered to us more than the capabilities we take advantage of.

Incentivized

I am a massage and physical therapist. We are not a fancy business but business admin can take a lot of time and effort. Xero came recommended to me by colleagues in the sector. You raise invoices, you get paid. and you pay your bills. These are all daily scenarios for most businesses and Xero does this particularly well. Since my accountant can query my records directly, this greatly saves on bookkeeping time when it is time to do the company returns.

Incentivized

• Divvy does purchases very well. Getting money into the hands of those who need it, when they need it.
• Budgeting is a breeze because card holders can only spend what is in their specific budget or on their card.
• Customer support is usually pretty quick to respond

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• I wish there were more options in the BILL reimbursement platform - for example, the ability to do a report instead of submit a single expense.
• We would love for reimbursements to feed into QuickBooks differently, but we understand that this is an early feature and hope it is further developed in the future.

• 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.

Incentivized

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.

The Divvy card provides convenience and flexibility for Finance to manage and monitor each user's transactions at any time. User can issue many virtual cards for different purposes. Transactions can be easily approved. Since we can monitor transaction closely, fraud can be prevented effectively. Mobile app is user friendly and safe.

Incentivized

As a standalone software, it allows users to fulfill most of the basic functions (e.g. transaction input and report generation) simply and conveniently. It also allows for multiple APIs to help augment various tasks that accounting-adjacent (e.g. claims processing). The cloud based model and portability to mobile devices allows tasks to be carried out in a more convenient way.

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.

On a good day, things worked but after upgrades, things began to slow and or not work at all at times. I coined the moving circle while I waited as the "Xero Wheel of Death". Sometimes it never stopped and force quitting was necessary.

Incentivized

We have enjoyed using Divvy and its functions. The Divvy team has been great, and their support team is outstanding. They have a chatbox on the platform, and they only seem to be someone on call. I have found its benefits to be outstanding, that I recommend it to my clients. I also feel that Divvy rolling out new features only makes it more compelling to stay on as a user.

Incentivized

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.

The format was great; someone was there to ask questions or help if you were stuck.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Nothing out there compares to the agility and ease of use of Divvy. Adoption by those most resistant to any expense reporting tool has always been the #1 painpoint to all other such software. Divvy takes the pain away even for creatives and salespeople!

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• Divvy is free, so it was tough for us to turn down. We decided to withhold our larger transactions from Divvy to receive those rewards directly.
• Divvy has saved our Finance/Accounting team tons of time digging through expenses, reimbursements, invoices, etc.

Incentivized

• Xero is a basic accounting system that performs basic accounting tasks easily and accurately. For that, it provides a positive impact on our day to day accounting operations.
• Because of Xero's basic structure, I feel it lacks some of the sophistication that some users want and need. The ability to create unique custom reports would enhance the impact Xero would have on meeting business objectives by providing current and useful accounting information.
• In my opinion, Xero's lack of focus on their customers - their users - is a real issue with me. In my opinion, those of us that are in the trenches that work with the system on a daily basis have to deal with the shortcomings of the system with the knowledge that Xero support refuses to address the operational issues that make their user's lives difficult. I feel if Xero would focus on truly making their software better from a users point of view, it has the potential to be a great system.