Fathom vs. Xero

I always ask if the other attendees are ok with my using the app. If they were not comfortable, I would turn it off. This is likely over-cautious, but I also am hesitant to use it in extremely sensitive and confidential conversations. I use it as often as possible and am heavily reliant on it for any status meetings where there might be action items for any attendee, etc

Incentivized

Xero is very easy to use and has great customer support. The ability to customize reports is an excellent feature. Accounts Receivables - not having the ability to add a finance charge is a HUGE issue, creating extra work and tracking. The lack of an interface to the credit union is a concern for recommending this software to other businesses in our area since this credit union is used by many small businesses.

• Xero Integration
• Instant Financials Reports

Incentivized

• Old invoicing provided the ability to fully document the invoice cycle by allowing for easy attachment of support documentation to the invoice for payment processing. The last time I tried New Invoicing, this capability had been removed.
• Xero is very easy to navigate.
• Adding to the chart of accounts, adding customers and vendors, and creating new transactions is quite easy.

• Honestly I do not have any Cons to add.

Incentivized

• Add offline version (very important for third world countries like Vanuatu)
• Payment portals (add more and add WordPress integration)
• Duplicates during bank reconciliation imports
• Allow customers to create an online account from which they can access all their past transactions (invoices, quotes and bills) on the Portal
• Allow more dashboard customization (more graphs)

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.

Great dashboards and very easy to use.

Incentivized

Xero is very user friendly, however, there are some features that can be more time consuming or features that I find are not exactly what I am looking for ie. not being able to pull a report in a certain way, or not being able to do a bank recon in a certain 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.

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.

Incentivized

I have not used customer support.

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

otter is audio only, and doesn't monitor things like talk time. Both systems have great (relatively new) AI features. Fathom's is a little more functional (templates for notes that can be swapped out after the meeting. Otter's is a little more useful with the AI chat feature and the summaries are a bit stronger

Incentivized

Wow, I have used so many accounting systems over the last 30 years! Your above options don't even list them. I've used systems like AccPac, TurboCash, WaveApps, and more. The answer to the first question explains why I prefer Xero.

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

• it saved us few hours a month to prepare consolidated reports.
• it made is easy to understand the financials with visuals
• Integration with Xero also made it much accurate

Incentivized

• 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.