Fourth Procurement and Inventory vs. Xero

The product is user-friendly in automating the tasks, managing the master data through central purchasing, and creating custom reports. It lacks certain basic functionalities like a record of wastages, sending automated emails confirming if the automatic tasks (scheduled tasks) have been completed or not, and the ability to automate the nutrition information, etc.

Incentivized

It has been my experience that software is only as good as the people behind the scenes supporting it. Xero seems far more interested in making things better for my customers than they do for their customers - their users. Most enhancements since I've been a user have been geared toward making it easier for my customers to pay their bills, allowing my customers to interact directly with the software with, what I feel, an eye toward bypassing me in favor of my customers dealing directly with Xero. This is something I'm very uncomfortable with.

• The 'stock management' tab on the home screen is of particular use when keeping tabs on incoming deliveries into the restaurant.
• The option to open and close your stock period is great as you have the chance to edit your stock at a moment's notice.

Incentivized

• Their method of moving between screens was very logical and intuitive which is not a "given" attribute among software packages.
• Finding transactions was relatively easy with just common sense.
• The use of this software was generally well received in that the accountants did not discredit the software as cheap, poorly organized, or timely to learn. No one at Corporate had a vendetta against using Xero.
• It does a good job of allowing the users to drill down to the final detail of an account balance - which is fundamental to the accounting department's needs.

Incentivized

• It would help massively to see via Enterprise and menu items what ones are no longer active, to keep the data tidy.
• When you take purchase reports from Enterprise and select to organise them by category, show the name of the category on the actual report download.
• Quick and easy upload/download of supplier products for correcting prices, descriptions, prices in bulk.

Incentivized

• I find it hard to pull a supplier Detailed ledger reflecting payments and receipts for a specific account
• When doing journals that each have different dates you need to do each journal separately, when you have a large batch of journals that need to be posted this is a frustrating feature
• When doing journals the Excel document for batch import is hard to understand where your debit and credit amounts need to go on the excel sheet as the description differs
• The Bank Feeds and Bank recon is great, however there are still clients where you don't have this availability and need to do everything manually, it would be great if Xero has a separate cashbook feature where you could capture the entire bank and allocate at the same time instead of having to import a CSV and then doing the recon

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.

I find the interface simple and easy to understand. I really enjoy their self help articles and videos for partners and clients alike. Their communication is great, which helps if someone is stuck on trying to use a feature. Often I have submitted a ticket and within minutes I have a reply. This type of communication inspires confidence.

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

Too long to get an answer.

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

Xero is really basic and our team can easily adapt with it rather than using other some other non-user friendly apps. We could focus on the work itself rather than having problems with learning its complexity. Xero is very user-friendly and also gives tutorial which is great! Also, they provide certification so you could learn from it!

Incentivized

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

• Procurement: Integrating some of the key suppliers with Trade Simple has saved labour hours.
• Integration: GL Integrations have increased the efficiency and quality of data.

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.