Highspot vs. Xero

Great for delivering insight on which personas are engaging with the material shared. If I've had multiple meetings with personas, but they have not engaged with my proposal, I'm now able to understand the priority of our partnership and how it ranks within their other initiatives.

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

• Outlook Plug-In is very easy to use and allows users to easily access Highspot content
• Highspot provides instant feedback when an email is opened and data about the length of time the reader spent in the document.
• Overall ease of use. Highspot is very easy to use and navigation is very intuitive.

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 feel one area is in Search - probably this is the one area where AI would assist.
• Sometimes it can be confusing when sending someone a document that is in "my content" which people don't have access to, when I meant to send them the version of the content from the general area.

Incentivized

• Multiple addresses for singular contacts.
• Limit unit price decimals to 2 digits, currently shows 3 or more after the decimal on invoices.
• Discounted rates for multiple entities within the same group e.g. if you have a group of 3 or more companies looking to move to Xero, incentivize those clients with discounted monthly rates.
• Easier way to reconcile loan accounts across multiple entities.

I love Highspot, it saves me a ton of time every single day. I like how my correspondence looks professional and I know what I'm sending is accurate and company approved. I'm able to add it to an email template in seconds and choose multiple brochures if it fits the information the student wants or requested. I can also customize templates to make them company specific when appropriate

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.

I use Highspot every day. It is basically my go-to spot to find anything I need to know about the product, like pricing and internal processes. It also helps me provide value-added emails to my prospects with extreme ease. Without Highspot I would not have the current success that I have right now in sales.

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

I have not needed any customer support until now, I guess this is because they work on a proactive maintenance of the platform. We have an internal team working with Highspot so if I need help I go to my internal team not directly to Highspot. I have never heard any complaints.

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

From an investment perspective, Highspot was very reasonable in price for both the main platform and the LMS. The ease of use and management seemed to be a lot less than some of the others we looked at. If we had a more robust solution, I could see where there could be value in what the others offered, but for what we needed Highspot checked all the boxes.

Incentivized

MYOB has always seemed well behind in the functionality. We recently discontinued our DEAR subscription due to astronomical increase in subscription fees. While Xero doesn't do as much in terms of inventory management we can manage without that function for the lower price.

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

• Highspot has created more efficiency within our Sales team as reps no longer have to "hunt" for up-to-date collateral
• Highspot helps us understand what collateral gets deals in pipeline
• Highspot aids in new employees getting ramped easier and faster with one location to review training content

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.