Jobber vs. Xero

The cost of Jobber is not suitable for a startup - even our company size is hard pressed to squeeze in other areas of business to afford the cost. Zenmaid or other maid-forward services may be better suited since Jobber seems to focus it's offerings on one-off as opposed to recurring services like ours. For business who do in-person estimates like ours, the streamlined estimate feature which causes increased conversion rates makes it worth the cost - as we anecdotally gain more business this way. However, if we switch to an online booking / instant booking model as opposed to in-person estimates, we may not require this feature. Zenmaid has a "gamified" residential booking page that was extremely high converting for us - we received sometimes 30+ inquiries per day due to the ease of use - MANY more completed inquiries than we receive now - but they didn't have a quoting and deposit collection tool - so here we are. If we used their instant booking feature we would have stayed due to the scheduling tool, gap finder, prevention of double booking employees, and cleaning service focus, as well as significantly reduced pricing.

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

• The program and schedule is easy to use, operate, and easy to navigate
• Jobber offers the monthly fee at a very affordable price point
• Jobber makes it easy for my employees to clock in.
• Jobber makes it easy for me to adjust time and tailor each employee's Jobber experience

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

• For us, sometimes doesn't save the data, just gone, especially terrible if you have a data interruption since it has zero offline capability.
• I think the price is way high now, made the mistake of 'upgrading' and cannot go back.
• In my experience, way too easy to create a duplicate entry of anything, then near impossible to clean up, unless you notice it immediately.
• I found no merge functionality. Same client has two entries? Too bad.
• In my experience, does not work with Xero accounting software, took a long time to figure that out especially since they advertise it and that was why we chose both of them, for the supposed integration. For us, Quickbooks was also a pain.
• In my experience, the app is unusable, must use the web version on a mobile device.
• In my experience, the integrated payment processing cannot accept debit in Canada, only credit cards.

• 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

I am anxious to replace it but there will be effort to learn and switch.

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.

Jobber is an easy-to-use and friendly software designed for efficiency. Its interface is well-organized, ensuring that each section is intuitive and accessible. Users can navigate smoothly through tasks, making project management simpler. Overall, Jobber enhances productivity and streamlines operations, making it a valuable tool for various projects.

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.

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

There is hardly an app that covers it all while staying simple and wrapping up the process. From the filing of the request, everything goes smoothly following a natural progression. Reports are insightful, give you an instant overview and easy to understand. In addition, you can easily track any information from those on clients to expense tracking.

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

Square only allows for scheduling to one person. And my team couldn’t see their schedules. As a cleaning company, I need to let cleaners know what their pay is without them seeing what I’m charging. That’s game changer about Kobber.

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

• It has dramatically helped keep us organized
• It has helped us keep payments taken care of and ensures that we don't miss an invoice
• It is great for our lead process
• I would like to see a lead board or line to help keep track of leads

• 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.