Likelihood to Recommend I believe it is well suited for a small sized company, like my previous one, that does not want any IT overhead to onboard a new tool. This tool is available online and can be accessed via the internet. It has all the necessary components to help you record your activity. But the solution in its current form is not scalable. [I've] Given few of my reasons I feel this is not well suited for a large company (like the one I currently work at).
Read full review In my opinion Xero is well suited for: 1) Standalone organisations, 2) Organisations where the accounting team bench strength is thin, 3) Organisations which are able to leverage on new technologies and apps 4) Organisations which get most of their tech infrastructure within the APAC region Xero may not be as suitable for: 1) Organisations with group structures (especially complex ones) 2) Organisations which are constrained in their use of startup technologies and apps by startups 3) Organisations which get most of their tech infrastructure from the US or EU
Read full review Pros It allowed me to fill my work time sheet. Every week I had to fill this. Based on the numbers the company keeps track of which days I worked. It reminded me to fill the time sheets constantly and also notifies me when it gets approved. So I never really forgot to fill it. It allowed me to see my vacation days left, and plan ahead. It had a list of holiday dates which was very handy to plan my trips or vacation. It had categorization by department and my view of time sheets was only limited to me. I could not see others time sheets, and except for my manager, nobody else could look into mine. It had internet access, which meant I could fill my sheets anywhere. It came in handy while working from home where a VPN connection may not be present. I also guess that this service being online meant no extra effort from IT department side. Read full review 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. Read full review Cons The UI in my opinion was too simple. Calendar views were pretty stale. I don't believe there was a mobile app for this, or this site worked nicely when opened on small devices. A better view of my time could have been shown. At the time I could only see small excel like boxes filled with numbers. Graphs, or some other visualization of remaining days would have been lucrative. Very stupid login page. We had to fill "company name" at the login page and this name had to match exactly to what was set in the database. It was frustrating and I always had to refer my notes to get that right. There wasn't any preselection option which made it hard to do it fast. If I can only set a few fields (because we had long list of dropdowns to choose from) then this process could be much smoother. A major issue was not being able to see my team-mates schedule or calendar. E.g. when are they taking vacations. So I had to pester them offline to get this information. Many times due to inter-team miscommunication we didn't know about others vacation days during planning. A central place where I could see this information would have helped me a lot. Read full review 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. Read full review Likelihood to Renew 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.
Sarang Mandke Consultant - Cloud accounting integration, Real Time Accounting
Read full review Usability The dashboard is a simple design where all accounts can be seen from the same screen, unlike other softwares that makes you search for bank accounts that you want to work in. Our clients love that they can easily find their way around their books without having to call our firm to help them.
Read full review Reliability and Availability 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.
Read full review Performance 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.
Read full review Support Rating 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.
Read full review In-Person Training The format was great; someone was there to ask questions or help if you were stuck.
Read full review Online Training 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.
Read full review Implementation Rating 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.
Read full review Alternatives Considered I believe it is not in my power to select the best tool. It depends on whatever company I work for. It just happens that we use a different system (and I don't even know if this is an internal system, or another online tool). But I do like my current system. It has a better UI, and more detailed insights about my time. It also shows my pay stubs and other small neat information like tax papers to help me organize. It also has notifications when something new comes up. All these features I think I lacked in Replicon (or maybe my company didn't have access to these).
Read full review 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.
Read full review Scalability 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
Read full review Return on Investment Replicon helped me maintain a record of my time. This helped during my assessment where my manager could see my work hours. Replicon was easy to use, so I didn't spend my precious time filling sheets in this site. As far as I can remember, this site only gave me problem once, but was never down. Though a good tool, I actually never got the use case of recording your time sheets. I think it will be pretty hard for an employee to just fill the time sheet and not show up for work. There are so many meetings and people around you, that you cannot fake your presence. So I feel there is no need to fill time sheets. It is a functionality with no real world solution. Read full review 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. Read full review ScreenShots