With advanced tools to automate manual processes and support close collaboration with suppliers, SAP Ariba helps streamline source-to-pay processes across organizations.
N/A
Xero
Score 8.2 out of 10
N/A
Xero is an online accounting software product for small businesses and personal finance. Its features beyond general ledger and double-bookkeeping include quotable invoicing, bank reconciliation, purchase order and expense management, and tax management. Third party apps can extend its features further.
$13
per month
Pricing
SAP Ariba
Xero
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Early
$13
per month
Growing
$37
per month
Established
$70
per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
SAP Ariba
Xero
Free Trial
No
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Yes
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
Optional
No setup fee
Additional Details
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Prices in table are in USD and just apply to the US - other markets & prices are listed below:
Canada - Starter $18 CAD/month, Standard $45 CAD/month, Premium 5 $58 CAD/month
UK - Starter £14/month, Standard £28/month, Premium £36/month
AU - Starter $29 AUD/month, Standard $59 AUD/month, Premium 5 $76 AUD/month
NZ - Starter $31 NZD/month, Standard $66 NZD/month, Premium $84 NZD/month
SAP Ariba is pivotal for our organization's supply chain requirements. The purchasing department needs it for vendor purchase order issuance and vendor order management. We can check procurement history for the last purchased price, standard price, price breaks, lead time for products, vendor, and alternate vendor details.
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.
Complete Procurement of Inventory step easy through GUI-Ariba integration once Purchase order is created and it is sent to the SAP Ariba Supplier Network. Vendor confirms the order and sends notification of Inbound Delivery to the warehouse through ASN and the Inbound process, Goods Receipt Process, Unloading, Put away process easy.
SAP Ariba integrates the different SAP Sourcing platforms, services and their tools in order to optimize operations, saves cost and meeting customer requirements through its easy to use tools. Such as integration with SAP S/4 HANA, SAP EWM using Idocs for End to End sourcing and Procurement coverage.
As a part of the SAP Direct Sourcing suite, it helps allow customer manage their direct materials in the single dashboard and helping customer to have view of the comprehensive info about BoM and the structure. Based on requirements, buyers can run materials and/or entire Bill of Materials. When these are sent from ERP to SAP Ariba, managers can manage them in the direct spend dashboard. Can search for desired items in the dashboard and view details of BoM or deeper view of information of the material. Buyers can run sourcing, run details for materials, create material quotes, and create pricing using book quotes.
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.
While SAP Ariba offers workflow capabilities, users have suggested more advanced customization options for workflows
SAP Ariba has a mobile app, users have suggested improvements in terms of functionality and responsiveness. Enhancements to the mobile app could provide a more seamless and efficient experience for users on the go
SAP Ariba integrates well with various enterprise systems, users have reported that the initial setup and integration processes can be complex. Improvements in integration tools and documentation could facilitate a smoother onboarding experience
AP Ariba provides robust reporting and analytics capabilities, some users desire greater flexibility in creating and customizing reports. Improvements in the ability to generate ad-hoc reports and customize dashboards could enhance analytics capabilities
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.
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.
While its great at usability. I would love ut have it more simplified. I would like to advocate for some personas who are non tech savvy or who have less or no experience in procurement. I sometimes feel that the valley of user learning fir such personas is quite steep and it may take them long time of learning to get adept to the platform.
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.
Customer support has always been top notch. From small configuration changes to overall process changes, support has the teammates in place with excellent knowledge and is able to provide solutions based on business challenges quickly. Their customer support through their Account teams continues to be hands on and very responsive to needs in a timely fashion.
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.
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.
It improves over all vendor management system of an organization by providing less costly ways of procurement and making business simple. AribaSAP Ariba digitally transforms your supply chain, procurement and contract management process. acts as supply chain, procurement service to do business globally In today’s world, there is a need to control your supply chain and to collaborate with your suppliers in an efficient way. To enable healthy supply chain, you need to have suppliers with visibility to every part of procurement process so that they can maintain an efficient supply chain and help organizations to grow their and own business..
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
We saved nearly 10% of planned costs due to the large database of vendors we created within the company as a whole.
Saving in time due to shortening of procurement cycles. Procurement activities were never on the critical path and were accomplished with less Supply Chain resources than originally planned.
In the process we created a huge database of Vendors and Pricing which well be beneficial in our future projects.
It is an excellent tool and just what are business required and could afford.
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.
