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
ZipBooks
Score 7.0 out of 10
Small Businesses (1-50 employees)
ZipBooks is an accounting software solution for small business owners and accountants. Users can track expenses, manage their team, send recurring invoices and manage projects.
$15
per month
Pricing
Xero
ZipBooks
Editions & Modules
Early
$13
per month
Growing
$37
per month
Established
$70
per month
ZipBooks Starter
$0
ZipBooks Smarter
$15
ZipBooks Sophisticated
$35
ZipBooks Accountant
Custom
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Xero
ZipBooks
Free Trial
Yes
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
Yes
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
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
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.
ZipBooks is really strong for small businesses (and non-profits like the ones I help manage). It may not yet be ready to handle medium or large businesses given the deep, niche functionality that is sometimes required in those cases.
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.
Invoicing is particularly easy-to-use, quick, clean and beautiful. GREAT for branding.
The time tracker was unexpected, but very useful and integrates well with the invoicing. Leads to quick invoicing every time.
Customer support is phenomenal -- the support staff is friendly and helpful.
Although they are a new company, they are definitely on the right track!
I recommend this software to clients, colleagues, and friends alike, mostly for it quick and beautiful invoicing.
They do what they can to live up to their name! It doesn't take very long to get set up, or very long to create a complete invoice and send it to the right person.
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.
There is some difficulty with a need to learn the use of the menus, they are not open and click, at the moment, the user needs to open the menu then using the pad keys scroll down and use enter to select from the drop-down menu. A mouse does not work.
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.
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.
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.
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've primarily compared ZipBooks vs. Quickbooks because I've used Quickbooks at larger companies before. ZipBooks was the right fit for a smaller organization because it still had all the core features of Quickbooks but at a dramatically lower price that fits the budget.
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
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.
ZipBooks is entirely affordable, and with my current $15/mo payments, I get ROI pretty quickly.
Invoices are simple and easy to make, while staying beautiful and functional at the same time. This saves me TIME, which means that I don't need to spend 15-20 minutes fiddling with the software to make it do what I want it to do. It just works. And that means, I can spend more time doing client work, and managing projects and sales.
