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Couldn't run our business without Xero
Updated June 08, 2016

Couldn't run our business without Xero

Scott Scharf | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Reseller

Software Version

Business Edition

Modules Used

  • Xero
  • Partner Edition

Overall Satisfaction with Xero

Catching Clouds provides outsourced cloud accounting services to e-Commerce businesses. Xero is our core accounting product, all current and all future customers will be migrated to Xero.

We couldn't run our business without Xero, it enables our virtual team and clients around the US and world to collaborate on the accounting 24/7. All of our virtual bookkeepers and virtual controllers are certified on Xero. We work with a range of Xero add-ons to provide best of breed technical solutions and most importantly current and accurate financials. This allows our clients to access their accounting anywhere in the world and know that their books have been updated daily by our team as well as the data is automatically flowing from their banks, shopping carts, and marketplaces.
  • Add-on partner ecosystem of partners integrating into the open Xero API to solve specific business requirements and provide support for verticals.
  • Stability and performance - updates every few weeks with no outages, always consistent fast online performance
  • Smart accounting - bank rules, cash coding, and fast reconciliation
  • Accounting Partner Only functionality - Xero partners have a range of tools to better support businesses and efficiently manage their books with Batch & Recode and a number of other functions.
  • Improving bank feeds with direct connections and additional functionality with major banks (Chase, Wells Fargo, etc.)
  • Direct connections to merchant providers - Stripe, Authorize.net, etc.
  • More Tracking Categories (Classes)
  • Add projects, tasks and job costing into the core Xero product
  • We are significantly more efficient using Xero than Intuit QuickBooks or QuickBooks Online, allowing each virtual bookkeeper to support more clients.
  • The Xero Add On Ecosystem allows us to support our vertical (ecommerce) efficiently and profitably
  • We are able to engage and collaborate better with our clients using Xero, where all parties have real time access to the finances and we can make notes on the income statement/balance sheet to communicate information.
  • Xero has been absolutely stable and reliable, we don't lose time with platform issues, doing upgrades, backing up data, or dozens of other issues running this great cloud applications. Our peers on other platforms lose hours and hours of productivity dealing with issues, sitting on hold, and taking weeks for issues to be resolved. We have none of that with Xero. There are minor issues here and there but they don't halt work or involve significant time to resolve.
  • We couldn't run our business without Xero, they are a great platform and company.
  • We can work with businesses anywhere in the US and world using Xero.
Where to start, Xero is a significantly better designed product over the QBO or QBD as it was built as a cloud product from the core. Xero took the time to look at accounting and technology from a new perspective and has built a clean product that is easy to use, easy to learn, takes complex accounting tasks and makes them easy to complete. Intuit is slamming multiple legacy cloud products, databases, mindsets and approaches into QuickBooks Online and not doing it well. They are using their clients and most importantly their accounting partners as alpha testers on their product with many bugs, major security issues, and just wasting the time of their partners. We selected Xero because we can have a relationship with the people there at multiple levels from the executives (Rod Drury), the product and marketing teams, customer support and sales teams, they have a great culture. If I am going to bet my business on a cloud accounting platform, I am going to have to be able to talk with them, this isn't possible with Intuit. Plus, it is just beautiful accounting software and allows us to provide significant value to our customers by updating the accounting for every client every day, so their books are always up to date. Xero's API and support for add-on partners is significantly better than Intuit which only had forum support for any business that wants to integrate with them, where Xero has multiple people in every region and online resources to help any partners integrate with Xero.
Xero is an excellent platform for e-Commerce and online businesses. These businesses are already in the cloud and have sales going on 24/7. Xero integrates with cloud inventory solutions that connect with their platforms to provide Cost of Goods Sold, Advanced Inventory Management, sales tax management, etc. Xero provides the one vision of the truth for all the financial transactions; provides a clear dashboard on the status of each account and makes it easy for these businesses to know their numbers.

Key questions:

  • Is your business in the cloud?
  • Do you need current and accurate financials?
  • Do you need an accounting solution that directly connects to your business or has add ons that will support your business?

Xero Feature Ratings

9.5
Accounts payable
10
Accounts receivable
10
Cash management
10
Bank reconciliation
10
Expense management
6
Fixed asset management
10
Multi-currency support
10
Self-service portal
10
8.0
Inventory tracking
8
8.5
Pricing
8
Order entry
9
Credit card processing
9
Cost of goods sold
8
8.0
Pay calculation
8
Benefit plan administration
Not Rated
Direct deposit files
8
Salary revision and increment management
Not Rated
Reimbursement management
Not Rated
8.7
Dashboards
10
Standard reports
9
Custom reports
7
10.0
API for custom integration
10
Plug-ins
10
6.0
Role-based user permissions
6

Using Xero

6 - We have 3 key roles supporting Xero -
Virtual Bookkeepers - daily bookkeeping, reconciling accounts, accounts payable/receivable
Virtual Controllers - reviewing accounts, reviewing the finances, managing sales tax, journal entries, financial guidance to our clients
Technical Support - Integrating Xero Add Ons (Payroll - Gusto/ZenPayroll), Hubdoc, Cloud Inventory, Expense Management, Data importing

Xero Implementation

Xero 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.

Using Xero

Xero Reliability

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.