A Tech-savvy CPAs Review of Xero
Software Version
Most recent
Modules Used
- All Modules
Overall Satisfaction with Xero
Xero is currently being used for our own firm's accounting, however, we primarily use Xero as a software product to accomplish selling our services to small businesses. Xero is the central piece in the financial systems we set up for our clients. We use a variety of other apps in conjunction with Xero to fit the needs of our clients. Xero solves many problems, the foremost being:
- Inaccurate financial reporting
- Timely financial reporting
- Double entry
- Dealing with paper bills/invoices/documents
- Too much cost hiring bookkeepers and accountants
- Integrated Reconciliation - As you categorize transactions they are reconciled at the same time, thus making it a one-step reconciliation process
- Fully Featured - Xero can do billing, invoicing, simple inventory, fixed assets, reconciliation, financial reporting, and payroll with the features that the majority of small businesses need.
- Collaboration - Xero allows for collaboration between financial advisors and businesses. Notes can be left on transactions for others to see, financial reports can be published and viewed by other users with footnotes.
- Accountant Friendly - There are a plethora of features that Xero offers specifically for accountants to do their work faster. Switching between clients, bulk coding and recoding, reporting templates that can be used across clients.
- A more robust invoicing system. They need to more payment provider add-ons so they can accept payments via ACH, instead of only credit card. They need to add the ability to have automatic recurring payments.
- A more robust reporting system. They need to add in financial reports with more flexibility on what fields you can add/remove.
- Payroll. I'd prefer if they had an option to do full-service payroll. They also don't yet support electronic filing and payment in all 50 states. This should be done ASAP.
- My employee efficiency when compared with similar tasks on QuickBooks has increased by at least 50%. When compared with QuickBooks desktop it was over 100%.
I have written several reviews comparing Quickbooks/Freshbooks/Xero. In many categories they offer very similar features. What sets them apart and will continue to set them apart in the long run is their approach to the market. Quickbooks has a closed ecosystem approach, while Xero is encourages and stimulates add-on partners to build products that connect to their system. This allows for more robust integrations over time and improved automation in their ecosystem of apps. That is the main reason I prefer Xero over Quickbooks.
Secondly, Xero offers many more accounting partner related features for cleaning up books, setting up clients quickly, and making it easy send out reports.
Secondly, Xero offers many more accounting partner related features for cleaning up books, setting up clients quickly, and making it easy send out reports.
- 50% to 75% of my clients