Very limited multicurrency and poor customer service
Updated January 08, 2018
Very limited multicurrency and poor customer service
Score 3 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Xero
We used Xero in concert with external accountants (it was bundled as part of their services). We used it across the organization to manage all of our accounting, with integrations for expenses as well as managing an investment portfolio - we are an accelerator programme performing 25+ investments per annum.
- It's reasonably user-friendly and when the defined rules work well it can be very helpful.
- The reporting and budgeting functionality is very good once they're set up.
- It has a lot of external integrations.
- The main one is responsiveness to customer concerns: the multicurrency edition doesn't do multicurrency expenses. It's been several years but things like apple watch (!) integration were prioritized over this.
- It can be difficult to drill down and find detailed information on single transactions when things aren't balancing.
- Most of the things it did well were fairly standard
- We sometimes spent rather a lot of time working around its limitations
- Single organization view for a tree of organizations and ability to manage investments was very good.
- Free Agent and Crunch
Free Agent was more user-friendly and had *much* better customer support but is really designed for freelancers &/or small companies with regular needs. We used Xero in the end because our accounting firm provided it as part of the service. We were then fairly tied into it due to the amount of work to migrate in/out.
Xero Feature Ratings
Using Xero
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
Like to use Easy to use Quick to learn | Not well integrated Inconsistent Lots to learn |
- Once you get everything set up, loads of things are really straightforward: getting to cashflow forecasts, budget reconciliation, payroll, and dealing with these reports work very well.
- The customisability is pretty good - we had to to fairly complex accounting for investments across 3+ organisations but maintain a single view across them. It was much easier to use than our previous system.
- When the rules system worked, it was a breeze - lots of our monthly admin was easy to use and imported through integrations really easily.
- When the rules system broke, it could be very difficult to get things reconciled properly. This happened fairly regularly (I'm still not clear if this was the expenses system, hte integration, or the Xero rules)
- Tracking down a single transaction could be incredibly difficult - for instance if your reconciliation was out of balance at the end of the month and you needed to find osmething. This meant I never felt like I could "trust" it.
- Multicurrency still gives me heartburn. Where it works, it works fine, but (arguably) the most faffy thing with multicurrency is their expense system, which seems like it was an awful thing bolted on that just completely didn't work and over three years they refused to use it, so we were reduced to using Excel sheets to transform and code and *hope* that HMRC would accept the evidence if we were ever subject to audit. It also meant hours of work for every international trip - even to the EU.
- Support (particularly for the multicurrency bit) was completely unresponsive. They have a voting system and this issue was the top of the voting pile but they kept working on shiny new stuff rather than fixing core functionality. Case in point: I lost complete faith in them when they prioritised apple watch functionality over getting expenses to work properly.
Yes - I didn't use it very much but it worked well enough when I did. There's a bit too much information, really, for it to be a workable solution but in a pinch it could be handy (i.e. if you needed to look something up on an aeroplane or whatever). They offered an IOS only app but we didn't use apple/IOS so I can't comment on that.