Who Thought Accounting Could Be Fun? (Not Me)
March 04, 2020
Who Thought Accounting Could Be Fun? (Not Me)
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Xero
After 10+ years with QuickBooks, I was ready for a change to accounting software that was designed for non-accounting types and didn't require me spending 5 hours a month to reconcile. (To be fair, we were on the desktop version and Xero's online version is what appealed to me.) The user interface in Xero was simple to understand because each screen only gives you so many choices. I only have 5 employees and only 2 on payroll. The rest are 1099s. Three of us have access, but I'm the only one with admin access.
- Beautiful proposals compared to QuickBooks.
- Easy reconciliation through the bank feed.
- Customer service ALWAYS responds, although it may take them a day or so. I never feel abandoned by support.
- Active and helpful community forum.
- Even after 3 years, they never added Missouri to payroll, so I had to hire an outside payroll company, then reconcile their records with Xero.
- The bank feed broke when my bank changed their authorization to a 2-step verification. Xero said it was out of their control, but I ended up having to export/import several times a month to stay up to date. Bummer.
- Custom reporting is limited. There were many reports I would like to see and there's no way to create them unless Xero gives you something similar to customize.
- Greatly reduced the amount of time I spend each month on reconciliation over the previous acct software I used to use.
- It doesn't force me to be an acct whiz to use the program; it adapts to my business model. This was critical in my decision making.
QuickBooks was my grandmother's bookkeeping software. Nothing was automated and it forced me to know good accounting practices. That's what I pay my accountant for. Xero is intuitive and also limited on what you can do on each screen. If I'm ever confused, I send a support ticket and hear back within 1 day. Or I go to the forum which is very active. I am currently running Zoho Books in parallel to Xero and they stack up pretty evenly. With Zoho Books, I get 24/7 live chat help and they stay online with me till I resolve my issue. With Xero, help is via email. Usually I'm not in a big hurry, so that is fine, but the choice is to work on New Zealand or Indian time. Neither one has a payroll module for my state, and Zoho Books has many more integrations thru its API than Xero does. Depending on what other software changes we make in the near future (around marketing and project management), the integrations will determine which accounting program we'll end up with permanently.