Xero Reviews: 4.4/5 — Solid Choice

easy to use and easy to set-up - great bank feeds

Reporting is nowhere near where it needs to be for either a full scale accounting service or a client with complex reporting requirements

Cash FLow Management and forecasting - we are on our way toward solving these objectives

What I like about Xero is its user-friendly interface. The dashboard is clean, designed intuitively and thus visually hence making it easy to get a snapshot of your financial situation at first glance. The software also makes robust offerings, including invoicing, expense tracking, and inventory management which can be helpful for small businesses hoping to simplify their operations forcefully.

A lot of the software showed up loaded with features but it proved to be quite a challenge to fully utilise it since I often wrested with functionality issues that impaired my ability to apply the software across my entire business. Moreover, the cost of using Xero was one big pain point. The monthly bills were quite steep, especially considering my difficulties in fully leveraging the software's capabilities. This and my challenges in disseminating necessary information to my accountants and authorities made for a less-than-ideal experience. In conclusion, while Xero had some merits and has the power to be a mighty tool for small businesses, it fell short of my expectations on several key elements. The steep learning point, high costs, and communication challenges made it fit less in my business needs.

Though the road to Xero was rockier than I could have imagined, it's tough to deny that, in the end, the software addressed several critical issues for my little lobby consulting business. First, when Xero brought a level of order to my financial management that was previously lacking, I was able to track income and expenses all in one place, along with the management of invoices and monitoring cash flow. This central approach to financial management saved me a tremendous amount of time and effort, allowing me the focus elsewhere on other aspects of my business. Second, Xero's cloud-based system allowed me to control my finances from anywhere at any time. That's especially useful for my lobby consulting business, where I often find myself on the move, meeting with clients or attending various events. With Xero, I could easily access my financial data in the office or out and about. Lastly, Xero's reporting capabilities were a significant asset. The software provided detailed financial reports that gave me a clear picture of my business's financial health. These insights were game changers in helping me make informed decisions about my strategy for business and planning for future scenarios. In conclusion, while Xero posed specific issues I had to struggle with, it also offered solutions that streamlined my financial management, provided flexibility, and added valuable insight into my knowledge of my business's financial status. Although the benefits these positives overshadow were never fully realized because of the difficulties Xero presented for me but contributed positively towards my business operations.

Xero is basic software that is easy to learn. You can search invoices and purchase orders in the global search field and there are a ton of reports that can be pulled via excel or CSV. There is a drag and drop feature for when invoices are entered, which is helpful. There is also an audit log.

I do not believe that there are many controls or approval workflows, so this would not be a good software for a public company. There is no depreciation or amortization automation so these must be done via manual journal entry.

Xero helps store invoices all in one place as well as provide generic reports for small businesses.

Search feature for all contacts is amazing. It's all in one search and you can use wild cards if you are looking for multiple customers with similar names.

Seems cumbersome to move around in the software and the reports don't have enough flexibility (or I just don't know how to manipulate them yet)

Accounting for a home owner's association

It is a simple and user friendly accounting software with multiple options in Reporting

Performing reconciliation in XERO is limited to only Bank and Credit card accounts, and we can not reconcile in XERO for other Balance sheet accounts.

Day to Day Accounting, Invoice and Bills creation, and Performing Reconciliations

I love the simple, clean look of the interface. It is easy to navigate

It does not have the flexibility with reporting that QuickBooks has, and does not sync well with softwares I have used

Pages only load so much at a time, so if your custom report returns large reports, you can only export so much at a time. Benefits is that it is easy to learn.

clean layout so easy to find sections you need. Not too over priced compared to cmpetitors, offers a lot of features

Help wasn't the best and did not fit our business which deals with multiple sale channels and currencies. We are a small business and did not allow us to bring the book keeping in house as was a lot of work to setup and they did not seems to understand the different sale channels for online sellers. Seems best suited to a traditional business

trying to bring the book keeping in house to save money

A very easy to use product, easy to understand even for beginners, and not so tech savvy people.

Quite dated UI, and not the best customer service. They took three business days to solve a problem for me which I have clearly labeled as urgent. Slow loading times sometimes as well.

Sending in company expenses and contact with accounting department.

It is undoubtedly a good product, I have used other accounting systems too from Reckon, MYOB, QBO etc. Xero is in my view the simplest to use, even if QBO might be a better product. I look forwards to seeing the other smaller players win more business. Freshbooks, Wave, Odoo and the like.

Price. Their business model is to get people 'hooked' and slowly up the price. Sometimes even charging for things that were already part of the product and calling it an add on feature. e.g. Expenses. As a heavily VC backed company, the model was win lost of clients and then up the price because people do not swap accounting systems readily.

Accounting. Payroll. Reporting.

It handles everything email drop box for receipting and good set up for organisational use and tracking record for spending

Layout is pretty hard to navigate down one side bar, very little plug-ins for ecommerce sides of business, they're very high on the elite scale, but mid priced for SMEs

Handling all our accounts and transactions

this software has taken an importance for this company since it has started the monitoring of our invoicing, resulting in an optimal work, it is easy to operate, I practice in its management, when we started with xero we started using the free trial for 180 days that only allowed us to manage a limited number of invoices, it is great since it allowed us to know if it was really good or bad.

the first thing that we dislike is that we did not see the customer service number to be able to support us when we had problems feeding this platform, the interface is very basic they should improve it, when carrying out the operations it does not indicate the delivery notes, it needs more features to support yourself better and thus have a more optimized software to carry out our processes.

It is helping us get out of the flow of our billings efficiently and quickly, provides an economy since we do not use paper for those processes of our company.

We love Xero, it is absolutely perfect if you have basic accounting needs. It has all the simple accounting needed for small business and the ease of use makes the barrier to entry perfect fort the amount of time most people want to spend on getting to know the product.

I have noticed that they tend to have poor customer service. They rarely reply to tickets and sometimes if they do reply it does not clear anything up. That being said, they have a great community which helps you find solutions. If it was a little cheaper, the package would be perfect.

I can use it anywhere which is awesome - on my phone, tablet and computer. It is also so easy to use because you cane take a photo/scanning an invoice to attach to the payment. It also makes keeping payroll updated easy. The tracking in other currencies and being able to separate that out has been incredibly helpful for us as we operate internationally.

I like the rules we can set up for recurring transactions. It makes reconciling very easy.

I don't care for the dashboard as much as I do Quickbooks Online's. The sync feature for our bank account is cumbersome and seems to take a long time.

It's good for recording income and expenses...like it should. Overall, it does just what it needs to.

It's web based, looks good, and works (ish) with many systems through the API. They fixed the Stripe integration, finally, which was a problem for years.

First and foremost, if you need to use Purchase Orders, Xero isn't for you. You cannot include Item Codes (their version of Part Numbers) on purchase orders. You can use the Item Name, but even to get that you need to create a custom template and rework it entirely in Word to get that. The default setting from Xero is that you only get Item Description. This is obviously useless for any purchasing, and Xero has clearly stated that it is never going to happen because, and I quote, "Item Codes are mainly for internal purposes." It's a huge issue. https://community.xero.com/business/discussion/3361072 is the thread on their boards where they refuse to fix it. In addition, accountants can't make certain kinds of journal entries which they're used to being able to do in Quickbooks. This causes an issue if you're making the switch, so make sure your bookkeeper or accountant is trained on Xero.

General book keeping, flowing in sales from multiple channels, expenses.

Mobile expense upload, mobile experience all around is very intuitive. Easy to take a picture, easy submission and quick response time from finance.

Website app is not as user friendly as it could be, mobile app is much easier to use. Also, difficult to use behind a firewall like Samsung Knox, but this is not a problem unique to Xero. Reporting functionality connected to the dashboard for the company could be better, seems like only certain fields are able to be pulled through API connection

Finance, expense. Ability to take pictures of receipts, automatically submit for approval. Taken the pain out of expense approval

web access and cleanliness of the overall interface. Able to get up to speed and use very quickly, even for non-accounting types.

Expense management, especially for employees is terrible. Their response is to suggest you subscribe to another company's expense software or do weird workarounds via invoicing. For a start-up with employees seeking reimbursement of out of pocket expenses, it is a real negative experience.

Standard accounting and financial oversight of start-up. Managing cash-flow, monitoring balance sheet, generating quarterly financial statements for investors. Also would like to use it for employee expense management. Main benefit is in standard financial statements management.

I liked the fact that you were about to reconcile your bank accounts from within the platform.

Although I liked the reconciliation function, I wish you were able to input the data directly from your bank account by syncing it instead of having it upload and you having to review it.

It's great for accounts receivable and accounts payable. I was working at a co-working space so I was able to issue invoices, have them paid and then documenting them through Xero.

We moved off of FreeAgent on to Xero at the first of this year - and overall, it's pretty good. It ties up with ReceiptBank and is easier to do journals and manage cashflow for our investments and whatnot. FA started off for single agents and then moved to multiuser as their needs expanded. The customer support is pretty good.

It describes itself as multicurrency, but it's not, and it's clear that the design of the thing is just flawed. There's a feature request from 2012 about making personal expenses work if you have expenses in another currency. You know, one of the basic multicurrency functions. It doesn't work, and the company line seems to be that it's a complicated feature. From a developer's point of view you'd expect that there'd be a module that would say something like "input money", and that they should be able to point the expenses function there, but no. Apparently it's too complicated. And this is a product they market in the EU. The whole multicurrency thing kind of doesn't work terribly well. It's as though someone added it without thinking about what it would be like for the user.

We: - Run basic bookkeeping and VAT - manage investments (loans, equity, and convertibles) Need to manage cashflow

Xero made accounting easy for someone who doesn't know much about accounting

I don't like that you cant integrate many apps like in quickbooks. I think quickbooks online is a better solution personally.

It solved our day to day book keeping problem.

The accounting side of thing is fairly decent. Bank rules are great. The reporting/filtering tool is quite powerful.

Whenever you request support they send you standard replies without investigating the issue, generally treat you like an imbecile and in one case refused to investigate unless I sent them a screenshot of the toggle that wasn't working turned on. The toggle is on. They've been in a UI migration for years now. Some key functionality is missing from the mobile app. You can't attach a document or any metadata to a project. Generally, the interaction between Xero Projects and Xero could be a little more smooth. Their website can't seem to remember who I am.

Manages the books for my business and basic project tracking.

I don't know compared with other systems.

Difficult to learn, in English only, obligation for accounting to use another software for VAT and yearly fiscal declaration

My CEO chose Xero because it permits us to have a permanent control of our cash flow and our costs. Before that, we only had the documents coming back from our external accountant after VAT closing, too long after the facts.

The relative ease of use. Quick to learn.

Only one delivery address per account. Increases invoicing time as you must change the account information for every invoice.

Keeps good track of all accounting, reports are easy to follow

i like the fact that you can import your transactions directly from your bank account and also do a live feed

The monthly subscription plans are a bit too pricey compared to other sites

calculating profits and loss, reconciling bank accounts, help with filing taxes and VAT and also submitting them with HMRC

For the most part the software is great. However we cancelled due to the bank account syncing breaking constantly, rendering the software useless.

Bad app connection or banking records on a regular basis

We were solving the problem of accounting.

I like the simplicity of the software and ease of use.

So far, there is nothing that I dislike except for the trial offer.

Payment processing

I liked the ability to pull reports and I think the dashboard was decent

I did not enjoy the difficulty of navigation and inputting information was clunky. In general, it did not flow easily in our workplace.

We used it for accounting. It was nice to have one place with expenses and payroll.

Xero could be accessed anywhere as long as there is an internet connection since it is a cloud-based application. It has a nice modern user-interface that is quite user-friendly. They have updated the names and terminology of modules for non-accountants to use. For instance Accounts Payable is called Purchases and Accounts Receivable is called Sales.

Xero does not have the ability for printing Canadian cheques. The cheque printing templates available are only for the United States and for some countries in Europe. The available reports within Xero are very limited as well. I continue to use a legacy report that captures most of the data that I need, but I have been told by Xero Support that eventually that report will be phased out. Xero had included a free expense claims module for the past few years, but that will be phased out at the end of September to a per user pay module just to enter expense claims.

We wanted an accounting system that was easily accessible for the executives while they were away on vacation. Since it is a cloud-based application, Xero could be accessed anywhere in the world that has an internet connection. Another problem that Xero solved was that staff were able to log on and submit their own expense claims, instead of having the accounting department look after the input of receipts for the staff expense claims.

Simple interface and easy to navigate. Manages our financials with ease.

Very financial/accountant based. Need financial understanding or background to use.

Managing income flow and expenses.

Online access for a number of users is a real advantage. I like being able to link in my accountant. Constant bank account updates is another plus. Overall I like the package but the reviews I've read ignore any of the limitations of the software.

Processes are slow, slow slow! Direct Deposit takes 3-5 days for Xero to confirm, then another 5-7 days for their direct deposit partner to confirm. At each stage you think you are done until you try to process payroll. The time it takes and the processes related to setting up electronic payments are unacceptable. The software is not set up to be compatible with some common web browsers Xero says they will respond within 24 hours to questions but there is no assistance on weekends - when do they think small businesses do their accounting? Overall I still like the package but believe they are deleting negative reviews. The reviews I've read imply the software is outstanding, which it is not.

It's accounting software and I'm doing accounting with it.

I am reviewing all the comments and so far I find them very helpful.

I am disappointed to find they are not handling multiple currencies very well. For me that is a vital feature for my business.

All in all, the reviews seem to be much more favorable than the QuickBooks online reviews, which were quite informative and shockingly negative.