Xero

With most clients abroads, we find its best to bill them in their local currency. Luckily for us, Xero is there to help sort our books out and keep them in order. It integrates with many bank feeds & popular wallets/fintechs like PayPal, Payoneer & TransferWise so accounts are upto date - always.

Another feature we really use is their tracking fields. Xero allows users to setup 2 tracking fields that can be added to invoices, expenses, bills and assigned to each line. This helps us keep track of project based work and has been our way since before Xero ventured into Project based accounting (that users need to pay additional fee for)

It also integrates with online payment gateways such as PayPal, Stripe, GoCardless, and a few others; thus payments are a breeze for clients.

As a non-accountant, Xero is easy to use even when you get into all the features it provides.

They have made some changes to their UI esp where invoices and expenses are concerned. Luckily for older users, expenses are still free however, for new users it isnt and each person filing expenses on it needs to pay a small fee. I think it should be free for a small number of users (atleast 2) and then charged.

What I liked most about Xero was its user-friendly interface. The dashboard is simple and streamlined, allowing me and my accounting team to use the software smoothly even without extensive accounting background. I also enjoy the mobile access on phones and tablets, enabling me to manage accounting tasks anywhere. Additionally, the seamless integration with other banking and invoicing apps is great. Overall, Xero is easy to use and helpful for handling the day-to-day accounting of my business.

What I liked least about Xero was the limited custom reporting options. While Xero provides many standard financial reports, the ability to customize reports or create more complex accounting reports is restricted. So sometimes I need to export data to Excel to build custom reports. It also lacks advanced support for inventory or manufacturing accounting. But overall, Xero covers my needs as a small business for now, and I expect the platform will continue improving over time.

I loved the usability of this software. It was super easy to set up relatively sophisticated accounting with no accounting background. I thought the bank reconciliation was dynamite, and while they still had it, I loved the payroll. When I would eventually get triaged to tech support, the person was so patient, and so helpful it was really great, and they never seemed to mind spending a long time helping to fix some oddball problems that I'd made. Oh yes, loved it that they did the quarterly tax filings for me, but that also went away with the payroll

One thing about this accounting software - when you have a question their first response is to tell you to have your accountant look at it. I was using this software as a replacement for an accountant, in order to save money, so that advice didn't help much. When you do a google for help, you run into a problem: Xero seems to be doing accounting software for all the english speaking countries,e.g. new zealand, australia, UK, USA and canada. each of these countries has different business formations/corporations, different taxation rules, etc, as well as meaningfully different accounting vernacular. I would end up mnost of the time getting somewhere only to realize I'd pulled up the UK instructions to solve a problem.

We have found the implementation and integration of Xero into our business, processes and workflow to be pretty seamless. The standard reporting package is useful and custom queries / analysis is pretty straight forward. We also really like the cloud based access that allows remote access almost anywhere.

Overall we don't have many Cons, but to make Xero better we'd like to see......Integration with a broader range of transitional apps would be great. Apps that track things like mileage travelled, POS (sales, credits, refunds) activity, pull invoices from regular suppliers / vendors (such as utilities).