Xero

Bastante satisfeito com tantos recursos e o esforço de trazer tudo isso da forma mais simples possível.

Vantagens

A primeira impressão que tive foi muito positiva quando mesmo antes de precisar me cadastrar para obter acesso ao programa, tive a opção de fazer uma demonstração gratuita de como seria ter como suporte o programa Xero para minha empresa. Muito bem construído, com um sistema bem organizado e que funciona corretamente, tanto pelo desktop quanto pelo aplicativo.

Desvantagens

É uma crítica necessária que faz diferença à quem procura um programa de gerenciamento. Sabemos que cuidar da parte financeira e de outras coisas mais de uma empresa, mesmo que seja pequena, é um grande trabalho, e isso pode se tornar mais desafiador quando não encontramos suporte para nosso próprio idioma, e é essa minha crítica ao Xero, a falta de opção para meu idioma.

It's been easier to use Xero than I expected, but I had a nasty surprise at tax time when I realized the default accounts/descriptions for expenses did not correlate 1:1 to IRS categories. (I should have checked this more closely when I set up my accounts because it's a New Zealand company, and the previous product was local.) This means I will need to double-check all my transactions for 2018 and the IRS has my vastly overestimated tax payment until I can do that and file my return on an extension.

I've had a much better experience importing data from financial institutions because Xero uses a well-known importing service that is trusted by the institutions.

I like being able to match multiple invoices to bank deposits because I usually don't run to the bank for each check. This will be more valuable as my company grows.

I should probably find an accountant to assist me with this, but I haven't found an accountant who understands both craft businesses and Xero.

Vantagens

Professional double entry software at a very affordable price
Accommodates both cash and accrual accounting
Links to financial institutions to get transactions
Uses standard importer recognized by the financial institutions instead of just trying to log in remotely (and triggering fraud alerts)
Can match multiple invoices to a single deposit transaction imported from bank
Can keep using Xero as company grows

Desvantagens

Pre-existing expense categories/descriptions don't map 1:1 with IRS definitions, so I'm having to go back to all my receipts to make sure expenses are entered in proper accounts because I didn't realize this when I switched
More difficult to focus on specific expense categories to check transactions
Have not been able to import historic data from previous app (possibly because it's not double entry) so I am still paying the subscription on that software to retain access to my data
No integration with Craftybase, so I have to enter supply purchases and customer invoices there independently

It's a lot of money to get setup with a certified consultant. Very few consultants available in Canada. When we did find one she was great but she bills you for every second she works. As in not any free advice. My lawyer is easier to work with.

Vantagens

As a former quickbooks user of about 20 years, it was a big deal to switch platforms. At first glance it looked like it would do everything we wanted. I loved the price point, the interface and relative ease of use. The multi currency was great as was the ability to integrate with Stripe. You make a lot of compromises to save on the huge monthly cost of quickbooks but there are workarounds.

Desvantagens

There are so many things that are just common/must have's for any business. Things like progressive billing, job costing and even the ability to make your own journal entries are missing. We had to hire a consultant and spend around $800 just to get it to add purchases easier to the mix with HubDoc. You see job costing catagories at the invoice level but not software or 3rd party app to back it up. The single most annoying thing about it is the support. It's non existent. You complain, They tell you its not a problem and ignore your requests. I struggle daily with the search function. I can't get about 50% of my searches to work. The clients I'm looking for are entered. I'm typing them in fine but you often have to visit contacts menu and find them manually by quote number or just never ending scrolling. Upon complaining numerous times the best they can do is say "it might take up to two weeks for your contacts to sync. " Xero: It's 2020 and the dark ages of cloud software have passed. You need to fix the search function and add job costing to be considered a contender. So here we are in 2020, manually adding each of our sales to a spreadsheet and adding the subsequent bills to it to see if we made $. They make it incredibly hard to contact support and they are quite unresponsive when they do reply to your ticket. They try really hard to push you to support forums, where there are literally hundreds of complaints on the same issue with the ability to comment closed.

Overall, Xero costs us a lot of time we didn't spend before, does things on it's own such as create new suppliers for an expense and to me, it seems the software was written by ex Bookkeepers who didn't really understand bookkeeping anyway and had a good go at designing a software package that would compete I am guessing with the likes of Sage and failed abysmally.

We use Xero because our accountants do the bookkeeping for us and this is what they use, if not for this, I wouldn't touch Xero if my life depended on it.

Vantagens

Nothing, nothing at all. The software is nothing more than a glorified analysed cashbook. Support is poor and some of the replies from Support demonstrate the advisor doesn't understand accounts, the accounts structure or the damage that can be done by the advice they are giving.

Desvantagens

All purchases whether a supplier, or a bottle of milk from Tesco's is a contact. A bottle of milk for the office should be coded directly to the nominal code, not a new supplier "Tesco's" created.

Cash in an out of bank should be the same as the bank statement on a live bank feed, but it excludes transfers from savings to current account so not a true reflection of cash in and out.

Xero doesn't reconcile customer receipts, even through the name on the receipt in the bank is the same as the customer account exactly.

Xero dump a lot of support on to the accountant who provides the service.

Xero creates accounts for customers and suppliers on it's own if it doesn't recognise a payment or receipt in the bank account. Software should never be allowed to decide if it wants to create something automatically.

Xero isn't as automated as Sage Accounts, for instance when bulk invoicing over several days, you can't set the date at software level, you have to keep changing the date.

When importing from Sage into Xero for the first time, if Xero doesn't understand an item on the invoice, it simply creates a new line on the invoice whether you want it to or not and there is no way apparently to undo this once done.

Xero works with receipt bank and you can spend hours trying to tell it an expense is not to be coded to a customer.

I could go on.

Overall, it's a decent program, with all the bells and whistles you'd expect from a cloud based accounting program. Unfortunately working without being able to reconcile monthly made life too difficult. And not many accountants work with it, so that made it difficult to have professional eyes on my accounting.

Vantagens

I loved how easy it was to integrate XERO with my bank accounts and Paypal. XERO seamlessly connected and kept my balances up to date. I also liked how easy it was to invoice clients and connect invoices to Paypal or Stripe.

Desvantagens

Unfortunately, the reconciliation process in XERO is a no-go for me. Rather than the Quickbooks and standard approach, where you do a monthly reconciliation against a bank statement, XERO had no such function. Once an item was matched up to a bank transaction, it was considered "reconciled." No option to close out a month and double-check transactions. I went back to QBO to get that feature.