Putting Xero through it’s paces

I’ve been trying out Xero – an online small business accounts package. I like the idea of SaaS and have been keeping an eye on it’s progress. I absolutely hate Quickbooks, which is what we’re using at the moment. However,choosing a new accounting package is not something that I’m going to jump into.

I’m not going to bother going over Xero’s good bits (as there are far too many to list). That may seem cynical, but Xero is very seductive. It can sometimes be difficult to discover what’s missing until you’re three months into using it. So, here are my notes so far.

• Customer Terms are not memorised
  • My customers don’t have the same agreed terms – they all vary between 30 and 90 days. So when I enter an invoice I have to specify the due date manually. Bit of a pain.
  • Unfortunately this is something that Quickbooks already does.
• Product unit costs limited to two decimal places
  • Some of our products have prices to four decimal places. Xero will only allow unit prices to two decimal places.
• Invoices and statements can’t be emailed in bulk
  • Xero is great because it allows you to invoice customers electronically. This is fine if you send the invoice as soon as it’s entered however…
  • If you’ve just entered 20 invoices you can click print all and get them all in hardcopy, but you can’t select all 20 and tell Xero to email to customers. This would be really handy.
• No stock management
  • Xero doesn’t support any stock management. So if you manufacture or resell product and need to keep track of inventory then this would ahve to be done outside of Xero.
  • QB already does this but we have other systems which are better at managing our stock.