Couple of Qs about Xero before committing
Discussion
Was just about to bit the bullet and buy into Xero, but have some questions:
I receive mostly USD and UKP but occasionally other currencies. I often purchase things in all sorts of currencies. In both these cases I am really only interested in the converted UKP amounts to track income, etc. Does this mean I need the multi-currency (the most expensive
) package?
Can I assign project and client codes to expenditure/ income? I have developed these over time in my current spreadsheet and would like to transfer them over to keep reprting the same. Is that ok.
Is Sage One a viable competitor. I don' think it was available when I started looking at software, but it may be of benefit if it does all of what Xero does as my accountant mostly uses the full Sage package. Does Sage One offer anything that Xero does not?
Thanks,
I receive mostly USD and UKP but occasionally other currencies. I often purchase things in all sorts of currencies. In both these cases I am really only interested in the converted UKP amounts to track income, etc. Does this mean I need the multi-currency (the most expensive
) package?Can I assign project and client codes to expenditure/ income? I have developed these over time in my current spreadsheet and would like to transfer them over to keep reprting the same. Is that ok.
Is Sage One a viable competitor. I don' think it was available when I started looking at software, but it may be of benefit if it does all of what Xero does as my accountant mostly uses the full Sage package. Does Sage One offer anything that Xero does not?
Thanks,
Foreign currency - I spent a while doing this for USD and it was fine (check with your accountant, I'm not entirely sure I should have done this) - we ended up upgrading once we opened currency bank accounts. The multicurrency support is quite good and it's nice to have accumulated losses/gains from FX transactions calculated for you.
Project/clients - you can assign codes to 'contacts' who are used as supplier/customers etc but I don't think there's much more than that. There's a new 'projects' paid feature which I haven't looked into.
Did you try the free trial?
Project/clients - you can assign codes to 'contacts' who are used as supplier/customers etc but I don't think there's much more than that. There's a new 'projects' paid feature which I haven't looked into.
Did you try the free trial?
Honestly, I would say use what your accountant uses, it just makes things easier in the long run.
We have Xero and it's fine but it has an awful lot of surprising "holes" (e.g. reporting is really limited) so you aren't buying a gold-plated solution with Xero anyway. Unless you buy lots of their 'Plugins' to fill the gaps ... which gets expensive.
We have Xero and it's fine but it has an awful lot of surprising "holes" (e.g. reporting is really limited) so you aren't buying a gold-plated solution with Xero anyway. Unless you buy lots of their 'Plugins' to fill the gaps ... which gets expensive.
Flooble said:
Honestly, I would say use what your accountant uses, it just makes things easier in the long run.
We have Xero and it's fine but it has an awful lot of surprising "holes" (e.g. reporting is really limited) so you aren't buying a gold-plated solution with Xero anyway. Unless you buy lots of their 'Plugins' to fill the gaps ... which gets expensive.
Thanks - interesting as the reporting is what is driving me to move to an accountancy package. I also really want to keep the codes from my old system for continuity sake (took several years to work through what was important to watch). We have Xero and it's fine but it has an awful lot of surprising "holes" (e.g. reporting is really limited) so you aren't buying a gold-plated solution with Xero anyway. Unless you buy lots of their 'Plugins' to fill the gaps ... which gets expensive.
I had also noted the ad-ons and I'm very wary of business models that keeps adding features that way...
That said, my accountant suggested Xero actually, despite using Sage. I think at the time Sage One may not have been an option and moving to the full Sage system for us was rather overkill, so Xero was a good part-solution.
I might try the Sage trial.
Interesting; our Accountants also pushed us onto Xero (we had been on FreeAgent, which suited the size of business much better in my opinion). I get the impression that Xero is written to make life easy for the accountants and having heard you were being pushed in the same direction I now have a suspicion that there may be some inducements going on ...
I'd say go with Xero, its far better known and if you need some additional features in the future you can probbably find an app for it. Sage has nowhere near the number of connected apps on its platform. You're essentially going for Windows vs Android/iOS. Every app developer will make something for the latter 2.
If your accountant tries to get you to use Sage, find another accountant.
If your accountant tries to get you to use Sage, find another accountant.
Edited by jamoor on Sunday 10th December 00:04
I've been using Xero lately and I find it OK. It does basically what it wants you to do.
From an accounting point of view though, the layout it generates for profit and loss accounts and balance sheets seems very muddled compared to what we in the accounting world consider to be normal or indeed, is required under general accounting practices or even accounting standards and company law.
However, as a day to day accounting tool, it looks like it can do the job.
From an accounting point of view though, the layout it generates for profit and loss accounts and balance sheets seems very muddled compared to what we in the accounting world consider to be normal or indeed, is required under general accounting practices or even accounting standards and company law.
However, as a day to day accounting tool, it looks like it can do the job.
For your codes I'm pretty sure you're referring to a Chart of Accounts, which Xero has.
You can also use the tracking feature. You basically set up a tracking category, give it a name ("InEx Code") and some values, then on each invoice/PO line you have a column for that tracking category and can choose one of the values you've created.
You can also use the tracking feature. You basically set up a tracking category, give it a name ("InEx Code") and some values, then on each invoice/PO line you have a column for that tracking category and can choose one of the values you've created.
Eric Mc said:
I've been using Xero lately and I find it OK. It does basically what it wants you to do.
From an accounting point of view though, the layout it generates for profit and loss accounts and balance sheets seems very muddled compared to what we in the accounting world consider to be normal or indeed, is required under general accounting practices or even accounting standards and company law.
However, as a day to day accounting tool, it looks like it can do the job.
From my experience it's designed to be easy to use for the end user rather than accountants as the end users are the ones that matter.From an accounting point of view though, the layout it generates for profit and loss accounts and balance sheets seems very muddled compared to what we in the accounting world consider to be normal or indeed, is required under general accounting practices or even accounting standards and company law.
However, as a day to day accounting tool, it looks like it can do the job.
jamoor said:
From my experience it's designed to be easy to use for the end user rather than accountants as the end users are the ones that matter.
Both are important. However, despite its weird final presentation of the figures, a decent accountant should be able to turn the silliness it produces into legally compliant formats.That's partly what we're for - stopping our clients getting into trouble with government agencies who can levy fines if you don't do things the right way.
Frankly, I was surprised at how cack handed their final presentation was. It wouldn't take much application by their designers to sort it out.
For me off the top of my head as a non-accountant there's:
The reports. You can't really write a report from scratch. You can customise existing ones but the custom/draft/publish approach is rather weird as it the way you setup the filtering for a custom report (easy to accidentally mess up the default report).
The journalling. Okay this is configuration as much as Xero and it maybe makes sense to our accountant, but as an end-user it's a bit of a PITA. The amount of effort needed to set up the rules to do it is more effort than I want to spend as a small business. It's not a payroll system, but that's a big bug-bear for me - dealing with the NI split and manually journalling salaries etc. is far more hassle than it should be.
The budgeting and forecasting seems to consist of "dump it out to Excel and do it there". Happy to be corrected here ...
In the Sales section I find myself "losing" quotes and invoices depending on the filters from dashboard to "show all".
There's a bug where when I send two attachments on an invoice only one comes through. Not nailed down what causes that yet but not great as that's the customer interaction blown.
Customers are restricted in contacts - lots of our customers have multiple departments and we either have to set up a new "customer" for each department, or fiddle with the contacts each time we send a quote/invoice. The "group" function doesn't flow through nicely to the rest of the system.
It muddles the terminology (from an end user perspective) with the "Accounts" tab being "real" accounts but the "Chart of Accounts" including the ledgers (or subsidiary accounts under the top level control account - guess it depends on your age what you call it but either way "subsidiary" isn't mentioned). As a result the MD still refers to "Categories" which is all down to the user interface that he sees.
Probably some more irritations but we have ended up employing someone part-time to handle it as the overhead when we were switched from Freeagent got too much, so as a result I've forgotten a lot of the pain.
The reports. You can't really write a report from scratch. You can customise existing ones but the custom/draft/publish approach is rather weird as it the way you setup the filtering for a custom report (easy to accidentally mess up the default report).
The journalling. Okay this is configuration as much as Xero and it maybe makes sense to our accountant, but as an end-user it's a bit of a PITA. The amount of effort needed to set up the rules to do it is more effort than I want to spend as a small business. It's not a payroll system, but that's a big bug-bear for me - dealing with the NI split and manually journalling salaries etc. is far more hassle than it should be.
The budgeting and forecasting seems to consist of "dump it out to Excel and do it there". Happy to be corrected here ...
In the Sales section I find myself "losing" quotes and invoices depending on the filters from dashboard to "show all".
There's a bug where when I send two attachments on an invoice only one comes through. Not nailed down what causes that yet but not great as that's the customer interaction blown.
Customers are restricted in contacts - lots of our customers have multiple departments and we either have to set up a new "customer" for each department, or fiddle with the contacts each time we send a quote/invoice. The "group" function doesn't flow through nicely to the rest of the system.
It muddles the terminology (from an end user perspective) with the "Accounts" tab being "real" accounts but the "Chart of Accounts" including the ledgers (or subsidiary accounts under the top level control account - guess it depends on your age what you call it but either way "subsidiary" isn't mentioned). As a result the MD still refers to "Categories" which is all down to the user interface that he sees.
Probably some more irritations but we have ended up employing someone part-time to handle it as the overhead when we were switched from Freeagent got too much, so as a result I've forgotten a lot of the pain.
48k said:
I really like Xero, am interested to hear more about the "cack handedness".
I was dealing with interpreting nominal accounts and putting the final accounts into legally correct formats.The former seemed a bit old fashioned to me and the latter had to be done as the formats used by the system are not complaint with accounting standards.
These may not be of significance for day to day users, but they do matter when the accounts are being reviewed and finalised for tax and company law purposes - as well as compliance with recognised accounting standards.
jamoor said:
You can easily make a backup using this add-on. It's even in the xero app store.
https://www.backupmybooks.com/home
https://www.backupmybooks.com/home
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