Thomson Reuters ONESOURCE is a portfolio of tax and accounting technology for corporations designed to help users boost collaboration with departments and partners and ensure seamless tax compliance no matter where a company does business.
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Xero
Score 8.5 out of 10
N/A
Xero is an online accounting software product for small businesses and personal finance. Its features beyond general ledger and double-bookkeeping include quotable invoicing, bank reconciliation, purchase order and expense management, and tax management. Third party apps can extend its features further.
$13
per month
Pricing
Thomson Reuters ONESOURCE
Xero
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Early
$13
per month
Growing
$37
per month
Established
$70
per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Thomson Reuters ONESOURCE
Xero
Free Trial
No
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
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Prices in table are in USD and just apply to the US - other markets & prices are listed below:
Canada - Starter $18 CAD/month, Standard $45 CAD/month, Premium 5 $58 CAD/month
UK - Starter £14/month, Standard £28/month, Premium £36/month
AU - Starter $29 AUD/month, Standard $59 AUD/month, Premium 5 $76 AUD/month
NZ - Starter $31 NZD/month, Standard $66 NZD/month, Premium $84 NZD/month
We use [Thomson Reuters ONESOURCE] to prepare federal and state income tax returns which allows us to complete the work assigned very quickly and allow senior members of the team to review the work before submitting in a very fluid state. While not in the tax or busy season, the program is not as used as much.
If they are using foreign exchange I always use Xero. If I need reporting to be customized we always use Xero. If the client is already working in a software and it is working for them we will leave them in the software they are in.
ONESOURCE is excellent for providing a holistic suite of products that are specifically geared toward tax compliance.
ONESOURCE also does an excellent job of maintaining a fresh look and appearance to their products, but doesn't change the base functionality just to sell more or improve the look of the product.
ONESOURCE also does an excellent job of maintaining current tax information. In an ever changing tax world, this is the most important thing for a piece of tax software to provide.
Their method of moving between screens was very logical and intuitive which is not a "given" attribute among software packages.
Finding transactions was relatively easy with just common sense.
The use of this software was generally well received in that the accountants did not discredit the software as cheap, poorly organized, or timely to learn. No one at Corporate had a vendetta against using Xero.
It does a good job of allowing the users to drill down to the final detail of an account balance - which is fundamental to the accounting department's needs.
ONESOURCE absolutely needs to restore their TIN Matching feature. Not having a TIN Matching feature is huge and needs to be addressed immediately.
The software interface itself is outdated and clunky. It is way behind in terms of user-friendliness and convenience. Additionally, it is only compatible with Internet Explorer. ONESOURCE is literally the only reason I would ever access Internet Explorer which is notably slower and more prone to freezing than Google Chrome or Safari. A good portion of our business uses Macs which means they are SOL on accessing ONESOURCE.
The ability to look at multiple tax years for a single recipient would be huge. Currently, if a recipient asks us to pull three years of data, this means three different searches within each year's ONESOURCE instance. It's tedious and could be improved.
I would like to have the ability to sign up a holding company and all its trading entities under one subscription, in order to have amalgamated and separate accounting records and reports for each trading entity.
This is pertaining to my own Xero business clients: I would like to have a full featured, customizable practice client support /ticketing and task manager system, with reminders that can be sent to my clients and my team for various tasks due.
I would like Xero to have a cheaper option for their packages that include invoicing and related documents, as in my country we have options with an opposition accounting firm that offers a subscription where clients can create up to 2000 invoices per year for free.
To reiterate - a very useful tool for private company information, otherwise not forthcoming on the public domain. It is very crucial in Company analyses for various lenses, slices and dices of Company information. Also useful in industry analysis and in list building. Overall a great research and analytics tool.
In addition to the matters covered in this review, my reason for renewing this product is that Xero's functionality and the constant updates that the company provides, makes the software even more business friendly. The software therefore builds a brand loyalty among customers.
Xero has all the features that you need, basically. From chart of accounts, reconciling books, to making annual financial reports. What I'm currently looking for Xero right now is to provide more broader integration with the other apps so we can use it for customer-facing experience also. All in all, everything works well!
We have been actively using and 100% Xero based for our ecommerce accounting practice for over 4 years. There has on been one real outage for more than 5 minutes. Xero was open and transparent about the outage, what they were doing to resolve the issue, and provided 15 minute updates. Showing how they care about their customers and partners. Plus, showing that their customers care too, were understanding, and went surfing or in our case took a nap. Couldn't run our business without Xero as a partner.
Pages generally load quickly, but it's a fairly common occurrence to have pages taking a bit longer than I'd like to load (as in, 4+ seconds). Occasionally I have to refresh a page to get it to work. Bank feed and integrations tend to be slow in general, but that could easily be due to API latency on the side of the other parties. Most of the time, though, the bank feeds refresh before I login so it's not a huge problem. Not necessarily good performance compared to a local app like QuickBooks desktop, but definitely good performance for a cloud application. Room for growth? yes.
The ONESOURCE support has improved significantly over the years. Support sends out emails with the answer provided which helps in the future when the same issue occurs. This reduces the amount of calls to ONESOURCE Support as you can better document the calls and rely on previous answers if the same issue occurs. ONESOURCE support has also implemented a callback feature that reduces the amount of time spent on hold.
Always respond and keep issues open until you are satisfied with the result. Generally good responses, in the past, I had some support responses that were really basic and really annoying. They type where "have your tried restarting your computer" style of answers. Well, of course, I went through all the basics before contacting them. Duh, but I suppose not everyone does. Otherwise, it would be a 10. The last year has shown a marked improvement in the support responses however.
All of Xero's training is online and available for anyone (business owner or accountants) to learn and become experts in their system. There is a range of content from product training to real world webinars from their partners. Xero is beautiful accounting software and their training is the same.
If it can be done, time the implementation near a new fiscal year so you can start clean. Otherwise, you have to go back and do historical data from the beginning of the fiscal year, which can be brain draining.
As I said it is an easy-to-use platform and saved us time and money. They have great customer service and have helped our company get new hires checked and in-service faster than our old company. By combining the two services in one place it has made it easier for the new hire and the HR staff to track results. I am a fan!
I've used a lot of different accounting systems. Many of them so big and powerful, but a hassle to get set up. Xero is light, inexpensive, and easy to use. When I originally selected them they seemed like they were developing new features at a quick rate as well. I was invited to be part of focus sessions to make the product better. That part has slowed down significantly though.
I have yet to fully stress test the product given the size of the company where I am using it. I am sure as we scale to more customers, more vendors and more reporting requirements, I will have a better understanding of what it is capable of in terms of bandwidth and processing
Saved many hours through automatic invoices and followups
Saved many hours by allowing transactions to start via bank feeds (ie I don't have to input a transaction and mark it against what is in the bank/cc account; rather, the transaction in the account is where you input the transaction into the books.
Has the scalability my business requires, and not much more.