Yes for Xero from Yes Accounting
December 18, 2015

Yes for Xero from Yes Accounting

John Cotter | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review

Overall Satisfaction with Xero

We are 100% Xero accountants. Xero is the cornerstone of our small practice. All of our staff are experts in Xero. We have a diverse range of clients, from service, financial, retail, import, public sectors, and manufacturing to name a few.

Xero provides businesses with the the best of class tools combined with add-ons to operate the finances and manage their businesses direction.

Crunchboards, the latest add-on in our portfolio, combines forecasts from scenarios to deliver both historical and projections of business forecast. The forecasts give three way forecasts - profit and loss, cash flow and balance sheet.

Pros

  • Bank feeds reduce data input and reduce errors.
  • Expenses can be added on the go via the mobile app.
  • Reporting - simple reports, good configurable dashboards keep owners and stakeholders aware of the financial position in seconds. Budgets can easily be created and managed.
  • There are over 500 add-ons that streamline seamlessly to Xero. That gives us the confidence we can find the right match of CRM, POS, Time Management or stock control system as necessary.
  • Multi Currency is as good as SAP Business 1. That is a real plus for software at this price.

Cons

  • Payroll is quick and simple although we are seeing some lag in delivering standard reporting like P11's
  • More flexible reporting is being delivered, but this is proving to be a long drawn out process. Currently the new monthly Profit and Loss report cannot deliver totals or YTD figures. The new reporting is more versatile in some cases, but is slower to run. That said, the original reports are still available and are perfectly suitable for most SME's.
  • Bank feeds via Yodlee can be problematic. Identifying missing transactions is easy but takes time to identify and import missing transactions. Yodlee is a third party, so this is not strictly Xero's issue.
  • Increasingly UK banks offer direct feeds. Most charge a fee of GBP3-3.50 per month for a direct feed. They are more reliable and update automatically. Metro Bank will be a GBP 1.00 per month. Barclays are about to deliver a direct feed. Of course, they will charge at the higher end too. Santander are cheaper but do not support all accounts strangely.
  • Xero continues to bring new clients. More and more clients now come to us looking for a Xero implementation. Originally we had to introduce all clients to Xero, so the market place for cloud accounting is certainly gathering pace.
  • Our practice works closely with Bills Entryless to streamline paper flow and minimise date input. Clients love this. This delivers great efficiencies with book keeping.
  • Our staff creates bank rules and this also creates efficiency.
Four years ago, Xero was the market leader. I had written an article on cloud accounting and compared all of the offerings. I had concerns as Xero was from New Zealand and preferred to use a UK company. However, Xero had more flexibility via its APIs and was, at that time, better than all other products on the market. Our first implementation required a full stock control system. At the time no other web based system had that kind of technology for SMEs.

Xero was designed from the ground up as a web based solution. It has no desktop version that it tries to keep synergies with.

Many new features have been added over the four years. As Silver partners we have what I would call a very good relationship.

Xero has kept pace with the chasing pack.
I have considerable experience over the last 35 years with software. Solutions like Xero would have been unaffordable to SMEs. There are always new features being added although my only concern is a rushed through payroll system for 2015-16. In reality Xero was not ready and our practice suffered as a result. we trusted Xero that it was really tested. That trust was based on our involvement with the payroll development. That said, it is saving our practice time in processing payroll. There are some glitches still and reporting such as P11's are still not available.

Occasional Payroll glitches and the slow development of the new more flexible reporting is the only reason this is not a 10.
I have not found any SME accounting system that is more flexible. We have clients running a couple of thousand transactions a month with no issue in terms of speed. We will continue to watch this.

Even where a certain bank cannot deliver a feed, I do not consider that to be a reason not to use Xero. Imports from downloads can be imported in minutes.

Xero Feature Ratings

Accounts payable
10
Accounts receivable
10
Cash management
10
Bank reconciliation
10
Expense management
10
Fixed asset management
9
Multi-currency support
10
Multi-division support
10
Inventory tracking
7
Pay calculation
9
Benefit plan administration
9
Direct deposit files
5
Dashboards
10
Standard reports
10
Custom reports
2
API for custom integration
10
Role-based user permissions
10

Using Xero

3 - Accounting, book keeping, Payroll, VAT, Year end Accounts, Corporation Tax Returns, Company Secretarial are business functions we perform.

We also create management accounts comprising profit and loss including comparisons to budget, fixed assets and balance sheets.
We supply the management reporting to clients and conduct review meetings monthly or quarterly.
3 - Xero is intuitive. Our staff sit the training for Xero certification. Our staff are good competent book keepers but their familiarity with Xero enables them to have the confidence to provide Xero support for over 90% of the regular questions we receive. They do not need technical know how, simply using the system every day affords them the confidence to provide support.
  • All clients are different in terms of how they wish to receive data. There are a wide range of reporting methods. Reports can be published in Xero or output to Excel or PDF.
  • Xero have introduced a basic stock system. We hope we can use this for very simple stock solutions in the future.
It is the cornerstone of our business. We are 100% Xero Accountants. Our clients love it, we love it and I do not foresee a day when we will jump to an alternative. Never say never though!

Evaluating Xero and Competitors

Yes - Excel, Kashflow, Sage and Quicken
  • Price
  • Product Features
  • Product Usability
  • Product Reputation
  • Vendor Reputation
  • Third-party Reviews
Our first implementation of cloud software needed a strong stock control module. There was an add-in which provided that solution. No other system had this four years ago.
We know we made the right decision four years ago. Xero was the only Cloud Solution with add-ons providing a wide range of flexible options.

Xero Implementation

No it is very straight forward.
Change management was minimal
  • There were no issues. It was just a question of getting to understand the software which we did get easily.

Xero Support

Xero support for a cloud based software with hundreds of thousands of users is about as good as it gets. There is always room for improvement though.
ProsCons
Good followup
Knowledgeable team
Problems get solved
Kept well informed
No escalation required
Immediate help available
Support understands my problem
Support cares about my success
Quick Initial Response
None
No - We support our clients and feel we have all the knowledge necessary. We sit the Certification Exams and are therefore well placed to support our clients.
Yes - Most recently we picked up a bug in payroll RTI reporting around Director's NI. The response was nearly three weeks although we were informed they were looking into it during that period. The issue, currently remains unresolved and the Alternative Directors NI solution has needed to be applied for the last three months.

That is the only time in four years I have ever had an issue like this ith Xero. Generally, there are no bugs!
When ever I have a serious question that needs an immediate answer my lovely account manager of two years (Sarah Minns) will ensure I get to talk to a specialist in Bank Feeds or Payroll urgently. This is rare however.

Using Xero

It simply is incredibly usable with excellent drill down features. The dashboard is highly configurable.
Transactions are now even easier to find with the new Global Search feature.

Documents can be attached to transactions. We use Bills Entryless to transfer documents to Xero without keying the data.

Visibility to reports (the old style takes seconds). The newer reports are more RAM hungry so there can be a 10 second or so lag while the report is compiled. Usually old style reports deliver what our clients need in a flash.
ProsCons
Like to use
Relatively simple
Easy to use
Technical support not required
Well integrated
Consistent
Quick to learn
Convenient
Familiar
None
  • Drill down of a transaction right down to bank statement line if necessary.
  • Payroll really has become less time consuming to process for our clients.
  • Bank reconciliations.
  • Tracking Codes.
  • Configuration.
  • Missing bank transactions from Yodlee feeds are the only cumbersome thing. But that is not a software issue. Try and use a direct feed that will be more reliable.

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