Top Xero Alternatives and Overview

Xero is accounting software for small businesses. From retail to farming, legal to café, you can manage accounts of all kinds of businesses with the software. You can manage Payment, invoices, expenses, and many others in one place.

Good: Comprehensive dashboard, ease of use, clean interface, inventory and payroll support, full of simple and complex accounting features, several support resources, multicurrency transactions, latest reporting sense, lots of add-ons and integrations, time saving automatic features such as bill tracking and bank feeds.

Things to Improve: Lacks basic automated features such as reminders of dues, lacks minor features such as sending quotes, no timesheets for 1099 contractors, inability to import a .CSV bank statement with separate credit and debit columns, no phone support, limited mobile functionality, Costly monthly plans

Overall: A fantastic cloud-based accountant acting as a midpoint between all-inclusive installation-based tool and essential cloud-based tool

Are you looking for an accounting program that supports unlimited users at a competitive monthly subscription? If yes, then Xero can prove to be a reliable choice. Many accounting programs come with different financial and accounting utilities but restrict themselves to a limited number of users who can use them. However, Xero allows unlimited users to access its diverse utilities anytime and anywhere. That is because it is a cloud-based solution.

Targeted to cater to the accounting needs of small businesses, Xero allows prompt account management, invoicing and billing, payroll tracking, and expense reporting. The software is also suitable for medium-sized businesses that need to administer their accounts independently or in collaboration with professional accountants from distant places. The collaboration features are also suitable for those clients and staff who are associated with financial activity.

The program can even seamlessly integrate with a variety of payroll, HR, and other existing apps through its Marketplace. Founded in 2006 and headquartered in New Zealand, Xero was one of the early entrants in the cloud-based accounting field. Even today, it continues to evolve with several developments in the pipeline such as new reporting framework and full payroll support for each state in the United States.

Setup and Interface

When you sign up for the first time to create an account, you are asked to establish your company’s profile in cloud. This task is quick and simple via self-explanatory screens, each offering the help section. You can get started by watching a few ‘Getting Started’ videos offering brief advice for setting up your business profile with Xero.

Once set up, you encounter a clean dashboard wherein all tabbed menus and other options are neatly organized at the top. Tabs on the top have options such as Accounts, Contacts, Adviser, Reports, Settings, and Payroll. Navigating is certainly pleasure although you might find it a bit difficult as a beginner to finding a few options through tabs.

The dashboard provides a prompt overview apart from showing the most important items such as overdue bills, at once. Once you start using, it also shows the real-time financial status of your company, including incoming and outgoing cash, accounts, and claimed expenses.

Account management

Monitoring is an important part of management. Xero provides you a dashboard for this. Through this dashboard, you can get information about business bank accounts, credit cards, outstanding invoices, and total in and out cash. It also allows you to monitor your sales and expenditure and to track some specific parts of the business. Another dashboard allows you to monitor business performance and hence, called a business performance dashboard.

Asset and project management

Xero can also function as the asset management software. You can keep a record of the purchase of the assets. Also, you can manage and monitor depreciation or disposal of available assets. Project management is another feature of Xero. You can use Xero to look after all the financial aspects of a project running in your organization. You also get a few integrations for it, like Xero workflow.

Online Invoicing

Invoicing is certainly fun with Xero through its appealing templates in which you can add your business logo. You can actually even design your templates for creating unique invoices. One you send an invoice, your customer can simply pay it online through PayPal or credit card, which encourages timely payment. Surprisingly, you can even know when a customer opened your invoice, as the software records the time whenever the outstanding bills are opened. This means no more excuses of lost or not-received invoices. 

You can even create professional recurring invoices, invoice a group of clients together, and schedule bill payments, all possible in just one click. Further, you need not track credits, returns, or payments manually, as the software does that automatically.

Taxes, quotes, and expenses

Creating and sending a quote happens in just a few minutes with Xero. You can add a logo to the existing template or design your own, include your business logo and details such as contact, price, and inventory that you use elsewhere in the software, and send it by email or take a print. The software also allows copying an existing quote and turning a new or existing quote into invoice. You can also easily track quotes by knowing which ones are accepted.

You can also use the platform to pay and manage your taxes. You can set a tax default for your purchase. Sales tax report is another feature. You can also create and customize quotes for a project or any client. The tracking feature allows you to track those quotes. You can view the hidden cost of an asset. Also, you can have clear visibility and an idea of cost with and without taxes.

Reporting

Xero is comprehensive when it comes to generating reports. You can view almost any kind of report such as balance sheet, P&L, tax returns, depreciation, management reports, and foreign currency trends along with its gains and losses. All of them are generated with just one click. You can export them to Google Docs, PDF, or Excel.

With these reports, it truly gets easy to track the performance of business domains such as departments, sales representatives, and regions. Above all, Xero can find out matching transactions for quick and hassle-free 1099 reports.

Reporting allows you to generate financial reports and budgets for future planning in the organization. Invoicing is another feature. You can send online invoices for any online purchase from your organization. Bill payments, bank reconciliation, are a few other features.

Bank Reconciliation

With Xero, you can reconcile transactions from your bank on the move, along with credit card or PayPal accounts in a click. The software matches with most transactions of bank automatically but it is possible to set up custom rules for matching complex transactions.

Conclusion

For a small business in any industry, Xero can be the most comprehensive cloud-based accounting application. It is seamless when it comes collaborating all bookkeeping and accounting tasks from an Internet-based device.

Bank connections, advisor tools, inventory are further few features of the platform. You can also find an advisor or a required resource for better finance management. If you are an owner of a start-up or a small business, Xero is an authentic and secure tool to manage and monitor accounts of your firm.

Company Name: Xero Limited.

Company Address: 3 Market Lane PO Box 24 537, Wellington, New Zealand

Founded in: 2006