Continuing from my experience with MYOB Live Accounts here.

My endevours this past week have been to re-enter the last fiscal years transactions into XERO. This en mass data insertion allows me to quickly find any shortcomings in the XERO system.

I started by importing my bank statements and then set about creating entries for each transaction. This worked very well and was very easy to do. I hit the 50 line statement reconciliation limit of the trial and purchased a subscription for $49 a month. This is double the $25 per month I am paying to MYOB Liveaccounts. A bit overpriced for my liking, SAASU pricing structure is much better, where an equivalent plan is $25 (or $35 for advanced payroll).

From the beginning I found the interface much faster than MYOB Liveaccounts. The website is so fast it feels like a local application (like running it on your computer). I did not encounter any bugs or glitches with the data entry. Creating transactions to match my statements was very intuitive and I was able to complete the entry without reaching for the XERO product manual.

With all my post data in I set about creating some invoices. I was disheartened to discover only minimal customisation to the invoice design. I like my invoices to be ‘pretty’ as opposed to the staid boring lines of traditional invoices. I would have liked HTML/CSS style customisation which would enable me to create an invoice themed like my website.

XERO, take a cue from the developers at Billings, their documents are beautiful.

Creating the invoices is a simple process, matching the ease of use of MYOB and SAASU.

One thing I did notice is the chart of accounts somewhat lacking. In this respect MYOB excelled. When entering a purchase, MYOB already has a Cost of Goods Sold section which includes Purchase of Goods For Resale/Finished Goods / Raw Materials. In XERO I had to create an expense field for my stock purchases. Maybe I’m doing it wrong, but as I stated in the beginning, I’m an IT guy, not an accountant.

With XERO you can export your invoices at the time of creation as an invoice named PDF, also you can carbon copy yourself in on the emailed invoice, which is fantastic.

Overall I was impressed with XERO. It feels very polished and robust. When it comes to cloud applications we as users really have no way to judge the environment other than by its user interface. Since all of our data is in the cloud and administered by them we need to have some level of trust that their backup and disaster recovery systems are up to the task. It would be disastrous for all concerned if they suffered a major outage and only had backups from 2 weeks ago (or like Distribute IT where all the backups were destroyed by a hacker). The smooth and fast user interface goes a long way to creating an assurance in XERO.

My comments coming as a MYOB to XERO user: MYOB has a very nice graphical interface, was extremely easy to set up and use but then destroyed my trust in ‘the system’ with the all bugs and glitches it presented me with. The cost of XERO is a lot higher but is also reflected in its user interface.

Continuing from my experience with MYOB Live Accounts here.