Xero vs. Zoho Invoice

I am a massage and physical therapist. We are not a fancy business but business admin can take a lot of time and effort. Xero came recommended to me by colleagues in the sector. You raise invoices, you get paid. and you pay your bills. These are all daily scenarios for most businesses and Xero does this particularly well. Since my accountant can query my records directly, this greatly saves on bookkeeping time when it is time to do the company returns.

Incentivized

Zoho Invoice streamlines invoicing, payments, and customer interactions, improving financial health and saving time, money, and energy. It ensures billing accuracy, reduces errors, and streamlines client billing by tracking goals and streamlining invoice generation. Zoho Invoice focuses on automation and invocation management to efficiently complete multiple tasks. Zoho Invoice has all the features needed for an invoicing system, but it could be better at integrating with other CRM platforms and simplifying taxation.

• Repeating invoices (most of my business is monthly recurring invoices) - it does these very well.
• Reporting - particularly being able to dig into the different lines of the P&L statement.
• Tracking categories - I assign a category to every line of every invoice so it's easy to see how much has been sold of each type of service every month and year, and compare them to previous periods.

Incentivized

• Multiple payment platforms integrated for ease of client payment.
• You can create different hourly rates for various tasks or individuals within an organization.
• You can attach files to your invoices.
• Clients get their very own log-in.
• Ability to create credit notes.

Incentivized

• Having different email addresses for different parts of a customer's business (eg invoices and statements to different places)
• Easily seeing the text of emails that have been sent through Xero
• More easily archiving old pay items. Our HR software updates rates when awards are updated which means a lot of old pay rates are in the system and they have multiple clicks to archive each one. Clicking the ones to archive in bulk and then just click archive for all would be much more efficient.

Incentivized

• Time tracking, though easy enough, could be simplified. Having the ability to change default settings when entering time could save a few keystrokes.
• The ability to automatically take unbilled hours and pull into a new invoice seems to be there, but it is a bit cumbersome. It also defaults to too much detail. Having the ability to customize would be great.
• The ability to auto-BCC yourself on all invoices sent out would be a nice feature.

Incentivized

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.

As a standalone software, it allows users to fulfill most of the basic functions (e.g. transaction input and report generation) simply and conveniently. It also allows for multiple APIs to help augment various tasks that accounting-adjacent (e.g. claims processing). The cloud based model and portability to mobile devices allows tasks to be carried out in a more convenient way.

Zoho invoice has changed my expectations of what services like this can be. Providing something as simple as invoicing for small businesses who are struggling to find places to cut costs at such a reasonable rate is life-changing for some businesses. I know it was for mine. We saved so much that we did not have to cut in other areas. That has helped to keep us in business and grow it as well.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

The format was great; someone was there to ask questions or help if you were stuck.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Each of the products I listed had their own list of drawbacks, but the one thing they all had in common, which was right on top of that list of drawbacks, was ease of use. I struggled to get myself accustomed to each system and struggled, but when it came to getting a client to even try and use it was when the true struggle started. Just found it easier to make use of Xero from the very beginning.

Google Drive stored my invoices in one accessible location but required more time and maintenance. I didn't want to invest the time into building out sheet functions to carry over figures across sheets, so I researched invoicing options. I am already a fan of Zoho services, so it was an easy decision to try out their Invoicing site. Same login, the same level of support, free trial. No risk! I was pleased to find the solution on my first try.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• Xero is a basic accounting system that performs basic accounting tasks easily and accurately. For that, it provides a positive impact on our day to day accounting operations.
• Because of Xero's basic structure, I feel it lacks some of the sophistication that some users want and need. The ability to create unique custom reports would enhance the impact Xero would have on meeting business objectives by providing current and useful accounting information.
• In my opinion, Xero's lack of focus on their customers - their users - is a real issue with me. In my opinion, those of us that are in the trenches that work with the system on a daily basis have to deal with the shortcomings of the system with the knowledge that Xero support refuses to address the operational issues that make their user's lives difficult. I feel if Xero would focus on truly making their software better from a users point of view, it has the potential to be a great system.

• Zoho Invoice has created a positive impact by allowing us to successfully organize and track online payments and invoices.
• Zoho Invoice has saved us both time and money by making our invoicing business processes automatic and effortless.
• Zoho Invoice has created a positive return on our investment many times over. It's increased business functions to help generate more profits in shorter periods of time.

Incentivized