Workday Financial Management vs. Xero

Our primary model for budgeting revenue is centered on patient counts. Missed assumptions early in the year result in massive ramifications over the balance of the year. Workday formulas allowed us to write formulas to project the recovery of such shortfalls over a variable length of time, resulting in realistic projections for overcoming said shortfalls.

Incentivized

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

• We specically wanted a cloud financial management system that we could use in China and communicate reports to the headquarters organization and roll-up reporting. It performs well.
• It was reasonably priced since we are not a for-profit company and need the Workday flexibility for finance and accounting operations. Most of our requirements are met with this one system.
• The system worked efficiently with the additional security we built on to keep confidential. Many reports are ready off-the-shelf or easy to develop, which is a strength.

Incentivized

• 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

• The automatic save function isn't always active for the cloud version. I'm not sure if it is a glitch or a settings issue.
• There are some limitations to customizations.
• Updates don't go through properly on the system, leading to downtime issues.

Incentivized

• Multiple addresses for singular contacts.
• Limit unit price decimals to 2 digits, currently shows 3 or more after the decimal on invoices.
• Discounted rates for multiple entities within the same group e.g. if you have a group of 3 or more companies looking to move to Xero, incentivize those clients with discounted monthly rates.
• Easier way to reconcile loan accounts across multiple entities.

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.

Workday Financial Management is an easy to use, productive software suite that really brings all departments together and improved workplace efficiency. Before we began using the software, much info was partitioned in random places that were not clearly labeled or accessible to all shareholders. We are very pleased with Workday Financial Management.

Incentivized

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.

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.

The product is pretty stable in performance. However, sometimes the links to bank feeds are not available which can be frustrating if you need to update the application for important transactions. I currently have to manually upload credit card transactions so that is not ideal and makes for manual errors or duplication.

Incentivized

Our support team has been awesome. They are extremely knowledgeable and have been able to guide us through all of the challenges we have faced. Workday's community online is also extremely helpful with many trainings and help topics that can be reviewed at your convenience.

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

The application data of users in the case of PeopleSoft is stored in its proprietary data storage, whereas Workday Financial Management connects to outside databases to create analytics reports. Therefore, this option uplifts the need to use Workday Financial Management as an interactive tool of business intelligence. The release model of Workday Financial Management is ahead of Oracle because it has a continual announcement of more functionality that is a very attractive incentive for our project management team for improving and developing the ongoing operational streams.

Incentivized

MYOB has always seemed well behind in the functionality. We recently discontinued our DEAR subscription due to astronomical increase in subscription fees. While Xero doesn't do as much in terms of inventory management we can manage without that function for the lower price.

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

• Workday has helped my employer save money over the past couple of year by tracking time of employees and how long were days looking like.
• It has enables us to make better decisions by hiring more people instead of paying overtime to those who already work in order to have the right work/leisure balance
• The platform has also helped us to redesign our policies after seeing when employees were clocking in and clocking out and track people who were showing up late for work

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.