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 is well suited for any business, regardless of size, that needs to have a way to create invoices with hourly or flat rates. It's easy to create and archive projects. It also integrates into their other tools, including Zoho Projects. Zoho is great for businesses who want to accept online payments.You can use PayPal, Stripe, and a few others. Clients can also pay via ACH. It lets you know when a payment is processing AND when it clears. I believe that it would not be well suited in instances where a company creates lots of credit notes (because from the invoice screen the credit will appear to grow, but when you check active credit notes, it is the right amount) or estimates (I can't figure out how to use this feature)

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

• Time tracking. Zoho invoice makes it super easy to track time and hours against specific clients and specific tasks.
• Unbilled / billed time reporting. Zoho Invoice gives a dashboard view of hours yet to be billed, which helps keep on top of invoicing so nothing is missed.
• Reporting. Zoho Invoice offers a robust reporting module for the price point. Canned reports can be customized easily.
• Invoice sending and tracking. Zoho Invoice makes it easy to create and send invoices. Invoices are easy to clone, which makes creating regular, repeatable invoices a snap.

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.

• Zoho Invoice can be complicated if you want to create a more advanced custom invoice or custom recurring invoice.
• Zoho Invoice does not provide all of its functionalities on the mobile version of its platform.
• Zoho Invoice is expensive for some small business owners especially if they don't plan on using it often.

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.

Ease of access of using the dashboard the buttons I mean like if it is taught in 10th I would have worked it. Simple and minimal hi give good entry to be more transparent and sharable to clients in seconds. The client also get shocked by saying it's fast.

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.

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

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

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

Zoho Invoice streamlines bill creation and sending by personalizing invoices with logos, identities, and terms. It offers detailed payment reports, an integrated payment system, and payment summaries for tracking success. It automates invoicing and payment tasks, saving time and money for companies. Zoho Invoice integrates with Stripe Payments, enhancing settlement processes and promoting digital payment adoption.

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.

• The biggest ROI for my business is that Zoho Invoice reduced the cost of invoicing so much, that I was able to invest that savings back into the business development allowing us to grow.
• Zoho Invoice provides the option of giving your clients a client portal through which they have access to their own accounts and can see and print their own reports as needed. That helps to create a transparency that our clients love.
• Zoho Invoice has been dependable. I have not had one issue with using the platform or its functions since I switched to it a few years ago.

Incentivized