5 signs you’ve outgrown Xero

Xero is a leading cloud-based accounting software designed for small to medium-sized businesses. It simplifies financial management by giving you tools for to manage your invoicing, expense tracking, payroll and more. 

Xero remains one of the best and most popular choices when it comes to accounting software for smaller businesses. Many companies will see something like this as a logical next step up from doing all of the accounts in spreadsheets and, for the most part, it works perfectly fine for their needs. 

However, as your business starts to grow and your finances become more and more complicated, you may find that you quickly start to feel the limitations of Xero. Here’s what to look out for to see if it’s time to make the upgrade to a more advanced system.

1) Slow performance and timeouts 

If you’re often finding that your reports are slowing down, timing out or just generally feeling a bit sluggish, it’s a good sign that your Xero accounting software might not be sufficient anymore. It isn’t really built to deal with these large amounts of data and big transactions, so as you start pumping more and more data into Xero, it will start to feel the strain and struggle to keep up.

2) You’re spending too much time manually entering data

As the amount of data you’re dealing with grows, you’re going to end up spending more of your precious time inputting that data into Xero. This is not just a time-consuming and frustrating task, but it’s also inevitable that some human errors will slip in and create inaccuracies in your data. Many more advanced systems will allow you to automate this and free up this time to spend on more important jobs. 

3) Lack of real-time business insights 

To drive your business forward and help inform the next steps of your company, you need to be able to quickly and simply pull out clear insights from your data. But in Xero, this is often easier said than done. 

Having to manually bring together several different reports from different add-ons can be time-consuming and prone to human error. This way of doing things means you just can’t get the real-time insights you may need to quickly make important business decisions. And when you do get the reports, the data within is often not in-depth enough to give you meaningful next steps.

4) You’re not happy with the level of support you’re getting

Xero’s support is mainly just online-based and as such isn’t always the best when you need help right away. Having to go back and forth on an online chat is never the fastest way to resolve your issues either. If you’re getting frustrated at the responsiveness or quality of this support, it could be time to consider the switch.

A proper Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solution should come with the complete package of not just the software but the ongoing support you need to get the most out of it. This can vary greatly from vendor to vendor, so it’s worth putting just as much importance on the support offered as the product when you’re looking for a new solution. 

Here’s what you should look out for when picking an IT partner.

5) Accumulating add-ons 

One of the great things about Xero is the vast array of different add-ons and integrations that are available that can help expand your functionality. The issue is, however, that you can quickly end up with a mess of disparate apps rather than having one clear place to do all of your financial business.

The other problem is that most of these add-ons are paid for and, before you know it, the mounting costs of all the different subscriptions can reach the price of just paying for a fully-fledged ERP solution.  

Next steps after Xero

If this all sounds quite familiar, it’s probably time to consider the next steps for your business. A complete ERP solution such as Sage 200, Sage Intacct or SAP Business One will give you not only far more advanced accounting capabilities but also a whole suite of other tools to help manage all aspects of your day-to-day business.

Which product you end up going for will ultimately depend on your business’ unique needs. That’s why here at Thinc, we always take the time to really get to know how you work and explore the best solutions before we give you an unbiased recommendation.