Have you got clients looking to leave Xero?

Where have they gone to?

Didn't find your answer?

I have a couple of clients looking to leave Xero, so we are looking at putting them back on Sage, or switching them to Quickbooks.

In particular, issues have been lack of functionality with regards delivery notes / customer sign-off function for delivery drivers, it can't do sales reports when deferred income is involved, and bulk-approving supplier invoices can be very time consuming.

We usually encourage clients to switch to Xero, but now it's time to branch out or face client loss.

Just interested if others have clients that have had better success with other platforms?   

Replies (12)

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By Moonbeam
26th Jan 2019 21:21

I have a client who wouldn't be happy on Xero, so I'm leaving him on Sage, which does all these tasks well. Of course their Sagedrive can be a nightmare, and it seems it will be years before they have a true cloud offering for the line 50 program that will be any good.

I agree with you that Xero has a way to go on the things that real companies need help with.

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By elliottchandler
26th Jan 2019 23:31

If the application does not have the functionality then find another one that does and then host it using Remote Desktop Services.

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By bernard michael
27th Jan 2019 10:45

Dear God surely not Sage

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By jon_griffey
27th Jan 2019 16:03

Why don't any of these software companies write software that actually properly does the job? It seems like they devote all their resources into adding more features and add-ons, i.e. gimmicks that people don't actually want and pay little regard to fixing shortcomings in core functionality.

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Replying to jon_griffey:
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By Tornado
27th Jan 2019 16:45

You could be describing HMRC!

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Replying to jon_griffey:
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By elliottchandler
03rd Feb 2019 00:45

Because the software is written by developers and not business people.

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By Manchester_man
27th Jan 2019 17:52

It is funny that this post should pop up, as I am a longstanding Xero fan; I find it works really well for my service business type clients and my engineering / construction clients, offering me huge time savings (although there have always been one or two annoyances, such as the way it deals with credit notes and the long-winded way of looking at outstanding supplier bills (you can view all invoices but then have to click the 'awaiting payment tab' and filter the list once again before selecting which ones to pay. These nuances were small compared to the other time saving benefits.

However, towards the back end of last year, I took on a medium sized shop which is part retail and part wholesale. This client was on Sage and was very unhappy with Sage, so I showed him Xero and we decided to transfer the accounts to Xero, no doubt largely due to my recommendation thereof.

The sage had been left in a terrible mess by the previous accountants (a national firm) and it has taken me 3-4 months to get to a point where I am happy with the accounts. The bank functionality has been a huge help in reconciling months worth of transactions. However, now that I'm using it for a different type of client to usual, I am seeing more and more issues with it and my client keeps asking me 'will it do this' and I'm having to say no.

A prime example is discounts. Client offers discounts and Xero will deal with % discounts on a line by line basis, but will not let him take 10% of the total invoice. If he wants to discount, say, £20, he has to enter a minus line which is workable, but he offers vat free periods (normal in his industry) which is effectively a discount of 16.67%. He asked whether he has to enter 16.67% on EVERY line on the invoice (sometimes 30 odd lines)? Answer is yes, he does.

He complains, asking why he can't just simply take 16.67% of the total at the bottom of the invoice. I'm then stood apologising on Zero's behalf and explaining that (having looked online) "Xero accept that their invoicing module is very inflexible and are working on issuing an updated version once they have finished re-working it and testing it out in other countries first".

Sage imported over with a load of 'payments on account' which had not been matched to invoices by the previous accountants or bookkeepers. These display on Xero as 'overpayments'. Fine. So he asks, why can't I select invoices 1,2,3 and 4 plus the overpayment here and the other overpayment there, so that the total to pay is the invoices less the overpayments? (Same where the are non invoice-specific credit notes) My reply "oh, sorry no it won't let you do that, you have to open the overpayment / credit, allocate it to any old random bill, then go back and refresh the page, now it will show just the invoices (net of the now allocated over payment) which you can then select and pay.

"Oh, I doubt I'll remember that" he says.

Issues as mentioned with no way of viewing supplier activity reports.

So, whilst I use Xero a lot and have most clients on it, most of whom it works very well for, there are some clients / businesses who will feel let down by Xero.

Xero is far from a one size fits all solution. It works superbly for lots, but not so well for others.

Back to tax returns now :-)

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Replying to Manchester_man:
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By fellowcraft
30th Jan 2019 11:58

We've had a discount problem today. Customer wants one line at the bottom invoice showing total discount, he doesn't want it shown on each item line. So we add an extra line and manually calculate it, and enter it as a negative. Not difficult, be can be tiresome if you have loads to do

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Replying to fellowcraft:
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By Manchester_man
02nd Feb 2019 22:47

fellowcraft wrote:

We've had a discount problem today. Customer wants one line at the bottom invoice showing total discount, he doesn't want it shown on each item line. So we add an extra line and manually calculate it, and enter it as a negative. Not difficult, be can be tiresome if you have loads to do

Thanks. Yes I did suggest this but the client couldn't understand why such a popular piece of software wouldn't have the option to include a discount from the invoice total.

Because they do so called 'VAT free weeks', this would mean the client would have to manually work out the discount for each invoice.

Expanding upon what I was saying above about Xero being great for some but unsuitable for others, I have a client who uses Xero for his business which sometimes (not airways)) invoices customers visiting the store. Xero isn't ideal for this. He has to create an invoice, click save and print. Then it asks whether to record the invoice as 'sent', then it will bring up the print dialogue... Then it will save the invoice as a PDF which will be opened and sent.

Then the client will have to re-open the actual invoice in Xero and mark as paid.

Fine for me, but client finds it tedious.

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By paulwakefield1
28th Jan 2019 09:35

Horses for courses.

One client I wouldn't dream of moving off their (old) version of Sage. Not a program I enjoy using but rock solid and works well for them. I have not yet seen a cloud offering that handles all their requirements and would bring benefits to their business. (Second stage of MTD may be more of an issue but that is still a distance away).

Others are on VT where possible. Again not always suitable.

Quickbooks works quite well for some but its PL is horrible.

I have a client about to move all of their group's accounts onto Xero from Sage. I think it'll work OK for them.

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Replying to paulwakefield1:
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By johnhemming
30th Jan 2019 12:26

I did a video about getting data out of an old version of sage
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SKWr2qYlZSI

This is a mechanism for creating the digital links and deals with the second step (2020)

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By elliottchandler
03rd Feb 2019 00:47

Aligning software to the business requires a business process management approach.

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