Includes tools that help automate the reconciliation process, along with a global search function and customizable dashboard; however, there is a learning curve. If you have a question that you can’t find the answer to in their help site, QBO has a messaging option you can use any time of day, or you can call them during business hours Monday-Saturday. Messaging might be the best way to go, though, as wait times can be long. Xero lets you fill out a help request form, and then they contact you by email after they’ve received your request. It can be a little hard to find this form initially, but you can search for it in the help section. Another difference is that Xero doesn’t allow you to group your report by customer or vendor the way QBO does.

1. Can support larger small businesses with dozens of employees; all three plans include an unlimited number of users.
2. QuickBooks, on the other hand, has generally more developed features, such as bank reconciliation without bank feeds, makes it easy to find bookkeeping support, and has live customer support.
3. While both are very similar, these two products have exclusive benefits that set them apart.
4. The Desktop plan offered by QuickBooks starts at $349.99 per year, goes up to $804 for your first year and renews at $1,340 per year.
5. This is a time-saving feature for businesses that handle a large volume of transactions on a daily basis.

Quickbooks is a more scalable solution than Xero when it comes to bills and monthly invoices, which are both unlimited in all plans. Xero’s Early plan gives you 5 bills and 20 invoices and only offers unlimited invoices and bills starting in their second product tier. https://accountingcoaching.online/ Both Xero and QuickBooks Online do a great job of accounting for inventory and calculating the cost of your inventory sold automatically. However, inventory accounting is included in all Xero plans while it’s only in the Plus and Advanced versions of QuickBooks Online.

The best AP automation software starts with self-service supplier onboarding through a supplier portal. If you’re in the market for accounting software, you might be feeling overwhelmed by all the options out there. While Xero and QuickBooks are wildly popular, they’re not the only options available.

Price and Plans

In evaluating pricing, we considered the billing cycle (monthly or annual) and number of users. While it’s not part of our case study, we evaluated cash and bank voucher entries in terms of assisted bookkeeping. We consider this a draw since each program is designed for specific business needs. QuickBooks Online and Xero both have a large collection of integrated apps, which should be enough to cover your business automation needs.

Our partners cannot pay us to guarantee favorable reviews of their products or services. QuickBooks currently has a 7.5, which is pretty good in comparison to others in the industry. Commenters praise QuickBooks for their ease of use, accessibility and customer support. Another important distinction to make when comparing these two is how they structure their pricing/packages.

Popular QuickBooks Online Alternatives

We considered features such as invoicing, billing, payments, expense tracking, mileage tracking, project and time tracking and inventory management. We also weighed factors such as pricing, user experience, customer service and integrations. Xero accounting software is a cloud-based system that helps small businesses manage their finances.

QuickBooks Online offers integration with hundreds of apps, making it great for small business owners. These integrations including PayPal, TSheets, Bill Pay for QuickBooks Online, and Stripe, with apps available for inventory, payroll, CRM, and time tracking. QuickBooks Online also gives you the option to have customer payments applied automatically once they’re deposited, or leave that option to the user. Xero offers simple inventory tracking software that can track up to 4,000 finished items.

What QuickBooks offers

You can even group by product or service, date created, or amount with QBO. Both Xero and QBO offer automatic transaction feeds when you connect to your bank. As for how reliable the feeds are, you may want to test out both to see which is most prompt and accurate. Quickbooks Online (QBO) is a personal and business bookkeeping software developed by Intuit in the early 2000s to help small businesses with their bookkeeping systems.

We like that this is a built-in platform feature you can also use from the mobile app. However, Xero is missing some of our favorite QuickBooks expense-tracking features, such as cash flow statements. Beyond built-in integrations, QuickBooks offers more than 750 connections with other platforms — a quantity that impressed us. Some of QuickBooks’ most popular app integrations include the payment app BILL, the line of credit solution Fundbox, and the expense management platform Expensify. Xero vastly outperforms QuickBooks in its fixed asset management tools.

With QuickBooks, you can record the purchase of a fixed asset, but with Xero, you can track fixed assets, calculate and track their depreciation, and much more. Xero also has a more robust tool for tracking project profitability, giving you access to real-time reports. Additionally, Xero is a better choice for international businesses needing multicurrency support.

Perhaps our favorite Xero bill pay feature is that you can use the platform to schedule batch payments for one or many vendors. This is the easiest tool we encountered in any accounting software platform for making timely payments in one click. We were delighted that Xero makes it so simple to keep up on your accounts payable and avoid late payment fees. As the leading business accounting software platform, QuickBooks is unsurprisingly a standout when it comes to integrations. The platform offers high-quality built-in integrations with many leading business software vendors. For example, QuickBooks integrates with Square, Gusto, PayPal, eBay, Shopify and Etsy.

The QuickBooks Online base plan starts at $30 per month, and the plan with the most features is $200 per month. Intuit offers prospective users a free 30-day trial and generous discounts on their monthly subscriptions. Go to their website for a full breakdown of Quickbooks pricing and deals. If your business needs many users to access your accounting data and requires low-cost inventory and fixed-asset accounting, Xero is the better choice. If you need comprehensive bank reconciliation, class and location tracking, good customer support, and easy access to local bookkeepers, then QuickBooks Online wins.

It’s tricky to declare that one software program is inherently superior to another when comparing Xero and Quickbooks. The decision on the Xero VS. Quickbooks Online topic ultimately comes down to your company, your required functionality, your budget, and the features that matter most to you. Let’s further discuss these software features to ensure the software’s suitability to your business needs. An accounts payable aging report is one of the best accounting reports you can run. It’s a great way to know how much money you currently owe vendors and how much you can expect to owe in the future.

Accounting features such as invoicing, accounts payable and receivable, and inventory management help your business stay organized and profitable. QuickBooks was created in 1983 by Intuit, garnering nearly 40 years of development behind it. A New Zealand-based company launched Xero in 2006 to challenge the growing accounting software market. Intuit also offers QuickBooks Desktop versions for companies that require it, but in this guide, we will compare the Online version. To compare QuickBooks vs. Xero accounting, we consulted product documentation and user reviews.