I consider traditional functionality as accounting tasks that existed prior to the invention of computers. Xero has all the functionality of a traditional accounting system including: In America Quickbooks is by far the most popular software, holding over 90% of the small business accounting software market. In the 9 years to date since entering the American market, Xero has yet to have the impact it has had in Australia and New Zealand. It the entered the Australian market in 2008 but didn’t enter the American market until 2011. New markets are often slow for accounting software providers to become established.

Different tax, payroll and reporting requirements and legislation. Branching out to new markets is complex as each market/country is different. The major factor causing this appears to be connected to where the products were founded and the order that they branched out into different markets. This is partly due to the software having different functionality in different part of the world. It is worth noting that these market share percentages vary greatly between countries. However the functionality and user experience of the others do not come close to that of Xero or MYOB. I have dabbled a bit with the others (the remaining 12 percenters) when clients use the software.

The remaining 12% mostly taken up by Quickbooks, Reckon, Saasu, Sage and excel spreadsheets.įor the sake of this article, I will mostly refer to do comparisons between Xero and MYOB as I have used both these products extensively. Xero currently has about a 47% market share of the Australian small business accounting software market.

We also need to look at how Xeros competitors stack up in each of these areas. The main factors that I believe weigh into the debate as to whether Xero is the best accounting software for small business include:

To say something is “the best” is a hard call to make as it will always come down to a matter of personal opinion and perspective. This article was published on: 16th April 2020 How do we define what is “the best”

Cost of xero accounting software