There are several firms out there, you can find them (and us of course) with a simple search of the internet. The other alternative is a firm that specialized in outsourced accounting. These are all things that may be fine for you if you’ve got a relatively small business that doesn’t need daily attention to its accounting. A couple of other disadvantages are that, because they are on their own, you are limited to just their skill set, they have no one else to check with in sticky situations, and when they go on vacation, your accounting goes on vacation, too. All other clients get pushed aside while they focus on their largest client because they can’t afford to lose them. Additionally, they are often working with up to a dozen clients, and what typically happens is one of their clients starts growing quickly. They often hook up with several services like this, so their loyalties are divided. The skill of individual bookkeepers varies widely from damn good to truly awful. You get assigned a bookkeeper, and then good luck. The down side is that is appears to be a person based solution. I haven’t worked with, but it looks very intriguing, and pricing is quite aggressive. Do you go with a person or a process solution? Full disclosure here, my firm does outsourced bookkeeping for a living, so you have to take that into account when viewing my answer. So, while Xero is a perfectly adequate piece of software, we’re talking the platform for your accounting, go with QuickBooks On-line. Lastly, every bookkeeper knows QuickBooks, some know Xero, and there are hundreds of developers developing software that integrates with QuickBooks. Likely end game is that at some point QuickBooks acquires Xero and moves everyone over to QBO. This is not a situation of the iPhone putting Blackberry out of business, QuickBooks isn't going anywhere. Anything innovative that Xero comes out with QuickBooks is going to quickly copy and add to their product, because they are huge and have the resources to quickly adapt. For instance, they have payroll rolled out for "a few states and are adding more each month". Why does this matter? The usability of the software from a user experience is about the same, but Xero is still trying to play catch up to QuickBooks On-Line in terms of features. ![]() The big dog in the market is QuickBooks On-Line (QBO), and when I say big dog, various version of QuickBooks have easily 10x the number of current customers that Xero has. And it's a very fashionable choice right now due to inroads their marketing has made with the startup community. ![]() It's a solid piece of software, certainly works. I'm familiar with Xero and my firm has worked with it, and if someone comes to us already on it, we stay with it. Let me start by saying that my firm is relatively agnostic to software, we work with dozens. Let's address the software question first. The world of accounting/bookkeeping can be a confusing array of options for non accountants.
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