Is the Grass Greener with Xero?

There are times as a QuickBooks ProAdvisor that you might want to entertain other options, either temporary or permanently.

Lynda Artesani and Sarah Prevost join the panel to discuss the differences between QBO and Xero for those that might be looking to add Xero to their suite of supported offerings.

Learn about Xero: https://xero5440.partnerlinks.io/80w3795vt0k0-nx0cim

CPE offered through Earmark. There is no Live CPE for this Webinar, however you can check out the Prior CPE eligible sessions here: https://bit.ly/QBPHCPE

QB Power Hour is a free, biweekly webinar series for accountants, ProAdvisors, CPAs, bookkeepers and QuickBooks consultants presented by Matthew "Spot" Fulton and Dan DeLong who are very passionate about the industry, QuickBooks and apps that integrate with QuickBooks.

Watch or listen to all of the QB Power Hours at https://www.qbpowerhour.com/blog 

Register for upcoming webinars at https://www.qbpowerhour.com/

00:00 Introduction to Earmark App and Course Enrollment
01:07 Welcome to QB Power Hour Webinar Series
01:42 Today's Topic: Is the Grass Greener at Xero?
02:31 Meet the Guest Speakers: Sarah Prevost and   Artesani
04:47 Discussion on QuickBooks and Xero
15:05 Intuit's Changes and Their Impact
25:28 Exploring Xero's Features and Support
36:02 Xero's Bank Feed and Reconciliation
38:02 Discussing Xero Payroll Capabilities
38:46 Reconciliation Process in Xero
41:04 Exploring Xero's User Interface
41:54 Bulk Work and Cash Coding in Xero
43:14 Mobile App Enhancements
43:34 Customizing Chart of Accounts
45:08 Financial Statements and Reporting
47:41 Time Tracking and Project Management
51:03 Find and Recode Tool
53:02 Xero Pricing and User Management
55:31 Xero App Store and Integrations
57:06 Certification and Training for Xero
58:59 Comparing Xero and QuickBooks
01:01:37 Merchant Services and Inventory Management
01:03:43 Final Thoughts and Closing Remarks

Transcript

Dan DeLong: 0:31

Welcome everybody to another QB Power Hour. Sorry for the, subject confusion. But today's our, topic is, the grass greener at Xero than QBO. We were supposed to have, keyboard shortcuts and how they how, we can increased efficiency with, keyboard shortcuts and all sorts of other shortcut types of things. But unfortunately Matthew is, not able to join us today. So we had to, pivot and we had to pivot quickly. So a lot of the, emails that went out with with the topic and whatnot, unfortunately caused more confusion, than as normal we need two people to to take the place of, Matthew. So we have Sarah Prevost and Lynda Artesani joining us here today. So let's go ahead and just do some in introductions and we'll, kick it off from here. So my name is Dan De Long owner of Danwidth and school of Bookkeeping. Worked at Intuit for nearly 18 years at co-hosting today, also at the workshop Wednesdays over at School Bookkeeping. Also doing some feature deep dive guest hosting at the unofficial QuickBooks Accountant Podcast. Yeah, that's all about me. So let's let's go ahead and toss all over to one of the best eyewears in the accounting industry. Sarah and I think, are you still mute? Muted? There we're

Sarah Prevost: 2:08

No, I'm unmuted. Thank you so much, Dan. I'll let you try these new ones on. I just got,'cause my Okay. Excellent. Changed again. So gotta get new ones. I am the founder of Vintage Labs, but more importantly, I'm the co-founder of the Proper Trust where I get to share my time and my journey with Lynda Artesani. We are building a fabulous team on that side and we're so solely focused on the legal niche and I am happy to talk about my love for Xero.

Dan DeLong: 2:38

And alsLyndada,

Lynda Artesani: 2:39

I'm Lynda Artesani. I also get to work with Sarah. We have the Accountants Law lab, and then we also have the proper trust as our business law Lab. We just help others learn how to do what we do. We had a big demand for it. So it's been we just do a weekly meeting, which is just amazing. It's a lovely group of people and we interact and talk about the challenges of legal accounting. But yeah, and I wrote a book called Modernize Your Law Firm. So for the attorneys basically a book for the attorneys. And yes, as you see from my bio, I am an alumni member of the Intuit Advisory Council. I'm probably not Team Xero, but that's the only hit you get.

Dan DeLong: 3:19

Alright. And though I really appreciate you both filling in on such short notice. And we were gonna have Sarah come on sometime in June to talk about this topic. Just fast track that that's as quickly as possible. Because we wanted to have this discussion, and, see where, and I think the best way to frame everything is and we'll, talk and unpack what the, triggering events that that are, occurring here. But as we have seen over the past pa past few years, Intuit has been driving the accounting community to look elsewhere, I guess is probably the nicest way to put it. And we were talking yesterday where is the grass greener in someplace else? My, my, philosophy is really the grass is greener where you water it. There are some. When is the last, when is it the last straw when you look at some something else? And so I wanted to have a a Xero professional because my life has been centered around QuickBook. So it's very, there's some trepidation and fear, with learning something new. And what is that green or what, how green is that grass when you actually think about it. Pretty blue. It's blue. Yeah. Yeah. It's blue, right?

Sarah Prevost: 5:05

It's a c it's a vast sea of blue.

Dan DeLong: 5:07

So a little bit of the details about the webinar series. Every other Tuesday at noon Eastern. We do not have live CPE credit as Blake was saying on the, intro video there. But we do have follow up CPE credit through earmark. You can check out our channel there on earmark and about five to seven days after today's webinar, that one will be available for CPE credit as well. Oops. Going back and there is a link there in the slides for our, channel on earmark. You can view all of the, all the prior ones. So as we discussed this, topic here today if you have specific questions for Lynda or Sarah or I, please put them in the q and a because that's a lot easier to catch them as they come in, and if we need to answer them live or if we need to follow up that's a lot easier to do that as well. If you have general comments of hey, the slides are wrong please put them in the comments there. And hopefully we can get to that in the, chat those of you watching on Facebook or YouTube I will do my best to monitor that over on my left here. Yeah, I do have yeah and, on top of all this, I lost my assistant. Which was my son he is now, oh no, getting a full full-time job and moving to Michigan. So he is unable to be the the behind the scenes guy for me there. So I looking for that all at the same time. And of course we have our our, power, our store. What's on the agenda today? So we're gonna be talking a little bit about the state of QuickBooks Pro advisor. What's when is the last straw? Lynda has a, wonderful perspective on the silver linings of all of these things and it's not all gloom and doom, but we wanna talk about is Xero any better? Talk about some of the platform differences. Sarah will go into the a demo account in inside of Xero and we'll take a look at some of the things that accountants and bookkeepers are, really. Focused on and, interested in and how those are, might be different and some of the Xero partner program differences. Sarah, what do they call, ProAdvisors? Is there a ProAdvisor equivalent firm at Xero.

Sarah Prevost: 7:45

We're accountant advisors as is how we're referred to, which I think is a, brilliant way to cross connect all of it. You're not very specific in, areas like it's just an accountant advisor is. That's generally what we are in pro advisors too, just right. Yeah. So just it's clear. Clear. Yeah.

Dan DeLong: 8:07

And to be quite honest, I think that the term ProAdvisor is they don't use the word pro anymore, yeah. Yeah. At least as far as a version of QuickBooks is concerned

Sarah Prevost: 8:21

Yeah.

Dan DeLong: 8:21

All right. So before we get into our fireside chat without fire with. I want to talk a little bit about tags because, and, this is a, double-edged sword, right? We, talked about it a couple weeks ago on the update webinar about what is happening with tags and true to form Intuit as reversed their position, right? Just to keep us all on our toes, right? We were talking about tags are going to be read only May 16th. So in three days, at the early part of the month they reverse their position on that. And this is all due to feedback that they've received. So that's the silver lining in all of this is that Intuit is not obtuse to to hearing feedback and reversing their position. It's unfortunate that they didn't take this feedback prior to making all of these announcements and changes. However at least. They did make a, positive change or re reversal of this, change. Because tags are not going to read only on May, 16th,

Lynda Artesani: 9:39

but are they gonna kick it, the can down the road and do it in September or is it just off the table now?

Dan DeLong: 9:44

I do not know.

Lynda Artesani: 9:45

Okay. I figured they were gonna kick

Dan DeLong: 9:47

the can

Lynda Artesani: 9:48

down the robot. I don't know either, but I didn't use too much. I,

Dan DeLong: 9:51

should have put on the, yeah, I should have put on the slide as of May 13th, 24 or 2025. I don't even know what year it's but

Sarah Prevost: 10:01

This making, this thing's making me itchy, just looking at this like

Dan DeLong: 10:07

Dave Chappelle reference there for for, yeah. But the dropdown this over lining here is also the dropdown custom field that was added to, to help with this migration of tags to custom fields. That functionality In all versions is is going to remain. So, you got something out of this as, as far as that new functionality. And this is only affecting existing users of tags. So new customers that especially after that 16th day, they'll never see tags. But the, challenge was, of course, is that the profit and loss by tags, reports and those types of things that were being the cool part of tags, was not, they really didn't have a, good option for those, people that were using it in that manner. So that's why the existing customers who were using tags will still continue to tag their transactions and use use tags in that manner. So kudos for, for Intuit, for reversing that decision. But shame on them for even bringing it up in the first place.

Lynda Artesani: 11:28

Yeah. And they, I didn't realize that they actually added the custom fields all the way back to the ledger program, the lowest of low tiers so that you get one. But you get the drop down, you get one custom field, but under the other the lower tiered skews, you just don't you didn't have custom fields, so this is interesting that they added it, I agree with be I think Becca and the thing, they'll probably take it away at some point, but they're just not gonna pull the rug out from underneath you, even though a lot of you already went through, like she did and started to clean up the data, they were using tags yeah.

Sarah Prevost: 12:02

It's nice to know that, okay, it's still in existence, but the new files, so you have a delineation. Yeah. Sometimes you

Lynda Artesani: 12:09

file and you're like, yeah. If it's not in the new one, Sarah, then I would say it's probably gonna go away at some point. Exactly.

Dan DeLong: 12:14

Yeah. Yeah. I, wouldn't put your, all of your stock in that, right? Yeah. I wanna use that. But hopefully,

Sarah Prevost: 12:21

yeah. My,

Dan DeLong: 12:21

my hope is that they'll have a better, end-to-end experience for those people that are using tags for the profit loss by tag report. So that it would actually be useful. Or ultimately you have this profit and loss by custom field, which is yeah. What it's going into. But

Lynda Artesani: 12:43

we shall see we actually had a, funny cl potential client come to us. I dunno if they became a client, it was a while ago, but tags had just come out and they figured out how not to get into QuickBooks advanced with lawyers because you need the chart of accounts and they used tags and they showed me this whole workflow. And I can remember just looking at it going, that's really cool, but they don't show up on any balance sheet items. And you need that with the lawyers and that poor person's face.'cause they thought they had it all figured out how to not have to pay for advanced. And it didn't work. It didn't work at all.

Dan DeLong: 13:14

You could hear the Price is Right? Yeah. Noise in the background.

Sarah Prevost: 13:18

Yeah.

Dan DeLong: 13:19

Sad days.

Sarah Prevost: 13:20

I agree that with Roanna and, Ted, they were saying like, they should have put a survey out first. They should have put worried at first, but typical fashion, we're gonna be beta testers in every way possible.

Lynda Artesani: 13:33

Yes. Miss Xero, you be quiet now.

Sarah Prevost: 13:36

It's not, obviously I have multi-platform that happened for a long time, yeah.

Dan DeLong: 13:42

So we're gonna, we're gonna kinda set the stage here about how things have how did we get here, right? Like the, talking head song how did we get here, right? This is not my beautiful ProAdvisor program. So there's been quite a few changes in the ProAdvisor community from, Intuit, right? There's the desktop degradations the slow March to to. Whatever the future holds. We don't this is all speculation. We don't have dates, times or, numbers. We're all experiencing this just as, you are as far as when you're a desktop coming from the desktop world and then cloud with the cloud, accounting with QBO coming into the, play here, some of the things that we know and love as a, as accountants and bookkeepers the Intuit online payroll for accountants has gone away. The enhanced payroll for accountants, new subscriptions has gone away and significantly increased the price of the said services. And then the heavy marketing in the product which is a polite way to talk about QuickBook live. Are they a competitor or are they, a complimentary service, not a free service, but a compliment to, the service offering that you like. So there's a lot of people that are holding on to some of those old things, and, mindsets. Different CEOs had different different options. Sarah,, could you talk you, talk about, you, you are a multi-platform type of individual. You had, you starting QuickBook desktop, right?

Sarah Prevost: 15:38

My, my start was in desktop. And I should add a clarifying thing'cause everyone's made comments about this. It's interesting. Intuit uses for accountants I said an accountant advisor. It is called a Xero partner advisor, just for clarification. But it is interesting how it interchanges and there's this hangup of this terminology. Understandably so with certification levels in different states and so forth. But being sta having started my journey, like a lot of people on desktop, loved it, wasn't interested looked at online and thought, oh my God, remember Stacy Kildal this giving us all this stuff. And I'm like, I can't even imagine this thing online. What does that mean? I remember the security was the number one the number one thing, for everyone. Oh, is it secure? Are you sure? Can we do this? And then the app systems became a, a, Thing. And that's how I journeyed myself into that. But when I went to business for myself, I really felt that why is it just one platform? There's this other platform and these types of, not everyone understood QuickBooks. And so it was nice to offer a secondary platform that really just was intuitive to my mind as well, a little bit faster of an adoption and easier to speak to with the client. So that's where my mind went to and I thought this is pretty neat. It's cool. Something cool and different is what I was thinking. Cool. Like your glasses, right? No, I'm kidding.

Dan DeLong: 17:13

Yes. It sounds I got some feedback here that you're a little hard to hear. I don't know if you can bump up.

Sarah Prevost: 17:23

Here's my mic. Oh, wow. Oh, very sexy. Oh, that was, I know, right?

Dan DeLong: 17:29

That was Sarah after hours there. Whoops.

Sarah Prevost: 17:34

Yeah.

Dan DeLong: 17:34

All right. So I wanna toss it over to Lynda here, because she has a wonderful way of putting things into perspective that it's not all gloom and doom as far as some of these things. And so you wanna talk a little bit about your perspective Lynda?

Lynda Artesani: 17:49

Yeah I've only been QuickBooks I was desktop or originally and then moved to online. Sarah said, I did follow Stacy, but when it first came out, it wasn't very good, and I was a little bit on the fence about it, but the, idea that you could always log in from anywhere was very, appealing. We were using like LogMeIn on the desktop back then and the payroll. The payroll with QuickBooks that enhanced payroll was just the bomb. It was the best payroll ever and desktop. And we moved to online. And I think with online obviously been using it for a very long time and I was in the era of the ProAdvisors. We, were beloved. We were the source to sell online to our clients. I still remember how I did it. I took. All of my clients that were in desktop and said, this is where I'm going. We're moving to online. I had already done my own file for six months or so and I liked it and I like, this is how we're doing it. I stopped doing hourly billing at the same time, brought them all over and told'em that they didn't like it. I had found somebody locally that would do desktop'cause sometimes you went to their office back then and everybody came with me and it worked really well. But I think things have shifted because of a lot of things that they're doing. Even just when they brought up that business view. And I can remember going, why are you making things confusing? Because now I gotta say to the client. You, this is how you do it. And then they go, I don't have that button, and I have to explain that you're in the business view and I'm in the accountant view. And then they backtracked on that too. And we've had some blank pages on QuickBooks. It does feel like we're being beta tested like Sarah described. But I never really wanted to learn. Xero. I did jump into it temporarily to see if I could expand my business, and, do it that way. And it, I just, I didn't care for it. I didn't like the bank feed way the bank feed was done there. I didn't, there was other things I didn't like about the reports were lacking. This is going back now, this is going back. I don't even know how many years ago. It was way back. It was when, whatever year this is Sarah, when Xero just started to dip their foot in the US market. And I wanna

Sarah Prevost: 19:56

see you were probably mentioning this to me. I feel like you were around 2018.

Lynda Artesani: 20:00

Yeah, it was way back. Yeah, but not that far back. But I remember I tried it.'cause the one thing I did really like about it was the the look of it. I love the blue and the color and Intuit's QuickBooks Online is, I think they're working on that because it's very light gray. And I think that it, the, theirs was much better on the eye eyes, the ui. But there was so many pieces of it that I just I don't like it. And then I had a bad experience with becoming a Xero advisor. I did all the tests, which wasn't that hard, and got certified. And I thought the clients were gonna come to me and they were like, no, you're gonna get 10 on your own and then we'll give you some. And I'm like you didn't tell me that in the beginning. I wouldn't have wasted my time. So that's where that all landed. But then since then we've worked through being together and working and we have clients on it. So I've, not as sour to sell grapes to it, but I think with, when it comes to QuickBooks and the ProAdvisor program it's a tool, it's a software. We use it it's really the only software that's out there that fits the clients that we call mid-market. And we have small mid-market and we have medium, mid mar, mid-market, and we really hang in the medium, but sometimes we have smaller ones. And we've been testing the waters with trying Xero, because I always think of Xero as like equal to essentials. And I think that when you look at it, it's actually gotten to the point now where they've been investing into it, that it's not it, can now serve a bigger client base. We've got a very large client on there that has a lot of transactions and I compare it to maybe the. The, one of the QuickBooks advanced clients that we have that's very similar, industry. And I, even yesterday I was working on a client's file and it was like every time I clicked on a bank feed transaction to download it, I had to wait for the circle to spin. And you don't wanna have that experience at all. And I don't, we don't have that with the Xero one, and it's the same size and components to it. So that kind of makes me lean towards Xero. But then I just know QuickBooks, it's very deeply integrated, has so many bells and whistles. Because that's how they built it. And there are things that are lacking, but you, if you haven't looked at it in a while, you probably should come back to look at it. If I was 45 years old right now, or 35 years old working in my business, what you're not definitely do it, oh no, I'm not. I would definitely look into two platforms because this way I'm, I've got options for my client.'cause when you tell a client it's 200 and whatever dollars a month for the software and it's in, in that smaller space attorney, that's really hard for them to ex how we need this tool. They don't even care about QuickBooks. They want the end result for taxes, but they don't really care how we get there. So when we can come to them with another option, it does fit certain clients and it's not as expensive. So it's a good option and it's not hard to learn. So if QuickBooks and you're good at software, it's not a hard learning curve. But you're gonna get past that bank feed thing.

Sarah Prevost: 23:00

Sorry, Sarah. It's the same. I mean if you look at it, what we saw on the screen at QBO, they're change the bank feeds. It's the same thing. We always talk about this. They're gonna yes, they about and try new things and see if we like it and the revert back. But I, happen to agree, Lynda, like you're saying, and what Ted even it, it's, it is mind boggling to me. And I think that's how I approached it. Why is it a one size fits all? And then why am I putting everything in one basket, which is where I always felt Dan. And what you were bringing up earlier is where the statuses of where we are, it's been a hard road with Intuit of late we were that. That trusted space. We were those ca coveted people for a while, and it, meant a lot. And I'm not saying it doesn't, it still means a lot to have a partner in this,

Lynda Artesani: 23:52

in these wonderful people. There's wonderful people at Intuit that are, they really do still feel that way about us, but sometimes the messaging from the top comes out and it doesn't sit well. It does feel like they're encroaching in your into your work where they're trying to put the ads. You don't have those in Xero, you don't have the constant advertisements. Even if you shut that off in, into, in QuickBooks, it's still there. So I think that's a big plus. Jean Jeannie Cook asked if it's a good match for the construction in industry, and I know you have multiple clients, so

Sarah Prevost: 24:26

Yeah, I don't have any, I would say possibly a light trade. I don't have anyone in there that's construction heavy. I think the weight of a construction. Entity and I don't know really all the apps I'd have to look at. They have a large ecosystem of apps. But Ted's saying, oh yes, and Ted's answering Katie. Yeah

Dan DeLong: 24:52

Ted was one of the first, first, first employees of Xero. So yeah. Appreciate him being being there to help. So to help us out with the technical stuff.

Sarah Prevost: 25:05

It I've, I have I've met him one time in person, but yes I, know of Ted. It's wonderful. And yes, Ted's right there is a really beautiful dashboard for accountants in there. There's a lot of learning opportunities in there, just like what we have. It's no different than what we have in the advisor space that we have now with Green. It's just laid out slightly different.

Dan DeLong: 25:28

Yeah I think, in general if you come in, if you're coming into this and you, both are in the. Are focused on the legal niche For anything dealing with with, legal industry, you guys have it covered there. But I think there, there are things in, in, in both platforms that are gonna have pros and cons.

Sarah Prevost: 25:56

Yes. But

Dan DeLong: 25:57

In, when you find a, specific industry, and that you're, looking to service a specific industry you're, ultimately gonna find those, specific workflows are gonna not reside in your general ledger Accounting package. You're you might have the shallow end of the pool Yeah. Being addressed by those things, but you're, LA largely gonna see other apps or applications that where those specialized workflows end up living. And both platforms. Typically are gonna have a, large ecosystem to be able to do that. It, you were saying, Sarah the, app ecosystem for Xero is in the hundreds, right? It's

Sarah Prevost: 26:47

Like, what? 400 And I don't, I'd have to go look right now. I don't know the exact number, but it's high. And I do have a fan. Jeff is my fan. I'm gonna take him.

Lynda Artesani: 27:00

Do you, can converting from on QuickBooks online to Xero? Is that even a thing? I know I've talked Yeah, Matthew's done it. Yeah, I've done it. I've known that. But I don't know, is it easy to do or I've done

Sarah Prevost: 27:09

it. There are ways to do it. Honestly, though I, feel like, Lynda, you and I have re rethought this in a lot of ways. When we're, we look at A-A-C-B-O file and say, do we want to clean this up or convert this? Like we have a desktop file right now. It's so messy. Just start fresh. Yeah. Sometimes the starting fresh and then having the historical data in a way that you can pull it out for whatever audit purpose, reasons and so forth. That has seemed to be the, better model. Sometimes you don't want 20 years of history rolling into something. I have done it. There are tools out there to do it. I don't know where they stand because I'm less apt to do that style any longer. Yeah.'cause

Lynda Artesani: 27:50

of the cost value and the value. So is it a value to this is how we sit with our clients. Is it a value for us to take your. PC law program is just its own thing and pull it out. Take the CSV import, that's a lot of money. We're talking like thousands and th 40,000,$50,000. Or do we take the balance sheet, start new, import the customers and vendors and just pull that in. And then you refer back to PC law and you need to go look at old stuff. Yeah. Or if you just rebuild a year there's lots of options and that's usually the easiest, cleanest way to do it than to reinvent the wheel. And it's just expensive for the client. Yeah.

Dan DeLong: 28:27

Yeah. It's it ultimately boils down to is the juice worth the squeeze?

Sarah Prevost: 28:31

Yes, exactly. I like that.

Dan DeLong: 28:35

Somebody is going to be disclosed.

Lynda Artesani: 28:41

Does Xero have a reseller program, Sarah? I see that's a question here too.

Sarah Prevost: 28:45

There are different programs. There's, you get, so what you do get is you get an advisor, you actually get a partner advisor and that's different. Dan and I were chatting before this and talking about every time if you ever noticed, if you, I, if you sign up a new client once in a while you'll get this random, Hey, I'm your sales partner channel from QBL. I'm like who the heck are you? I don't need your help right now. But you actually, I get an advisor. So when I need support with a client file, if I need a support with a demo because I wanna show the differences or work out, hey I've got. I'll use Jeanie's example. I've got a, trades a, construction person. This is what they look like currently, and they, we wanna look at Xero. Is it possible we'll talk through that? They'll support me through that. There's things that they'll do to help me with the client. So I never, in fact, a lot of times a client will ask me a question and I'll kick it out to my advisor. I actually have a partner that I can communicate with. The support has been amazing for me. I, know that it's different. We always wanna pick up the phone and call into it. I don't like doing that. I, the scheduled calls are nice. A lot of times I'll put in a case ticket with Xero and I'll say, Hey, this is getting complicated. Can you gimme a call? They call I've been at I'm, I should disclose, I've been a part of the Xero Partner council. It just came off. And so I've been in their office in Denver. I've been in their offices where I can see that they have support right there. Like people are working, answering calls, helping. And

Dan DeLong: 30:28

Somebody asked if is, the support US based, or is it worldwide or global?

Sarah Prevost: 30:34

I'm, presuming I've not, I presume it's gotta be worldwide because there are worldwide markets. I've gotten I've never asked, I've never thought about it. Mean everybody I've ever worked with has been super helpful to be honest. And I, but do you have to

Lynda Artesani: 30:50

wait? Do you have to wait, Sarah?'cause it's Australia, we, you have to wait for

Sarah Prevost: 30:53

response time, but you can see on your case ticket, it actually tells you this person will respond, or this has been picked up. You'll get a response in 15 minutes. It'll tell you that. So you get some tentacles to like, what's happening. I. I'll say, though, I don't have to write support often. So this is the thing, there's the difference, right? Any doing meth gets you a gold

Lynda Artesani: 31:18

star?

Sarah Prevost: 31:21

Yeah, but they're I Jamal, it's right. They're, very good. They've been, in fact, I've been in places where a client's employee has locked themselves out. I write on behalf of the employee. I fully know what's gonna happen. I disclose that. I let them know how to reach the individual because they can see the information based on their user criteria profile. And they bound me out of that case. And they start a new case and they do, they meet, they've done it for me, and the owner has been traveling, had no idea that their employee was locked out at a store where they have to sell and record sales and so forth. And I'm in the background just. Humming along.

Dan DeLong: 32:01

Do they have like accountant users in QBO? Like where, you have some special functionality or, you uses user feature functions that you would have as an accountant's?

Sarah Prevost: 32:12

Yes. And you can control that too for your own team. So I have my team, what I include my team on on a file. I can have special roles criteria that I want that team to do. Similar with, an owner could invite their team. We just had a change for one client where she only wanted. The sales side for all the, managers. So we just have sales side and it precludes them from, similar to what Lyn and I do with bank information. Or report information. Thank you Ted for adding that. They, I knew he was gonna,

Lynda Artesani: 32:49

but the user roles, Sarah, are not as good as, let's just say advanced. I mean talking different price points, but you have more ability for client user roles with QuickBooks than you do with Xero. You have more

Sarah Prevost: 33:02

precisely, yeah, we have.'cause if you think about advance though, we're looking at, it was built in a custom user role centric space. Yeah. When we're talking about just an, a typical ledger and you've, you're have a, like certain aspects. Yes. You don't have to have your staff seeing a whole total thing. You could have cutoffs and pieces to it. Yeah. And, if you think about it and somebody brought this up and thank you for bringing up. Xero is focused on the deep inner, deeper integrations with different platforms. So Carbon is a deeper integration. Yeah. Carbon

Lynda Artesani: 33:36

I know is a big one now, right? It's new.

Sarah Prevost: 33:38

Yeah, there's Gusto. What's nice about the Gusto one is you could be in the file, click and I've shown this to the owners and they're like, oh my God, I could do that. You go in, you go into the payroll module thing that says payroll, click in. It takes you right to gusto any bill, any journal entry that you've brought in that has a little quick link that takes you out. And the reason why.

Lynda Artesani: 33:59

They don't have that in QuickBooks, it's'cause they want you in QuickBooks payroll. They want you in there clicking on your gusto and then it pops into QuickBooks.

Sarah Prevost: 34:06

On my, time with council, one of the biggest change, and it was a very fast moving change, is they heard the community saying, you don't have enough bank connections. They ramped that up wicked fast. So they have a lot more bank connections now. So that's, pretty cool. And one thing that they have that I absolutely love, and this is awesome, you can take a PDF of a bank statement and toss it into the product and it will import it for you. So if your bank doesn't connect, you have the option of doing that without having to convert or do external things. It's just pop it in and move it along. Yeah. Yeah. So

Dan DeLong: 34:48

I think most people are concerned and are mostly curious about. The bank feed reconciliation. Yeah. Yeah. That sort of thing. Could you do you mind sharing your Absolutely. Yeah. Your screen and we'll let's take a look, because I think that's the first impression that people will, get is okay, how do I convert my QuickBooks Bank feed knowledge into the Xero bank feed knowledge? Yeah. So that's, because that's where, a lot of people, the magic happens.

Sarah Prevost: 35:20

The magic happens. And I think the biggest thing to the caveat too is if you think about it, the, path of Xero was, it was built in these other countries that don't have as many banks as us. If you think of how many banks we have in our. Our nation, like it's our United States is crazy, right? It's built for six banks, so you didn't need this extra thing and the US market needs it. So I'll go ahead and share.

Lynda Artesani: 35:45

Vivian actually said she likes the fact that Xero's bank balance is the cumulative bank, BA bank feed info, rather than the current bank balance, which how many times anybody here that's listening has gotten a call from a client that says something's wrong. My balance doesn't equal the bank. You're messed up. You didn't do your books right, and then you're like, whoa, wait a minute. You're looking at the bank balance and the QuickBooks balance. You get a lot of checks outstanding, but you don't, they call you up and they start yelling at you and they don't understand that there's a difference between the two balances. I bet there's a lot of people who have had that lovely conversation.

Sarah Prevost: 36:18

Oh yeah. No, it's, we've had it so many times. Many times. Yeah. Yeah. So you all can see my screen correct. Yes ma'am. Great. Okay. I'll just pop into, this is your dashboard. You can edit and move stuff around on your dashboard so you can show things that you want to, you don't have to have everything displayed. I do Lynda and I love this. We love that. Yeah, it's cool. It's a watch list. There's a way to go. It's good for the client too, cash in and out. Just simple. It's just very like, we were saying, it's very easy. So let's just go into reconcile.

Lynda Artesani: 36:53

Does Xero do payroll? It's always outsourced payroll, right? There's no Xero. They,

Sarah Prevost: 36:58

yeah, they, in the past they had that for a little bit. Didn't really move as well. It wasn't available in all the states. Every state is so hard. Payroll is hard. It's hard. Yeah. But so their partner they, they have. Can Paychex, a DP, all of those can come in. Their deepest integration is with Gusto and it works really well.'cause I'm a huge, Lynda knows this. We're huge Gusto firm. So I've been using Gusto for a while similar to what we see currently in our bank feeds in QBO. It fits matched. It has a green, so it has some sort of denotation. You can add bank rules and so forth. This, I'm gonna skip ahead and go to what Dan is asking about, which is the reconcile period. This is the newest thing that they've built. I, happily have been a part of this. In conversation at council. So you have, I'm starting fresh. This is a demo file, so just take it as it is. It'll tell us what's outstanding. So it looks like something's just been hanging out up here for a while. I had a hundred dollars to start. I've got a negative balance. It auto checks everything I can close the period. Okay, great. There's my period. Let's go into what was the norm. What we also used to see people, I think were always confused by this, what I call the register how to look at this. And it's organized by date. It can tell you what's unreconciled, what's reconciled. But for the sake of conversation, let's go into, I just reconciled April and I wanna make a change to this. Let's just say that I'm gonna, just for ease, I'm gonna do this and hit update. It can't because it's locked, because it's in the reconciled period, so it protects the data. So that is right. It just

Dan DeLong: 38:58

doesn't give you a warning like, like QuickBooks are you sure you can do this? But,

Sarah Prevost: 39:05

Yeah. But there is if you go back in and you found this error and it needs to be fixed, you can go back in and obviously unlock it, edit this period, it'll unlock the period and allow you to do this. But let's create the next period. It already populated my information, it populated my opening statement balance like we normally see in others. I'm gonna put in Xero. I'm just gonna go to the seventh.'cause sometimes we do those office, is that similar

Dan DeLong: 39:35

to the close date? Yeah. Or is it just for that register account?

Sarah Prevost: 39:41

It's for the, I would do the, close date, the regular banking statement, close date. I'm just sometimes you do a soft reconcile to see where you're at, see where things are. You want to check it out, make sure everything's in right. I'm just, do see how nice the

Lynda Artesani: 39:56

UI is here, though? The red just stands out unless you're color lined. The red stands out. And the blue, it's very nice on the eyes.

Sarah Prevost: 40:04

So it's telling me like, Hey, you've got some stuff in here, but guess what? You've got things to code. You can't do this. So I would have to go back and, oh, look at that. Look at all this stuff. I have to code. It's basically telling me, go do your work in a nice

Lynda Artesani: 40:20

way.

Sarah Prevost: 40:21

Yeah.

Dan DeLong: 40:22

The

Sarah Prevost: 40:22

other, big benefit,

Dan DeLong: 40:23

it's very similar to I'm, looking at

Sarah Prevost: 40:28

Yeah.

Dan DeLong: 40:28

Putting in, putting it through my QuickBooks lens.

Sarah Prevost: 40:31

Yeah,

Dan DeLong: 40:31

Because that's, that is my frame of reference. Yeah. Is very similar to like desktop where the bank feed was left and right as opposed to. Up and down.

Sarah Prevost: 40:43

Yeah. Yeah. There you go. The one feature, I can do a cleanup so fast due to this, thing called cash coding.

Lynda Artesani: 40:51

She does do it fast too. I can't, I've watched her, I'm like, I'm so lost. What you just did, Sarah.

Sarah Prevost: 40:57

Yeah, I've done, it was a small file, but Lynda and I had to do something real quick and I literally took, it was 12 months for, I think it was a checking, savings and a credit card. I think it was Lynda and I was able to do it in about seven hours total. I

Lynda Artesani: 41:12

know you popped in and I'm like, ah, I can't even follow you here.

Sarah Prevost: 41:16

Yeah. But the beauty of this tool, is that you can organize it and you can basically mass, if I come in just grab all these, oops, I did that wrong with my keyboard. Sorry, I'm trying to

Lynda Artesani: 41:29

See's getting a lot of love in the chat. I can tell you that.

Sarah Prevost: 41:34

Let's just say I'm gonna drop all these in. So just travel maybe. Okay. All right, so I gotta pop all these in. Good. Save and reconcile. Those are off my plate. Okay, now I'm down to the next five are done. Okay, let's move on. And you're doing bulk work like this and you've got repetitive names. You can organize it by payee description. You can apply if you've got your, rules. Oh look, seven eleven's in here. Okay, let's go do seven 11. You got your rules right? Okay. So just go ahead and apply that rule. Thank you very much. You don't have to do anything. Goodbye. See you later. The mobile app. I was Xeroero conference last year and the mobile app just got a huge enhancement. So I was doing a client's file while listening to the seminar. It was just, it's a small file, just whipping it out, cleaning it up, and it was very intuitive. If you haven't checked out the mobile app, it's pretty neat. Be honest.

Lynda Artesani: 42:25

Can you show Sarah how you, because the other thing I didn't like about Xero is the fact that the chart of accounts is very, flat and you have a way of making it not be flat.'cause I like the sub-accounts and the collapsibility.

Sarah Prevost: 42:38

Client wants extra details. Yeah. Yeah. Can you show, I think this is where my buddy Jeff might come in and like this, and he might be saying this too, is what's nice about this is, so I'll go into what you're asking for Lynda, and I'll say, edit my layout and let's just decide that these guys need to be grouped together. And we'll just have a blog group update that. Blah. I just, oops, let me go back. Sorry. Let's get some more things in here. I'm gonna just group these together. And so now this is a layout. Let's just say that. We wanna group another section together. So I tend to group these,

Lynda Artesani: 43:29

like insurance and things like that, right? You're, yeah. Big things that are professional services or whatever.

Sarah Prevost: 43:35

Yeah. Things that you and you can see it on a preview. Sorry I, always forget, this is fairly new tool that I love. So here's blah, here's my new there's nothing booked into this, so let's just go grab something that's booked in. Let's go look at that preview. Before I hit update my layout, I can take a look to see how is this looking? How do I like it? Nice. I like how fast

Lynda Artesani: 43:57

loads too.

Sarah Prevost: 43:58

It's fast. Yeah.

Lynda Artesani: 43:59

Now, when it comes to financial statements, Richard has, can Xero do financial statements like the statement writer. I know financial statements are weird in Xero. I don't know the statement writer. Yeah, I don't know. Statements.

Dan DeLong: 44:13

Yeah that's a, desktop.

Lynda Artesani: 44:15

Oh, the old one

Sarah Prevost: 44:16

from the long time. Yeah. Yeah.

Dan DeLong: 44:19

Can I think that's what he Or, can you do managed reports or management

Sarah Prevost: 44:23

reports? Yeah. There's managed exactly. I'll show you some. There's a saved report.

Lynda Artesani: 44:26

Yeah. There's a way of saving reports. There's

Sarah Prevost: 44:28

different ways to do this. You can have your published custom draft you can export. I always export straight out to Google Sheets a lot of times myself. PDF style, PDF, that's a whole other thing. There's like a whole bunch of stuff, but let's go to what he's asking about. So let's leave this for a second. And I do wanna highlight another feature too that, that I really like and Oh, that's a commercial. This is a popup. This is nice. This is more about, hey, this is an update we did in the product. See, so I like this different,

Lynda Artesani: 45:02

than the commercial, right?

Sarah Prevost: 45:03

Yeah. It's not a commercial, it's introducing trial balance by date range. So that's a new product thing. So Dan, I think I wanna go to let's just play around in, some of these and just let's do the executive summary for a second.

Lynda Artesani: 45:21

So it's already a preloaded template.

Dan DeLong: 45:22

Yeah.'cause I loaded, I think with the with, the exception of banks reports is probably gonna be the next yeah. Next hit list of things that accountants and bookkeepers are gonna be mostly concerned with. In their, general.

Sarah Prevost: 45:38

I have another tip, and I might get a TED approval on this one is the find and recode our reclassification tool that we have in QBO. It's really robust in this particular software. It's amazing. I can do things pretty quick inside the software and I like it. But this is this is one of the reports. This is pretty neat. It, I used this when I was having a conversation with a client and they're like, are you sure we're up? And I was like, I said okay, let's take a look. And these were way up and they were by yeah, like 200%. And I had to show them like oh, our average invoices, that, that's how many invoices we create. And this is a Clio to Xero conversion. So this data was coming in from a software and this was reporting it for me. It was beautiful. Let's go.

Lynda Artesani: 46:27

It's easy for the client too, when you see the up and the down arrows that, yeah. Sarah, do you know if does, Xero have time tracking? At all, or you have to get that with your, so your payroll,

Sarah Prevost: 46:39

there is a, I don't know if it's right here. Time entries. All projects on these demo files. It's always hard to know. Staff permission, staff cost rates. It's in the project. So the project is a adder that you can add.

Lynda Artesani: 46:55

That was a question somebody asked too, because that's the other thing is that when you buy Xero, you add on the pieces that you like and then you pay extra for it. But that was another one. You have projects and Yeah, track by project.

Sarah Prevost: 47:08

What was really nice, I will say Christie Monaghan, dear friend of mine, we were on council together and we're talking, she's really ti in nonprofits. That's where her background, she was construction nonprofits. Anyways, we were talking about this and we did a test model on the demo file. And it was actually really cool. She's oh, I could use this for nonprofits very easily. So can you cost code? Look. Here. Yeah. You can't cost code,

Lynda Artesani: 47:39

like adding the client name to let's just say advanced client cost'cause that's lawyer. Lawyer stuff. Yeah. Can you lawyer speak?

Sarah Prevost: 47:48

Yeah. But

Lynda Artesani: 47:48

if you're doing job costing, basically,

Sarah Prevost: 47:50

oh, those are expense claims. Yeah. So when you're entering a cost, let me go back over here. And mind you, we spend a lot of times in professional services and we actually work in other,

Lynda Artesani: 48:06

industries.

Sarah Prevost: 48:07

Industries. So Lynda and I, a lot of that stuff doesn't pertain in the ledger for us, however, right here, so they've got their Hubdoc thing, as you saw. You can hubdoc's

Lynda Artesani: 48:18

included, right?

Sarah Prevost: 48:20

On the middle tier. So that's, a win.

Lynda Artesani: 48:26

That's worth, the whatever you extra pay because it's a good way to pull in receipts and, save the ton of time.

Sarah Prevost: 48:35

I'll just put this into the first thing. Look right here. Assign expenses to customer or project right here. So you can assign it, you can tell it what project, which I thought I saw this. Yeah. Assign. So it's inside of there and I've assigned the expense there. So

Lynda Artesani: 48:53

new spend money isn't adding an expense.

Sarah Prevost: 48:57

It's adding an expense in. It's versatile. You can do it the with the, bill or an expense account or the, you can do a bill. Very similar to what we're used to. So again, just different

Lynda Artesani: 49:07

terminology.

Sarah Prevost: 49:08

Yeah, Terminology. It's translate. The other thing too is these tracking. If you are working with brokers real estate brokers, offices, I use this in, I have so many of these regions. I have regions by sale. I have regions by the individual who sold. I've got a whole section of things and I can build all these out. It's easy for me to use this. And once you save. We'll just put it on the east side. I'm on the east side in Portland. So let's just do that. You save it, it's got it in here. You can quickly go view it. Hey, I liked that so much. I'm just gonna go ahead and copy it. Do it again. If it was paid by a check and you wanna reference a check number, you can note that there. So I wanna, I do wanna take you all to, what's called the find and recode, and this is like our reclass tool that we have. And you can set up criteria of what it is, like if what, if you wanna find a recode on a contact, which you cannot do. So let's do that, Abby Wells and let's search to see if we got, nothing in there. I gotta find one Willow Properties. Okay. I just did this. Willow Properties and guess what? I am not keen on on the name. Oh, let me go back. I'm sorry. Let me show you all this that you saw that you can Recode Source or with Emmanuel Journal right from here. These are the features. I can change the contact name if I need to. What if Abby Wells or the Willow Properties was spelled wrong? And I just wanna get it all fixed. I can change the account where it sits, that if it had a tax rate.

Lynda Artesani: 50:58

Yeah. So you can change it right here in this screen. You don't have to,

Sarah Prevost: 51:02

yeah.

Lynda Artesani: 51:02

Go. Wow. That's cool.

Sarah Prevost: 51:03

Yeah, and you can have your regions, so all your class trackings, which is our region like are. Market tr I'm, trying to think of the word I'm escaping me today. But anyways we can do that as well. So we can do all of these and then review, cancel, move on or whichever, whatever you wanna do. So this find and recode is, you can do it by enter tax. It's criteria is amazing. This is, this tool has saved me. When I have found like, oh my gosh, you guys just threw all of Amazon into ask. I'm just gonna go, it's not office supplies. I thought it was and it's 5 million Amazon's marketplace web, blah, blah, blah. Okay, I'm gonna change the contact name. I'm gonna clean that up. I'm gonna change where it's gonna go, and off I move. And yeah. I know it's not office supplies, Lynda. No.

Dan DeLong: 51:53

So you had Sarah, you had or I think it was Lynda actually said that Xero was in, in line with, quickBooks Online Essentials or, plus, depending on the flavor. What, is the, the version, ecosystem of, Xero? When you're looking at, what, flavors do they have and, who might be a good fit for one over the other?

Sarah Prevost: 52:26

I tend to utilize, there's a different variety. I can say I've got my, what we call writeups, Lynda and I have these writeup clients and year end stuff where they're literally just at the end of the year. So I'll go in and have'em on a ledger. So essentially like a cashbook ledger or ledger, which

Lynda Artesani: 52:46

they had ledger way before QuickBooks had Ledger.

Sarah Prevost: 52:49

Yeah. Yeah.

Lynda Artesani: 52:51

And it was, it's fairly inexpensive, isn't it? The ledger one.

Sarah Prevost: 52:54

Oh there's, ones that are just for us advisors too.

Lynda Artesani: 52:57

Which is what QuickBooks is. Same thing. Yeah.

Sarah Prevost: 53:00

So let me bring over the pricing, Dan and, bring that in too. Yeah. Two bucks. Yeah. On sale everyone's got the sale. I, typically rest in growing. I have a little bit in not very many. In fact, I should look again and see who's in establishment, but

Lynda Artesani: 53:22

it's really not two bucks, it's just 20. Because it, that's a little deceptive there

Sarah Prevost: 53:28

But look, at what's considered, but still 20, you still get in early. If you're not a high volume. Yeah. Which I have a few of these folks that are in other apps, they don't have a lot of things that they're doing. They're bringing in the data. I. This works perfectly for them. A photographer that's not really spinning out bills through here. Let's say that they use a different app or they're just dedicated subcontractor for one group.

Lynda Artesani: 53:53

Somebody said, you get as many users as you want too. Is there no extra charge for users or you don't have to bump up?

Sarah Prevost: 53:59

Yeah, exactly. I don't have, okay, that's interesting

Lynda Artesani: 54:02

too.

Sarah Prevost: 54:03

I don't you, sorry, my, now my mouse has Dan, is there

Lynda Artesani: 54:07

an Amazon app that connects?'cause somebody wrote that, Rebecca Becca wrote that connecting the Amazon app and QBO is necessary for her and what she does. Is there one in, in, I'd have

Sarah Prevost: 54:20

to look in the ecosystem. That's a great question. There are, so right here, explore the Xero app store. You can go in there and QBO could go in and take a look. Again, there are ways to make apps connect that in this AI space of ours that you could. Do at a low code through make or Zapier or those types of things and not squish in all this data that's unnecessary. If it's built a certain way you could build it a different way. So

Dan DeLong: 54:54

Yeah, because there's always that works with

Sarah Prevost: 54:57

Uhhuh, whatever,

Dan DeLong: 54:58

right? Yeah. Works with QuickBooks, works with, Xero. Yeah. Where the devil is always in the details. And you can Exactly,

Sarah Prevost: 55:06

yeah.

Dan DeLong: 55:06

You can be the angel and and make your own details through, some other manner, right? Yeah.

Lynda Artesani: 55:13

Yeah. And even have a compare button there, you can go on. They do. Versus QuickBooks. Yeah. I'm sure it's slanted in a certain way, but Yeah.

Sarah Prevost: 55:21

They've got they, can show you what you're, yeah what you're buying.

Lynda Artesani: 55:26

It's the same.

Sarah Prevost: 55:27

So just giving you an idea of what this looks like. So it. You could go onto this and, look at the, different versions,

Dan DeLong: 55:38

now as a, QuickBooks Pro advisor or a Xero accounting partner. Yeah. What kind of like certifications, training. Do, does, somebody, have yeah. Looking to get familiar with Jira? Yeah.

Sarah Prevost: 55:54

So they have this I, actually really appreciate it. So getting certified, obviously like QuickBooks, you, it takes a bit longer for you to get certified on the front end. You have these very relatable certification videos with some tests, questions, and it's very intuitive. Learning, researching is super easy. You make sure

Lynda Artesani: 56:17

I heard from the ladies that the recert was just. Silly. It's very easy. It's not but it's on.

Sarah Prevost: 56:23

But if you think about it, Lynda it's, on

Lynda Artesani: 56:25

the new stuff.

Sarah Prevost: 56:26

It's on the new stuff. It's on the relevant stuff. It's, very bite sized. Honestly, do we honestly have time to get certified? No. I don't

Lynda Artesani: 56:34

want them spending hours on it as

Sarah Prevost: 56:37

clocked in. But yes it, it's. To say silly, that's fine. But I really say like it's more intuitive because it's more here and now. And it's honoring our time as busy business owners. And I think that's the really key, essential

Lynda Artesani: 56:56

and, certifying is important because re-certifying is important. If you've gotten a certification, for sure it's important, but recertifying,'cause you want to, I learn something every time I do a recertification. As much as I grumble about having to do it you don't, unless you're watching every in the Know webinar with Intuit, you're not gonna know every single thing that's happening. And it's good that you're able to get certified on what's going on and keep your certifications. It's important even if it's with Intuit we had a good I built my business on the ProAdvisors and the leads coming in, I guess advanced certified, which is now level two. And I built my business off of that. And then that has changed as well where. Most of the leads I get, I don't trust that they're not some kind of a spam. That's not a source. You don't only wanna have one source of leads anyway. That's not recommended, but for sure I don't, that's not how I would build my business today.

Dan DeLong: 57:50

It seems Sarah, that where Xero is today, as far as like the core functionality is especially when there's real world implications like money going out, have. A partnership with, what, I guess would, be like a gold standard, right? Like a connection to Yeah. To bill.com or go you mentioned Gusto for payroll. Yeah. Doesn't mean that you are pigeonholed into only using that as a, solution. Yeah. But they already have a, way to be able to do those things. Whereas looking at apples and apples comparison of, QuickBooks Online versus Xero today, Intuit has taken it, taken on those tasks themselves for the preferred Yeah. Method of being able to do those things. Whereas Xero is, they're partnered with Bill for, bill payment. They're partnered with Gusto for payroll. Yeah. Those initial things. Would you say that's a kind a, a fair comparison right now?

Sarah Prevost: 59:01

Absolutely. And, what they're also doing is, you've got, I'm in the sales module. You've got the different kind of workflows, I guess you could say. And they've built this way. This has not changed in a while. I know the invoicing has changed, but they do, like you're saying, they have stripe here, but you can use other platforms. I've tested out a few different ones I'm using one, I use Stripe and I use Helium. I can have two different payment pla I turn'em on or off depending on the cost versions of what I need. But yes, Dan, to your point, you have multiple ways of working with this, program where, you're not, I don't feel like they're honoring us as advisors, so they're honoring us in that space of Hey, we're, we see, a. Small business do better when they have an advisor attached to their file and getting this guidance they're not in it to, compete with that space. That I feel like right now is a little bit of a conundrum that we're in with Intuit. It's Hey, we've got live. Oh, but you know what? You as a, an accountant or a accounting firm, you can you, could also use live too. Or you could do this, or I'm like, wait, yeah. You use selling me.

Lynda Artesani: 1:00:15

Yeah. Question and answering. You, have your clients call us to a how are they gonna even know anything? And the thing about the question and answering is they can only stay in the lane of QuickBooks. They can't, our clients would wanna know, how do I do this in Clio? That's not helpful. That service. Sarah Merchant Services with customers, how does that work with Xero?

Sarah Prevost: 1:00:33

Oh, yeah. Okay. So I like right here it does say Stripe. You can attach, PayPal, you can attach, there's multiples in the background. You can attach, like I said, health sum. There's multiples that you can attach in to have this work on your invoicing. It will also work with Stripe is their leader, just because that's the, one that they deeply integrated with. They used to have Square that's no longer. I've only dabbled with a few, to be honest with you. I do and I'll put the name in if you'd like. Health, H-E-L-C-I-M. I do like that. Particular one. I have a client that's heavily, in Square, like really three different locations, three different EINs. And we have a whole workflow that we do. And it's a store, so we have product, we have inventory not very heavy inventory, I should say, but so we didn't really cover that. But we've got products and services as well that's similar to our products and services in the sense of, you've got income, you've got expenses. They could be,

Dan DeLong: 1:01:51

yes. It's more of a, I buy stuff and I sell stuff type of inventory. There's not like a,

Sarah Prevost: 1:01:57

yeah, a

Dan DeLong: 1:01:57

management of I'm gonna build stuff out of this raw material, or I'm gonna put it in a certain place so I can find it later. The advanced inventory you would say essentially it it's, on par with, what what they can do inside of QuickBooks on online. But we are actually at the top of the hour already know.

Lynda Artesani: 1:02:22

Okay. I'm Sarah. Keep going. I'm

Dan DeLong: 1:02:24

kidding. I'm sorry about that everyone. We could have an extended power. Power, but, thank you. I wanna keep keep people on yeah. Time. Be respectful of people's time. Yeah. I appreciate you all joining us here today. We obviously didn't have any poll questions because we couldn't figure out how to do all that in such short amount of time period. But really I, I think having this, discussion is. Starting point for some folks Yeah. As you guys are, mostly in the, legal space and having those additional niche industries. Yeah. But it looks from what you could, show in just such a short amount of time, I think, framework is, on par between the two. There are clearly, navigational differences and a, learning curve in, in picking up something new. But if you are in an industry that has multiple apps where you have a tech stack of some sort, you will likely find that those applications do, do, synchronize with, both platforms. Yeah. And my wife finds that very funny. If you heard that in the background. Apologize. I always try.

Sarah Prevost: 1:03:46

It's a beautiful software is what I refer to.'cause I find it to be. I just it's a beautiful software to work. Do they have a support group? Sarah? Xero. There's like a whole community. There is. Is it on LinkedIn? You can do LinkedIn, but inside the oh, in the community. Okay. In the community. There's your answer, Kathy. Yeah. But thank you everybody. Yeah. And if you do I'm sure Dan will have some sort of link referral thing that we could help navigate you to. If you just wanna let folks know at Xero that you've learned from Dan's webinar here with us, that's, yes. I appreciate that you allowed me to share this today. I think it's, always been my little gem rockstar in my head of tools.

Dan DeLong: 1:04:28

It was very busy chat. You're a little gem, and that's not a short joke, but you are one of the, one of the greatest people that I know in the accountant community. And I really appreciate you joining us today Sarah to be able to share what you do know about about this platform. Yeah. Hopefully the folks that that joined us today, learn something new. And maybe if it comes to that last straw where, okay, that's it. There, there is, there, there is, there are other things, other options out there. And there are other communities. But again, the grass is greener where you where, it's gonna get watered and exactly. Putting those things all into perspective. May, not be the last straw, while you're still working on it. I appreciate you both joining us. Any, final thoughts before we close out today?

Lynda Artesani: 1:05:33

No,

Sarah Prevost: 1:05:33

thank you. I

Lynda Artesani: 1:05:34

don't think so, but yay. You a good job. This was

Sarah Prevost: 1:05:37

fun. Thanks for having my business partner with me too.

Lynda Artesani: 1:05:40

Yeah. I get to be Matthew for a day, yay.

Dan DeLong: 1:05:43

Alright, we appreciate you everybody joining us today, and we'll see you next time in a couple weeks. Could power. Have a great day everybody.

Lynda Artesani: 1:05:51

Bye everybody.