Coming from the QuickBooks world, I've only ever given Xero a sideways glance over the years. Looked at it a bit probably 4 or 5 years ago but didn't see it as a good fit for what I though most U.S. farmers might want.

The past few days though I've signed up for a 6 month trial and have been testing features, looking at reviews online, etc. I've found that I personally still don't "like" Xero--just seems oddly organized to me, and has a lot of quirky details hidden here and there. For instance, if you want to bypass their requirement of reconciling a bank account against an automated bank statement feed (i.e., so you can manually reconcile against a paper statement) you can do that...but you have to find the option for doing that and it's not on a Settings page somewhere but is an added menu item which appears at the bottom of the Help menu. But it only appears there under certain circumstances!

I have other complaints about how Xero operates, too, but that's not the point of this post. (And I realize some of the complaints may be due to my limited familiarity with Xero.)

No, I wanted to comment how it appears that Xero (as a company, not a product) seems to have gone the way of Intuit. With several million subscribers each, they think they "own" their customers. Sifting through online comments (doing a search for "why I hate Xero" is very revealing!), customers are disgruntled that Xero now seems to be steering their own ship without listening to customer complaints about features, pricing options, etc. Lots of complaints about bugs that don't get fixed. Lots of complaints about poor/slow response to customer support questions--some say Xero has offshored its customer support and that's contributed to the decline in support quality. And so on.

Especially in the past 6 months you'll find literally thousands of complaints about Xero's new Invoicing module. It's slow, glitchy, and uncomfortable to a lot of long-time Xero users. Complaints are so vehement that Xero has now postponed (but not cancelled!) removal of the option to use classic (what everyone is used ot) Invoicing. Responses from Xero are a generally standard "corporate speak", which implies that "Yes, we know not all customers are happy and we are working to improve the new Invoicing."  But they say nothing about restoring the Invoicing features long-time customers want....I see a lot of "We know best" attitude in Xero's responses too all kinds of bug reports and feature requests.

Intuit has been infected with this kind of thinking--managing their customer base more like cattle than customers--for a long time. Customers are a thing to be marketed to continually, regardless of how obtrusive the advertising is. And The Company always knows best, even when they appear to be supportive of customer requests and complaints.

For years in Intuit's community user forums when someone requested addition of a feature which others had requested maybe 1,000 times, Intuit staff would reply with something like "What a great idea! Why don't you submit it to our suggestion box page so our developers can consider adding it"...while full well knowing that referring customers to submit ideas to the 'suggestion box' was just a way to put them off, rather than admitting that 1,000 people had already requested the same feature, maybe over the prior 10 years, and that the suggestion box was mostly a black hole where suggestions went to be lost in space.

I'm disappointed to see that Xero appears to be traveling down the same road. It's unfortunate that the initial success some companies have, eventually morphs into a "we can do no wrong" arrogance.

EDIT:  One more thing:  visit Xero's site, look at their Pricing page, and you'll see pricing advertised as 95% off for the first six months.  But click on the Try it for free button, establish an account and a company, and then click on any Buy now button or option...and you'll be taken to a page where the 95% off options are gone!! (I had to reload the original Pricing page, then search in fine print at the bottom to find a 95% off promo code to use.)  This is the same kind of bait-and-switch marketing crap that Intuit is known for.