At Xero, we love talking to our customers. Our head designer Andy Hovey explains, “design-led means we put customer needs before Xero needs…we ask questions, listen and observe, because we can’t design what we don’t understand”. That’s why we’re sending our small business owners an invitation to join our customer research panel.
We want to hear your stories about your business. What do you love about being in business, and what’s a struggle? What really makes your day as a business owner? What are the troubling things that keep you up at night? Understanding your experience helps us stay focused on delivering solutions that really help you – and do so in a delightful way. We’ll be reaching out to other customers: accountants, bookkeepers and developers in the near future, but we’re starting with small business owners.
One of the things we’re passionate about is giving small businesses the same tools that in the past only big businesses had access to. By connecting software tools for accounting, payroll, and banking, and connecting you and your trusted advisors, like accountants and bookkeepers, we get computers to do the grunt work – freeing you up to do the work that matters most to your business. By talking with you, we learn which small business tasks are harder than they should be, and this directs our unwavering quest to create beautiful experiences.
No one puts it better than the great designer, Tim Brown of IDEO who says, “in the end, all businesses exist to serve some kind of human purpose… people want to work on things they believe in”. You couldn’t get more passionate believers in small business than the team at Xero. We hope you’ll take the opportunity to join our research panel – we look forward to hearing your stories.
You can sign up to join our research panel here.
“…we put customer needs before Xero needs…”
Ha! I rather doubt it. (Tell that to your shareholders.)
I’m having trouble with bank feeds. The bank assures me that the feeds are coming through but at my end one account doesn’t appear to be receiving them. Any ideas?
I’d love to learn about what Xero can do for payroll, but wouldn’t know where to start.
Brett
Do you have any red notes within Xero alerting that the bank feeds might not be working?
My Paypal account says it connected but the information is not being loaded by Xero.
I work with a number of clients and these bank feeds are hit and miss.
Xero support hasn’t been a lot of help.
If you were getting error message on Xero side I have found that some banks require you to authorize 3rd party access before the information will actually show up in Xero. So far when this has been the case I have gotten some kind of error on Xero side.
Does the bank know that you are using Xero? I had one bank tell me that they only will allow transmission to Quickbooks. Argh!
Hi Ben, thanks for your message, you raise an interesting point – however, we do prioritise our customer experience at Xero. We strive to make new features work best for our customers, which often means more work for us. By helping our customers succeed, we succeed. If you have more feedback I’d love to hear it lisa.wilkin@xero.com
Moving around in Xero can be frustrating , it doesn’t always allow me to go where I want
I agree Mat.
Typing dates is difficult. You have to type all the characters.
Sometimes when you save something and then hit the back button you get a 504 error or the system aborts.
when you get back in you have to leave the client you were in and then switch back to them before the data comes up.
Sometimes when you click home is just sits there. But click something else and it moves. Then you can click home and it goes there. (I use home as an example it could be anything on the screen.)
All in all I like the simplicity of the program but there is a lot of improvement that can be made.
Agree Ben Kennedy!
Like the saga here:- https://community.xero.com/business/question/13386841
I think the 430+ responses to that ‘brain-fart’ will bear testimony to that tongue-in-cheek statement above!!
“…we put customer needs before Xero needs…”
That’s exactly what I want to hear.
Hi Mat, do you have specific examples? We’d love to hear them – you can check to see if it’s already raised on our community pages or drop me a note lisa.wilkin@xero.com. And thanks shareholder!
Dear Lisa and Xero developpers.
I am and I understand a lot of other users of Xero totally frustrated by the lack of an easy way to allocate customers to a sales persons without having to enter this information line by line in invoices. For the user it would be so simple to relate invoices and customers to sales persons. Right now we have to export to Excel the reports and then sort the data to be able to find weekly’s or monthly’s sales hence be able to calculate the commissions. With the actual way of doing this task on Xero it is very easy to forget to enter the sales agent and of course get a wrong report. Every week we spend a lot of time export the reports and re-calculating the sales per sales agent to be sure there is no mistakes!!! What a waste of time.
While I am at giving you my opinion, it would be nice and I am sure not complicated to implement a way to recognize the Customer as their name comes up when you want to do an invoice. Why not giving the possibility to have a background colour behind the Customer name to know if it is a wholesaler a client in red that shouldn’t be delivered ans so on. This is what a computer driven accounting system should do to help in the repetitive tasks and help avoid mistakes. These basics modifications would change the Xero life of many of your customers.
Sorry about the long message.
Regards
Georges
Hi Georges, you have a couple of options in terms of tracking sales. You could set up a tracking category with all your sales people in it, and then set the default tracking category for each contact to the relevant salesperson. Then every time you raise an invoice against that contact the line items will automatically relate to that salesperson. There are many reports that make use of tracking categories, see a more full description of this feature in the Tracking Categories article in our help centre.
On the subject of categorising contacts as to whether or not they are a supplier (or possibly a barred customer), that’s something we’re discussing internally at the moment. We don’t have solid plans right now, but I agree it’s a good idea. Definitely something we’re considering!
Can Xero add a percentage to invoice cost when a credit card payment is made. If not can we work on getting it. I have other friends using Xero and we all would like it
How about actually getting real support that can actually fix bugs?
It appears to me that marketing @ Xero is more important than actually making sure the service works as advertised. I have several open tickets that the response from support is basically we know these are problems and we might fix them someday but other things are a higher priority. For example, AT&T integration to hubdoc has been broken since I started using Hubdoc several months ago. Support said it was fixed but when I told them it still did not work I was told they were working on it. Xero projects does not honor the sales tax settings for a customer in Xero. Again was told they might fix it someday. Hubdoc app crashes on IOS. Again we are working on it and might fix it someday. Should I go on? I can if you would like. There is more!!
You need to have a REAL support team that can actually fix things and/or give real estimates of when things are going to be fixed and actually run QA on those fixes to be sure things actually work before telling the customer things are fixed.
As far as I am concerned, support is non-existent for anything more complex than how do I do something in, Xero, Xero projects, Hubdoc or WFM.
On the rare occasion when things do actually get fixed if I ask what was done to fix the problem, I get get the standard answer of “We can’t tell you that due to security reasons”. IMO This is just a cop out for Poor support.
Hi Tom, thanks for sharing your feedback. I am sorry to hear that you feel that our support isn’t meeting your needs. I have passed your thoughts on to my team and have asked that we take a look at the issues you have raised to see if we can provide further updates. Thanks again for your feedback – we will be in touch with an update.