Drupal.geek.nz Bevan on drupal, usability, web, open source, tech...

I'm still very happy with it. The only complaint I have is that multiple currencies are still not supported. I signed up when I was told that multi-currency support would be added in matter of months. Almost two years later, they are still saying it's just 'a couple of months away'. As a software engineer I'm a more sympathetic about this than most would be; multi-currency accounting is very complex.

You do have to put a decent amount of trust into any service provider and anyone that handles your data. This applies to your email provider, your ISP, your accountant, your bank...

Frankly, I'd rather pay someone else to implement a comprehensive backup and recovery system for many people like me, than implement my own that will probably break when I need it anyway! I'm sure xero's engineers have a much better backup system than I would have with a desktop accounting system, and I have more confidence that they'll take better care of my data than I could.

This doesn't resolve privacy concerns though, and that's a more difficult one.

I have used Xero for the several weeks now, I have used Quicken extensively as well. Xero needs quite a bit of tidyup work if it comes close to the functionality of Quicken. The automatic downloads are good but that's about where it ends. A lot of the functions are very around the house, involving a lot of mouse clicks and going in and out of different parts of the program as you can't have more than one window open. You can't save report settings so you are continually resetting them every time you want to generate a report and because you can't keep more than one window open at a time you have to go in and out of the report generation area.

Things like no option to have no decimal places on the reports are sub standard. These things are standard on other accounting software.

The Xero server is also very slow even when you have reasonable broadband speed so your work pace is slowed right down staring at the screen a lot waiting for things to load.

The help is not intuitive at all. You get screeds of notes that don't tell you the answers.

I could go on, to sum up they have a lot of work to do. It will be interesting to see how things pan out after this year end 31/03/09 and the accounting fees incurred by small businesses having to get their work fixed up. You still have to have quite a bit of accounting knowledge to drive this software properly.

I will study more about it and how it works and make my life easier.

Thanks for informing about Xero. I also hate accounting and depends on others to help me to manage my paperwork since accountants are expensive.

I will explore how it works and hopefully it may help me make my life easier.

I'm intrigued by your belief in the use of Open Source as an alternate to a Microsoft platform. I have written my thoughts on my blog here (http://stuartbale.blogspot.com/2008/01/does-open-source-have-commercial....) and linked to you, however if you prefer, I can remove the link.
Regards,

Stuart