What type of software is Xero?
Looking to find answers about Xero Inventory management?
When it comes to accounting, Xero is exceptional online accounting software. In fact, the Xero mantra is synonymous with Xero and beautiful business. Of course, Xero is extremely powerful in terms of features and logic for calculating the GST, cost of goods sold, tracking categories, purchase order control, sales, and invoices, not to mention the excellent features for bank reconciliation and its many integration options.
Primarily Accounting Software
But it must be kept in mind that Xero is primarily an accounting software that integrates with other software via API. This allows development teams and organisations around the world to focus on their niche and do it properly without trying to solve all the problems in one solution. Have you ever heard of SAP, or Oracle? Those giants are slow to move and labour intensive to feed every day, but yes they can do quite a lot and can deal with large organisations with complex and/or unique requirements.
Inventory in Xero?
Small business owners far and wide, potentially even you, are or will be trying to use Xero inventory to run your business. Our customers typically contact us to find out how they can use Xero for accounting and inventory tracking purposes, and then once they made a little progress they run into a few roadblocks like e-commerce integration, payment reconciliation, unique pricing, stock code and description management, customer-specific pricing and stock take issues to name but a few.
Growing industry
More and more retailers, wholesaler and distribution companies, especially as they grow, get to grips as to how important stock control and real time tracking is, but often fails to understand where, if at all, their Xero account is capable of handling their various inventory management requirements.
Managers know what they want.
Now, we acknowledge that Xero inventory management is a thing, but it has limited capabilities, especially when comparing Xero inventory management with the likes of Dear Inventory, for example. Xero inventory management, unfortunately, lacks all the OOMPH and more tricky but necessary components business managers want.
Consider stock takes and inventory adjustments for example, or purchase orders with batch numbers or expiry dates. What about multi-location and tracking serial numbers. Not to even mention barcode scanning stock in and out or selling those items via eBay, Amazon or Shopify and let it automatically link to Courier companies when it needs to be delivered. So in short, if you ever even thought about using barcode scanners in your business, then Xero must make room for a specialised add-on module. Oh, and don’t even think about running a warehouse full of stock with just Xero. No.
Not doing stock control is dangerous.
Stock Control is a specialised task, and it should not be limited to rights reserved Xero and beautiful excel files. That is just plain dangerous as many Excel versions will be floating around and it will end up being 20 times more labour intensive than a proper solution, guaranteed. In the realm of specialized cloud-based systems, Xero is an amazing accounting software program, but there is a reason it promotes its accounting functionality. You need something better to manage your stock, and online sales.
Beautiful Dear Inventory
Dear Inventory however and beautiful business are trademarks, not just for Xero anymore, but for almost everyone who uses Dear. People swear by the amazing integration capabilities of Dear Inventory and Xero (or Quickbooks) and how their new business software (aka Dear Inventory) and the way they do business is not limiting anymore. Rather Dear Inventory allows and promotes small businesses to grow exponentially in sales and revenue into large corporations and even then, can still cater for complex scenarios. We have clients with annual revenue of over 100 million dollars running on Dear Inventory.
Why you should not really bother with inventory in Xero?
So even though Xero is great for real time accounting software with simple steps to generate invoices, for example, it really offers little when it comes to inventory management. Software4Business recommend that you start using Dear Systems as your business operating software as it fully integrates back into Xero anyway. This will give you the best of both worlds. Best in accounting and best in stock control. Give us a call, we work with Dear Inventory all day, every day and have converted and implemented Dear projects for many businesses in Australia.
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