I’ve been using Xero for a while now and while I think that Xero is very easy on the eye and things work fine, there’s one thing that bothers me about it. The $50 per month fee. It works out to $600 a year and, that’s not a once off. It’s every year, or rather, month.

Xero’s lowest plan is $25 per month, but even then, the restrictions on it are too great to allow my books to be done. For example, you only have a restricted number of bank reconciliation lines (I think 20) but if you’re a high turnover but low margin business, the $25 per month doesn’t really suit and you’re forced to go with the $50 per month.

Recently, I’ve started to test out Sage One (they’ve been advertising on trams in Melbourne everywhere!) https://www.sageone.com.au/. It’s ticking all my boxes:

• Cloud based so I can access it everywhere.
• Simple layout that’s easy to navigate through with sensible names for navigation.
• Functions well and the flow makes sense (you can do stuff that you can do in Xero like uploading images of receipts, bank imports etc… but there are something you can’t do like deleting an invoice).
• Cost is only $165 a year, $15 a month (which is just over a quarter of the cost).

By going with SageOne, I save $435 per year that I can use for other things like adwords (if you hate accounting, you could always swap to SageOne and then use that additional savings to outsource your data entry to a bookkeeper).

I feel like moving from Xero to SageOne is like changing from shopping at Coles to Aldi. You go from better looking and better featured layout to a layout that’s enough to do all that you need. At the end of the day, you still get your groceries.