Xero needs to up its game

At the time of writing, Xero has been down worldwide for hours, and frankly I’m getting a little sick of it. It’s time for me to moan.

Its tagline is ‘Beautiful accounting software’, but they haven’t made any significant improvements the UI in over 10 years, or made much in the way of key improvements to their core offering.

For instance, the bank fees/reconciliation feature has been crying out for supervised learning for YEARS — the sheer amount of data they have would make things like classification of transactions almost fully automated. This stuff isn’t rocket science — SpaceX literally developed the ‘impossible’ reusable booster system in significantly less time than Xero has had (2011–2015).

More than a year ago they promised they were working on this stuff with lots of trendy videos and speakers, but where is it? They are a publicly listed company with over a million customers, and are now operationally sound with a positive EBITDA — there is no excuse.

Xero either needs to up its game, or we need a well-funded tech-driven competitor to step up and start showing them how it’s done.