Xero pricing a rip off in NZ/AUS??

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CYaBro

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#97786 20-Feb-2012 17:11

We've been looking at maybe changing to Xero for our accounting package and noticed that here in New Zealand you have to pay NZ$49 per month for the Medium plan (which is what we would want).

However if you change the pricing to US$ then it's only US$29 per month.
With the current exchange rate that's less than NZ$35.
In GBP it's 19 pounds which is also about NZ$35.

Isn't Xero a New Zealand company? Why do we have to pay so much more here?
If you are in Australia it's even worse as they pay AUS$49 which is about NZ$63 or US$53!

Can you pay for Xero in US dollars?

Opinions are my own and not the views of my employer.

mattwnz

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#584058 20-Feb-2012 17:49

CYaBro: We've been looking at maybe changing to Xero for our accounting package and noticed that here in New Zealand you have to pay NZ$49 per month for the Medium plan (which is what we would want).

However if you change the pricing to US$ then it's only US$29 per month.
With the current exchange rate that's less than NZ$35.?
In GBP it's 19 pounds which is also about NZ$35.

Isn't Xero a New Zealand company?? Why do we have to pay so much more here?
If you are in Australia it's even worse as they pay AUS$49 which is about NZ$63 or US$53!

Can you pay for Xero in US dollars?

Not really. You are comparing the price with teh current exchange rate. But 3-5 years ago the rates were very different. The NZ dollar is historically very high, and possibily too high. Xero wouldn't want to continually change their international pricing just so that it matches the NZ excahnge rate, that wouldn't make sense.

Ragnor

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#584063 20-Feb-2012 17:57

Exactly the NZ to US exchange rate has varied from 0.5 to 0.8 over time.

Compare $29 USD / 0.5 vs $29 USD / 0.8

http://econfix.wordpress.com/2011/05/27/nz-to-us-1982-2010/

You wouldn't want to have been paying the US price when the exchane rate was 0.5!

Things will only get worse with the current trend though!

http://econfix.wordpress.com/2011/08/04/nz-strength-and-its-impact/

getresults

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#584075 20-Feb-2012 18:13

CYaBro: We've been looking at maybe changing to Xero for our accounting package and noticed that here in New Zealand you have to pay NZ$49 per month for the Medium plan (which is what we would want).

As others have pointed out the price will change over time as the exchange rates fluctuate. The thing is that the price is set in each country and stays consistent.

It would be extremely difficult for Xero to constantly update prices globally to try and keep the exchange rate exact - no matter what they did there would always be clients complaining that another country has it better.

Look at it this way... the face that we technically pay a little more compared to the USA for Xero is offset by how much cheaper it is for us to import things from the USA using the same exchange rate.

Xero is an AMAZING accounting package. It's well worth the monthly fee for the free updates forever. When I had to use MYOB Premier for Multi-Currency it was the most painful accounting process in my life. That cost $1200 new and another $300-$500 each year for updates.

It also took me 6 hours to do my accounting each month (manually entering every single damn multi-currency transaction by hand) compared to 15-20 minutes a month with Xero where all bank account transactions are imported automatically, including my USD PayPal account.

Xero rocks. You won't regret it.

CYaBro

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#584161 20-Feb-2012 20:43

So can we pay in US dollars then?

The big thing that's stopping us changing to Xero at the moment is that it doesn't do stock control / inventory so that would mean paying another monthly fee to some other company, that integrates with Xero, to get that feature that we need.

We use Quickbooks at the moment and being an IT reseller we can buy it at dealer pricing so don't have to pay retail prices.
We only use Quickbooks Pro and the last upgrade didn't cost us anything. So it's cost us about $400 over the last couple of years whereas Xero will cost NZ$588 per year. Plus whatever it costs to get stock/inventory control....
Where we are looking to save money is in time taken to process bank recs etc.

Opinions are my own and not the views of my employer.

mattwnz

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#584184 20-Feb-2012 21:17

CYaBro: So can we pay in US dollars then?

The big thing that's stopping us changing to Xero at the moment is that it doesn't do stock control / inventory so that would mean paying another monthly fee to some other company, that integrates with Xero, to get that feature that we need.

We use Quickbooks at the moment and being an IT reseller we can buy it at dealer pricing so don't have to pay retail prices.
We only use Quickbooks Pro and the last upgrade didn't cost us anything.? So it's cost us about $400 over the last couple of years whereas Xero will cost NZ$588 per year. Plus whatever it costs to get stock/inventory control....
Where we are looking to save money is in time taken to process bank recs etc.

Time is where you will save money, not on the upfront capital cost of the software. Xero is great, and they also listen to customer suggestions.

Ragnor

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#584202 20-Feb-2012 22:04

Xero is probably more expensive that shrinkwrap accounting software but I'd argue it's far more productive.

If you don't consider your/staff time worthless you will be better off.