You are in the UK, Australia, or New Zealand
Xero is stronger than we are in those markets — Making Tax Digital, GST handling, and local payroll integrations are mature and ours are not. That is a real gap, not a positioning statement.
Migration · Xero
Xero is well-built and its users generally like it, which is rare in this category. The problems that push companies off it — a third reporting dimension, a third entity, manual consolidation — are dimensional data problems rather than ledger problems, and they can be solved without moving the ledger at all.
Your entity count and the reporting you cannot produce. We come back with a straight answer, including 'stay'.
Stay if
Each of these describes a situation where leaving Xero would cost more than it returns, and we would say so before taking a deposit.
Xero is stronger than we are in those markets — Making Tax Digital, GST handling, and local payroll integrations are mature and ours are not. That is a real gap, not a positioning statement.
The consolidation problem that drives most moves does not exist yet. Two entities in Xero is workable if you do not need them combined continuously.
Adoption is the largest hidden cost in any system change and Xero has unusually high goodwill. Trading a tool people use willingly for one they resent is a cost that never appears in a business case.
Real reasons
Tracking categories are hard-limited to two. Department and location and project is three, and the workaround — encoding one in the chart of accounts — compounds in cost while the fix does not.
Three or more Xero subscriptions exported and combined in Excel each month, with intercompany eliminated from memory. This is the most common genuine reason.
An audit, a lender covenant, or a raise. Approval thresholds, segregation of duties, and an audit trail covering automated activity are difficult to add to Xero after the fact.
“We want better reporting.” True and almost never worth a ledger migration on its own. Xero’s API is one of the better ones we work with, which makes an integration that adds unlimited dimensions, consolidation, and drill-through unusually straightforward — from $6,500, in two to three weeks, with Xero untouched. That is an engagement we sell, so we are not steering you away from spending money.
It does not start as a migration. We connect Xero read-only, extract two to five years of history, and run a shadow ledger that reconciles to your Xero trial balance every night. Nothing changes in Xero and you can stop at any point having lost nothing but a read-only connection.
Within two to three weeks you have the dimensional reporting and consolidation you were missing. At that point a genuine share of customers stop, because the problem that started the search is solved and the ledger was never the constraint.
We do not cut over until the shadow ledger has tied to your Xero trial balance for three consecutive closed months. Not one month, not a spot check — three closes where the numbers agreed to the penny without intervention.
That rule has delayed cutovers on several engagements and we have never regretted enforcing it. A migration whose first reconciliation is clean has usually not reconciled properly.
The API is good — stable identifiers, a real change feed, sensible pagination, and honest deprecation notice. Extraction is one of the more straightforward ones we do, and rate limiting is the main constraint on a large historical back-load rather than data structure.
Bank feeds, reconciliation history, and attachments all come across cleanly. Where Xero payroll is in use outside the US, we read it rather than replacing it.
Tracking categories have to be remapped into real dimensions, and this is where the engagement takes its time. A company that has been encoding project or office in a tracking category, and encoding a second dimension in the chart of accounts, needs both unwound — retrospectively, across history, so year-over-year comparison survives.
That remapping is most of the work in a Xero migration. It is also the part that delivers most of the value, and it is worth doing even if you never move the ledger.
Questions
Then decide about the ledger. Doing it in that order removes most of the risk from the decision.