Xero

Xero Limited is a New Zealand company, founded in Wellington in 2006 and listed on the Australian Securities Exchange, with five million subscribers worldwide by its own count. In the UK it has become the default for small companies for a simple reason: accountants. Xero's partner programme claims 250,000 accountants and bookkeepers, every practice gets a free licence and a client console, and the practical effect for a small business is that whoever does your year end will already know the product. There are no per-user licence fees, so the director, the bookkeeper and the accountant all log in on the same plan.

Prices are in pounds excluding VAT, read on 8 September 2026, and Xero bills monthly only. Ignite is £18 a month and caps you at twenty invoices and quotes and ten bills a month, which is why a trading company outgrows it fast. Grow, at £39, is the plan we score: unlimited invoices and bills, bank feeds, VAT returns to HMRC, Making Tax Digital for Income Tax readiness, smart document capture for receipts, payroll for one person and expenses for one user. Comprehensive at £55 adds multi-currency, payroll for five and expenses for five; Ultimate at £70 adds projects, payroll for ten, KPIs and benchmarking. Every plan carries the same offer for new customers, 90 per cent off for the first six months, after which the regular price auto-renews. The add-ons matter: an extra payroll person is £1.50 a month, an extra expenses user £2.50, CIS returns £5 a month, auto-reconcile £3.50 a month on Ignite, and Company Accounts and Tax, which files micro-entity accounts to Companies House and the CT600 to HMRC, is £120 a year. Bank feeds are free for most banks, with a few UK banks' feed charges passed on. Xero has raised UK prices every September since 2021, and the September 2025 figures reported by accountancy firms (Grow £37, Comprehensive £50, Ultimate £65) are already below what the page shows today.

HMRC lists Xero on both its Making Tax Digital software lists, for VAT and for Income Tax, with quarterly updates and the tax return covered for sole traders and landlords with UK or foreign property. The ecosystem is the other reason it wins: Stripe and GoCardless are native (GoCardless charges 1 per cent capped at £2), the app marketplace is the largest in the category, the API is mature, and Xero publishes its own MCP server on GitHub, updated in June 2026, so an AI assistant can read and write the ledger without a third-party connector. JAX, Xero's AI assistant, and smart document capture are on every plan. Security is ISO 27001 and SOC 2, with PCI DSS for payments; Xero does not state a UK data region and secondary sources place hosting in the US.

The weak spots are real. Xero's support page says "we can call you if you contact us", which means there is no inbound phone line; support is Xero Central and the community forum, with a callback. Trustpilot is 4.1 on 11,320 reviews with 17 per cent one-star, and the recent one-star themes are bank feeds that stop working, rigid invoice templates and the way the trial and discount are framed. The invoice cap on Ignite and the per-person add-ons mean the headline price is rarely the one you pay.

In our experience: Next Generation ICT Ltd, the company behind Saaskly and Fractional Teams, has run its books on Xero for years. We chose it because it is the product most accountants support, the range of integrations is enormous and the pricing is reasonable for what it does, and none of that has changed. Saaskly has no affiliate link for Xero; the verdict is ours.