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Xero squanders its advantage of being one of the very few collaboration tools with financial application know-how by simply offering an alternative to a well-established online accounting tool incumbent.
We are assessing leading collaboration tools against four criteria that we see as critical to the future of this space. The criteria we used to assess Xero’s effectiveness as an enterprise tool are:
- Debates lead to elegant solutions.
- Project partitioning and allocation is efficient.
- Progress monitoring improves capital allocation.
- Risk mitigation improves project outcomes.
Source: Xero at SoftwareReviews, January 2019.
Unfortunately, even when considering its application add-on, Discuss, Xero falls flat on all four criteria despite offering an attractive solution that, in many respects, seems to push the status quo.
Our Take
Xero’s “whatever you can do, I can do better” approach of going to market is uninspired. Reconceiving this saturated and cynical market is worth the bet. Xero should use its considerable financial application development savvy to shift the conversation from an accounting theme to a risk theme. Xero can then achieve what most collaboration tools have not: perform well on our fourth criterion and, from there, go on to tackle criteria one through three.