Xero, MYOB or QuickBooks: what should IT consider?

Which ledger platform to use is the firm's decision, and it should be made on how you practise and what your clients run. The IT contribution is narrower: how well the platform integrates with your email and documents, what it needs from your environment, and how you would extract your data if you ever left.

That division matters because platform debates in accounting firms are professional arguments, not technical ones. Xero, MYOB and QuickBooks all handle ledgers competently. They differ in workflow, in the practice management layers around them, in pricing and in which clients already use them, and those differences are for partners to weigh with people who do the work. An IT provider pushing a particular ledger is answering a question nobody asked them.

Where IT genuinely has something useful to say is integration, and it is where firms most often lose value they have already paid for. Can correspondence about a client attach to that client without someone re-filing it? Does a document created in Word land in the right place automatically? Does workflow and time capture happen where the work happens, or in a separate system people update afterwards if they remember? When those connections are weak, staff maintain a parallel filing habit in Outlook and the platform becomes a billing tool rather than the record of the engagement.

The second question is what the platform needs from your environment. Hosted platforms need reliable connectivity and sensible identity management, which most firms have or should. Anything still running as desktop software or through a hosted desktop brings infrastructure decisions with ongoing cost and refresh obligations, and those belong in the comparison rather than being treated as a given. Ask specifically how it behaves when staff work from home or from a client site, because that is where the practical differences show.

Third, settle the data question before you need the answer. Who owns your data, in what format can it be exported, and what happens at the end of the relationship. This is not hostile and a confident vendor answers it plainly. It matters particularly in accounting because records must be retained for years, sometimes longer than you will hold the software, so the ability to extract material in a usable form is a retention obligation rather than a commercial preference.

Multi-platform reality deserves acknowledgement, because most firms live in it. Clients arrive using whatever they already had, so staff end up working across several ledger platforms regardless of what the firm prefers. That has real IT consequences: more identities to manage, more places client data sits, more integrations to maintain, and a wider access review. It is manageable and it should be deliberate rather than accumulated, with a clear picture of which platforms the firm supports and who has access to what.

If you are migrating, treat it as a project with a defined scope. Historical data, client files, integrations and workflows all move and all need verifying afterwards rather than counting. Plan it for a quiet period, keep the old platform readable for a defined time, and expect a productivity dip while people relearn the tool they use most. AFM Services moved from MYOB to Xero as part of a broader modernisation that also retired their server, which is generally the better approach: do the disruption once, deliberately, rather than spreading it across three separate projects.

Security follows the same rules regardless of platform and is worth stating because it gets assumed. Multi-factor authentication on access, permissions that reflect who works on which clients, and a clear answer from the vendor about what they do regarding backup and their own security posture. A hosted platform is still your client data and your obligation, so the vendor's answers to those questions are part of the evaluation rather than a formality after signing.

One organisational point that outlives any platform choice: agree who inside the firm owns the system. A platform with no internal owner drifts out of configuration within a year, integrations break quietly, and everyone blames the software rather than the absence of anybody responsible for it. That role does not need to be technical; it needs to be accountable.

The honest caveat is that the best platform is the one your people use as intended, and a second-choice system used properly beats a first-choice system worked around. If your current platform is disliked, find out whether the problem is the software or how it was configured and integrated, because reimplementation is frequently cheaper and far less disruptive than replacement. If you want the integration and infrastructure side assessed, call 1800 456 567.