Xero rarely fails a small business outright. It fades. The first year it does everything you need, and by the third you’re paying for a reporting add-on, an approvals add-on, and a receipt app, each with its own login and its own invoice. The month you total those up is usually the month you start looking at Xero alternatives.
The danger in that moment is swapping one set of headaches for another. This checklist covers ten things to confirm before you move, so the replacement actually reduces the number of tools you run rather than reshuffling them.
Key Takeaways
- Add up your current Xero cost including every add-on. That total, not the headline plan price, is what a replacement has to beat.
- Reporting, budgets, bill management, and 1099 tracking should be in the base subscription, not bolted on.
- Check the entry-plan limits on invoices, bills, and users. Xero’s starter plan caps invoices at 20 and bills at 5 per month.
- Confirm support is live chat on every plan. Xero’s U.S. support is email-based, with no inbound phone line.
- Test with your own bank feed and your own transactions during the trial, not the demo file.
1. Reporting that doesn’t need a second subscription
The reports built into Xero cover the standard set, which consists of profit and loss, balance sheet, aged receivables and aged payables. When a business requires comparative periods, department views, or a report that a lender or a board will read without reformatting, that business generally adds Fathom, Spotlight, or a similar reporting tool, and that reporting tool is billed at a separate monthly fee in addition to the Xero subscription.
Any replacement product should be examined to determine whether reports can be customized inside the product and whether those customized reports can be saved inside the product. In GlassJar each user selects which reports appear on that user’s dashboard, and a saved customization is rerun without the customization being rebuilt. The report library in GlassJar is included on every GlassJar plan rather than being sold separately from the GlassJar plan.
2. Bank feeds and categorization in the core product
Xero connects to most major United States banks, and at low transaction volumes the matching performed by Xero works well. Past a few hundred transactions in a week, the bank rules in Xero and the reconciliation screen in Xero begin to cost a meaningful amount of time, and a dropped bank connection can require several days of re-matching before the reconciliation is complete.
Whichever replacement product is selected, a real bank account should be connected during the trial period and a full month should be reconciled during that trial period. The categorization applied to imported transactions should be observed, the effort required to correct a categorization should be observed, and whether the same vendor appearing under three slightly different descriptions is assigned to the same place should also be observed. GlassJar’s bank integration imports and categorizes transactions and reconciles against invoices, bills, and receipts from the same screen.
3. Bill management without an approvals app
The invoicing functionality in Xero is adequate for most requirements. The payables side of Xero is the area in which additional subscriptions accumulate, because approval workflows, vendor bill tracking and payment scheduling are not covered by Xero and generally lead a business toward ApprovalMax, Dext or Hubdoc.
A replacement product should allow a vendor bill to be recorded, should allow every outstanding vendor bill to be displayed in order of due date, and should allow a vendor bill to be marked as paid, with all three of those actions performed from one place. GlassJar includes bill management and invoicing in the base GlassJar product, and bill management and invoicing are both entered from the same single screen as every other transaction type in GlassJar.
4. Budgets that compare to actual numbers
The Budget Manager in Xero allows a budget to be built and allows that budget to be viewed against actual figures, but the Budget Manager in Xero is limited to one budget for each tracking category and does not extend much beyond that comparison. A business that requires variance reporting by category, mid-cycle budget adjustments, or side-by-side period comparison generally returns to a spreadsheet in order to perform that work.
A replacement product should provide budgeting that is tied to live transaction data, so that a budget overrun becomes visible during the month in which the budget overrun occurs rather than after that month has closed. GlassJar includes budgeting with variance reporting on every GlassJar plan.
5. How many screens a transaction takes
The Xero interface is uncluttered when Xero is used for single-entity bookkeeping. When tracking categories, projects and a second currency are added to Xero, the navigation within Xero becomes considerably busier, and new staff generally require several weeks before those staff are able to navigate Xero without assistance.
The test that matters is the time required to enter a bill, an expense, an invoice and a journal entry. In GlassJar a bill, an expense, an invoice and a journal entry are all entered from the same screen, where the transaction type is selected, the form is completed and the transaction is saved. The difference on a single transaction is small, and the difference accumulated across a full year of transactions is substantial.
6. Permissions you can actually shape
Xero offers user roles, but the user roles in Xero are preset tiers, specifically advisor, standard and invoice-only, and those preset tiers provide limited ability to tailor what each individual person is able to see. When an outside bookkeeper and a certified public accountant both work in the same file, the preset tiers in Xero provide less control than that arrangement requires.
GlassJar’s user roles allow permissions to be set for each role, allow an accountant to be given limited access to the books, and provide an activity log recording which user changed which record. Every GlassJar plan includes more than one user.
7. Contractor payments and 1099s in the same system
For a business that pays independent contractors, the 1099 filing period is the point at which that business discovers whether the accounting software used by that business was tracking the correct information throughout the year. Xero produces a 1099 report in the United States, but 1099 filing from Xero generally runs through a partner service, and contractors in Xero are held in the same contact list as every other contact with no dedicated contractor tracking.
GlassJar assigns contractor payments to 1099 categories at the point at which those contractor payments are recorded, retains the payment history for each contractor, and exports the year-end 1099 report from that payment history. One contact record in GlassJar can be a customer, a vendor and a contractor at the same time, so a subcontractor who also sends work to the business is held as one contact record rather than as two separate contact records.
8. Check printing for the bills you still pay by mail
Paper checks remain in use for a number of ordinary business payments. Rent payments, certain local tax payments and a considerable number of vendor payments are still made by paper check. Xero does not print checks natively, so a business using Xero either writes checks by hand or adds a further application in order to print checks.
GlassJar includes check printing as part of the GlassJar product rather than as a separate subscription. It’s a small thing until it is the third app you’re paying for.
9. Support you can reach during a close
United States support for Xero is delivered primarily through email, and Xero provides no inbound telephone line on any Xero plan. Response times for Xero support lengthen during tax season, and tax season is the period during which a response is most likely to be required urgently.
Any replacement product should be confirmed to offer live chat support on the specific plan being purchased rather than on the highest tier alone. GlassJar includes live chat support on the Foundation plan, the Core plan and the Advanced plan.
10. Total cost, not headline price
The plan price published by Xero appears reasonable when that plan price is considered on its own. When reporting, approvals, receipt capture and whichever further add-ons a business actually uses are added to the plan price published by Xero, the actual monthly cost is frequently two to three times the plan price published by Xero.
Before a comparison is made, every add-on the business currently pays for should be listed, and the cost of every add-on the business currently pays for should be recorded alongside it. Each add-on on that list should then be checked against the base plan of the replacement product in order to establish whether the replacement product includes that add-on. GlassJar bundles bank feeds, invoicing, bill management, expense tracking, budgets, reporting, check printing, custom tags, user roles and 1099 tracking into one subscription. Current plan details are on the pricing page, and there is a 14-day free trial. Early access opens October 1, 2026.
A note on Xero’s entry-plan limits
One further point is worth establishing before a comparison is made. The starter plan offered by Xero caps a business at 20 invoices and 5 bills in each month, a service business can reach that 20 invoice cap within the first week of a month, and expense claims are available only on the highest Xero tier. Unlimited users on every Xero plan is the genuine strength of Xero, so a business for which a large team is the priority should weigh unlimited users against the invoice cap and the bill cap. The GlassJar and Xero comparison sets out the differences line by line.
How to make the switch
Contacts, chart of accounts, open invoices, open bills and a trial balance as of the end of a closed period should all be exported before the migration begins. A cutover date should be selected at the start of a month or at the start of a quarter, opening balances should be brought into the replacement product, and both systems should be run in parallel through one complete close. The migration guide covers each step of that process, including which records should be retained in Xero as an archive.
Frequently asked questions
What is the biggest limitation of Xero for a U.S. small business?
The most significant limitation is dependence on add-ons. Advanced reporting, bill approvals, receipt capture and check printing all sit outside the core Xero product, and the requirement to license advanced reporting, bill approvals, receipt capture and check printing separately raises the total monthly cost and multiplies the number of separate logins a business maintains.
Does GlassJar include reporting without extra fees?
Reporting is included without an additional fee. The customizable report library is part of every GlassJar plan. Each user selects which reports sit on that user’s dashboard, customizes those reports, and saves those reports so that the saved reports can be rerun.
Can I track contractors and 1099s in GlassJar?
Contractors and 1099 payments are both tracked in GlassJar. Payments are tagged to 1099 categories at the point at which those payments are entered, and the year-end 1099 report is produced directly from that payment history, so no separate tool has to be kept in sync with GlassJar.
Does GlassJar have unlimited users like Xero?
Every GlassJar plan includes more than one user, and every GlassJar plan includes role-based permissions for those users. The pricing page should be checked for the current user allowance applying to each tier.
When can I start using GlassJar?
Early access opens October 1, 2026. Every plan comes with a 14-day free trial so you can test it with your own data before committing.
