As most of you know, I am a huge fan of Xero as I use it for my own bookkeeping. If I am preparing the books for my clients, I prefer Xero and I have turned away potential clients that were on other platforms unless they were open to converting.

My main reason for this approach was to become an expert on one platform. At the time I was operating my practice on a part time basis, and I didn’t have the time to learn other accounting applications.

I have now been running my practice full-time for almost a year and I have recently softened my original stance. I have had a couple potential clients approach me about using QuickBooks Online and Wave for their bookkeeping.

These businesses were not running huge operations on these applications so I thought that they would be the perfect size clients if I wanted to learn more about the software. I didn’t want to turn these businesses away as I thought they would be fun to work with.

QuickBooks Online plays well with Dext Prepare and Wagepoint, two applications that I absolutely love. Wave doesn’t have the same integrations as Xero and QuickBooks Online, but it works well for simple small businesses and it’s mostly free.

Going forward, I am taking an approach to have an open mind and first evaluate the potential bookkeeping client’s current system. If I feel that it has a solid setup, I will not make the conversion if they are already using a cloud platform that I can work with. If they are on a desktop application, I will suggest a conversion to Xero. I still will not do bookkeeping on desktop applications such as Sage.