What is Xero?
Xero is cloud accounting software for small businesses, covering invoices, bills and bank reconciliation, with an AI assistant called JAX (Just Ask Xero) built into the product. JAX answers questions about your Xero data and helps with admin tasks, and it opens from the navigation bar inside Xero.
Who it's for
Xero's pricing page offers three plans for small businesses, with payroll, inventory and project tools available as extras or on higher tiers. Xero's JAX page describes the assistant for Xero subscribers and users who want answers about their business finances; the pages read do not name a size or industry limit.
Pros & cons
Strengths
- Xero lists three US plans (Early, Growing, Established) and says there are no per-user license fees; the pricing page gives no user cap for any plan.
- Xero lists bank reconciliation on all three plans, with auto-reconcile included on Growing and Established and sold as a $5.00 a month option on Early.
- Xero says JAX chat is available to all Xero subscribers and users, and that there is currently no additional charge to use it.
- Xero says JAX follows the same access rules as the rest of Xero, so admins can limit its use by changing users' roles and permissions.
- Xero says JAX only runs when a user asks a question and does not run in the background, and that it does not use customer data to train the language models it uses.
- Xero's pricing page lists integration with 1000+ apps, cash flow forecasts of 30, 60 and 180 days by plan, and Smart Document Capture on all three plans.
Limitations
- The Early plan is capped at 20 invoices and 5 bills; Xero says the invoice limit applies to both approving and sending invoices.
- Projects, expense and mileage claims, and multiple currencies are listed only on Established; budgets are excluded from Early and listed as 3 budgets on Growing.
- Payroll is an optional add-on at $36 a month plus $6 per employee or contractor, and online invoice payments carry payment fees; the Early plan also needs the $5.00 a month add-on for auto-reconcile.
- Xero says it reserves the right to change pricing at any time and to change JAX's terms and pricing; it also says the 90% intro offer can be changed or cancelled at any time.
- Xero's JAX page says third-party language model providers process the data sent to them, but it lists AWS, Microsoft Azure, GCP and OpenAI in one answer and only AWS, Azure and GCP in another, and it gives no retention period or accuracy limits.
Plans and pricing
- Early: $27 a month ($2.70 a month for the first 6 months for new US customers). Quotes and 20 invoices, 5 bills, bank reconciliation, 30-day cash flow forecast, basic graphs. Auto-reconcile is an optional $5.00 a month. Billed monthly.
- Growing: $59 a month ($5.90 a month for the first 6 months for new US customers). Invoices and bill entry listed as included with no stated limit, auto-reconcile included, 60-day cash flow forecast, dashboards, 3 budgets. Billed monthly.
- Established: $97 a month ($9.70 a month for the first 6 months for new US customers). Everything in Growing plus projects, expense and mileage claims, multiple currencies and a 180-day cash flow forecast. Billed monthly.
- Add-ons: Payroll $36 a month plus $6 per employee or contractor. Payroll is optional on all plans; Inventory Plus is optional on Growing and Established and excluded on Early. Payment fees and usage charges are billed separately.
Prices were read from Xero's US pricing pages (xero.com/us/pricing and xero.com/us/pricing-plans) on 2026-10-22, in USD, excluding taxes, with subscriptions auto-renewing monthly until cancelled; no annual billing and no free plan or free trial were listed. The intro price came from a promotion for new US customers (code listed on the page) that Xero says ends November 2, 2026, and the page also shows an unexplained 'Get one month free' label. Confirm on the live pricing page.
Details checked October 2026 against the vendor's own pages. Prices and limits change, so confirm before you buy. Official pricing page ↗
Sources
This profile was compiled from these public pages. We have not run hands-on tests.
Xero — at a glance
Xero is cloud accounting software for small businesses, covering invoices, bills and bank reconciliation, with an AI assistant called JAX (Just Ask Xero) built into the product. JAX answers questions about your Xero data and helps with admin tasks, and it opens from the navigation bar inside Xero.
Try Xero →