Why We Love Xero (Recorded at XeroCon 2026)

Welcome to Accountants Law Pod, where accounting professionals and law firms converge. Hosted by Linda Artesani, Sarah Prevost, and Stephen Libhart.

We're actually at ZeroCon in a podcast which is an Airbus. No, I had to do it.

I had to do it.

I own an airstream.

And that's when Steve storms out!

Yeah!

I won't handle this disrespect!

The beauty of this is that we actually fell upon this and Steve happened to be walking by right when we were all coming together!

Well, we found Steve scoping out the Airstream!

I immediately saw the Airstream and I jumped inside because I own one and I was like, I gotta be in here! And then they found me and here we are in a podcast!

Here we are! Actually, it's our podcast, so welcome to the Accountants Law Podcast!

Yes, welcome!

A different edition, and we actually got Tierra to come in.

Yeah, look who's here.

Our producer. They drug me in.

Yeah, so we are here at ZeroCon in Denver, uh, 2026.

We've—

we ourselves are— most of our team is here minus a few key people.

Yeah, just a few people didn't come, but we got quite a—

quite a crew. We have 11 of us.

11 people. Yeah, what's really cool, Steve, I have to say, because Steve is from Denver, I say I always scope out every time we go to a conference, I check out the Yeah, this city's pretty nice.

This is a wonderful city. It's a great city.

I walked 8 miles around Denver yesterday.

Oh my gosh.

And it was just such a beautiful day.

And the tree, the sparkling tree Sierra sat under till the sun came out.

It was so pretty.

I did, at Glenarm and, um, was it 16th or something?

And you went to Meow Cat?

Meow Wolf.

Meow Wolf.

I went to Meow Wolf.

I made up my own words again. Here we are.

I had a great time. Walked to Union Station, got some ice cream. Ice cream and then watered down. Yeah, it's beautiful city.

Yeah, so excited to be here. We are excited. This is day one actually of zero.

Beginning of day one. We really haven't even scoped out.

We just walked through the doors.

We found this. We just walked through the door and got sucked into the air.

We got a photographer to take our photo right up front for the whole team. We saw the s'mores and now we've turned our head to the podcast.

Yeah, there's a s'mores bar. There's an airbrush tattoo place.

Apparently the mamas are getting neck tattoos.

So let's talk a little bit about why we're here though.

Yes.

For the accounting side of it.

Xero. Well, Xero is, uh, it's been around. It's a global legend. It's been around a long time. Yeah, its US market is definitely in a smaller market, but I will say for law firms, this is such a viable product. It integrates with Clio. I know LeanLaw has had quite a bit of discussion of wanting to turn their head this way as well, that they They constantly circle it.

We have a lot of friends in the app world that are starting to look towards it.

Yeah, we have some Law Lab members that are really, really loving it.

Yeah, they're starting to embrace it. Including me.

Yeah, yeah, honestly, I, I've been a multi-platform user for some time. Lynda tried it, didn't like it, but then now we've gone back to it. It's changed a lot. Serving on their council for them at one point during my career has been really a phenomenal change. And I really do feel like it's something that, especially if you're a boutique law firm, it's, it's one thing.

Well, the one thing I can say about Xero is that they do respect the accountants. I know Intuit's trying to go back to that. They used to, and that's one of their main focus. But a lot of people are kind of a little bit hedgy about that because it's like, yeah, you know, you kind of stepped on us for when you try to compete with us. And Xero has not done that. So I think that that's a very good reason why you might want to come to Xero.

One of the things too with Xero is the price point.

Yes, that too.

Especially for smaller law firms. If you're on a super tight budget, Xero is the way to go.

And they go up every year, but not like to the extremes like Intuit.

Yeah, and it's very intentional. So we don't have a lot of ads like we do with the Intuit product. Any of the information that's What's not priced in there is definitely for a new product launch or an update. Would you like to see turn on, turn off? And truly, like you're saying, Lynda, it definitely— they've been less incremental at the size and frequency of pricing with the value of the flight.

They actually put features in and then raise the price.

Yes, exactly.

Which is different because it's— yeah, I mean, and I know Intuit does too, but sometimes it feels, if Your product is buggy or it lags or, you know, frustrates us when we work in it. You don't seem to have that as much with Xero at all. It seems to be whatever they do for working it into the products is not— we're not the guinea pigs of that.

And their cash flow reporting.

Yes.

Well, they have great reporting now with that.

Oh, and their SIFT reporting. Now that they own SIFT, there's been some intentional interesting purchases. Some we've all in the profession have gone, what are you guys doing? But Clearly there's some power behind it, we just don't see it quite yet. So yeah, your cash flow reporting is key. I do feel— I'm not sure how you guys feel— with all the different products that are coming out, it does feel nice to have a product, you know, QuickBooks has been the cornerstone of the market here in the US, and it does feel nice to have a product that's actually— you can use and it's a reliable product.

It's another choice too. I mean, I love QuickBooks. Don't get me wrong, I do love the product. I'm very comfortable in it. I've been using it a long time. It's very beefy. It has a lot of pluses, and there are things that it has that Xero does not have. But for certain clients, we're finding it's better to put them into Xero because it's more affordable. The smaller firms that don't need it. And sometimes you can get some— we have a very large firm in it as well. It works fine. So it's not because of that, but you know, you have to look at the needs of the client, and I think that's the biggest part.

I honestly I really think that for trust accounting, it's actually, it's nice for the people that want to drive it because it's a different integration with Clio.

Uh-huh.

When it comes to the invoicing, if you're a large volume invoicing group, honestly, this product is really good as far as a law firm goes. It handles it really well. Where we've been in the QuickBooks, excuse me, in the QuickBooks product, and we have found the bloat to be Slowing down the product quite a bit.

Yes.

So, I've not had that experience with Xero at a large volume. And I'm talking, you know, I had to look through 33,000 records for a 1-year law firm of the number of invoices that came in from Clio to Xero, just for recording different counties and jurisdictional states. Incredible. It did not slow us down.

Now, is it easy to search inside of— you know, sometimes we go to search in QuickBooks and we'll do a search, it says it doesn't exist, or you can't— there's no results. And then you have to go like to the register if you're looking for something in a check register or a register.

Oh, that's a good point.

Yeah, sometimes that works, sometimes it doesn't work.

Um, or you search, you have a better search, you search, you put a number in, and then it brings up the vendor, and then you have to sift through the vendor to find that number.

So what's actually nice, it's a funny interesting point that you bring this up. When you go to their Spotlight Search, is what I call it, in Xero, yeah, it brings up a whole slew of different things, but it tells you, is this a customer, is this a sales invoice, is this a vendor? So you kind of get to see the grouping.

So you get to see it all.

You get this like running inventory.

So you don't have to go look at a customer, you don't have to go look at a vendor.

Yeah.

The only time I probably need to drill in, and the difference here is that contacts in Xero are the same, whereas QuickBooks treats customers as a contact and vendors as a contact. And then of course we have the hidden secret of employees and, and then other contractors and the others. Well, not in Xero. Xero, it's just one, right? You could pay somebody or you could spend your—

oh, I saved money.

I don't know about that one. But it's very clear and you can see it very clearly. I do like it because I'm not having 2 names. I'm not— because it's true.

Yeah, but you do -V because we have a vendor, they're a vendor at one point, and then you do—

But you can know by the transaction type instantly what you're getting, so you can search it.

And I'm just thinking 1099s. It's very—

actually, they do a really good job in their product. I don't really go outside their product too much. Um, we, we use another in our firm, Lynda and I, we use a different product as well to kind of double-check our work. But I find it, it's a lot easier. And part of their development when I was on council was a big conversation about this.

So it's a big pain point for us every year.

Yeah, yeah. A few members on our team utilize it and it's not nearly as hard. Plus we can file through there if we wanted to, or we could go through our simple— is it TRAC 1099? Yeah. I was like, wait, what product do we use? I don't know, I forgot.

We should probably say the name of it.

Yeah, what product do we use? You could do it really simply in there, you could still export it out. There's a variety of ways to handle it. But yeah, it's a great question because it is a very easy—

It's different.

Yeah, the bank feed is different. Yeah, the banking's different, which that was one of my other reasons I kind of, I don't know, I don't know if I like this because it's different. I know they've changed it since I looked at it, which is way years ago.

But you know what's nice about it? It's more intuitive to a business owner.

Well, as we get with AI, we're going to start seeing a lot more automations in that realm. So I think that we're going to start to see that's going to be just happens, you know.

Yeah, no, truly. Um, it does have quite a bit of ability to have a lot of things import, you know, in different integrations. I've been playing around with the Claude MCP. In my own file, playing around with that. That's been interesting. And I don't know, to me it's a viable product that's worth looking at, especially if you are struggling through QuickBooks. A lot of— honestly, Lynda and I have in our respective clientele, in our own businesses, we have clients that are in different varieties. And, you know, if you're an artist, a producer—

Yeah.

photographer, I tend to see that those folks really prefer actually Xero over QuickBooks. It's not as cumbersome. It's not as, you know, PC to them. So they can navigate it very easily.

This is a big floor too. I have to say that my first impression was you got the beautiful— I love the logo and the mountain. I love the bear. And Denver and all that.

Did you see the big bear outside?

No.

Yeah, there's a giant bear looking through the window.

Oh yeah, I did see that yesterday when we were walking. Yeah. Yeah, that's cute.

Yeah, yeah, they really leaned into the Mountain West theme and it's so fun.

And yeah, you're only seeing like a tenth of this.

Music is bumping.

Oh yeah, massive.

Yeah, we'll get some videos and stuff. But you know, I've honestly, I've always found their product to be beautiful is what I've called it. The blue is pretty.

The UI is nice.

Yeah, the UI is nice.

And they do throw a good party, I have to say. Everywhere they, they used to, they used to come to some of the other conferences They do road shows still.

They float around and do different road shows on the non-Zero Con years.

They have a big presence here in Denver. They have a big office here.

Yeah, I've seen a lot of billboards and ads for it as I've walked around.

It's a great central location too.

Actually, I've seen a lot of ads on TV and YouTube and like pod— when I'm— yeah, lately I was like, oh, there they are. They're starting to do TV.

That's smart.

Yeah, but we have a lot of— looks like a lot of different vendors that we get to look at. They play nice. I think what's nice, if you're a Clio user, it's a very similar product in the idea of like, they have a core product.

You have Manage, right?

Yeah, you have your core product and then you have a whole bunch of integrations, a whole bunch of apps that you can work with. And so I found it to be a lot easier of a product.

And it has Melio embedded into it, right?

BillPay.

They built that. So that's where— and if you're familiar with that, I mean, I have that with clients outside of Xero.

Yes.

What else is in it? Well, Sift, we already talked about Sift.

We talked about Sift. They have—

Oh, Ader.

Yeah.

So you get Ader in there.

Yeah, and which then you also have— gosh, there's different merchant providers that you can kind of hook up to it, so you have choices. You're not like limited, and they integrate very seamlessly into the product.

Does Xero have an app store? Store like QuickBooks does?

Yes, they do.

So you can actually go in and look at it.

Speaking of, look, apps stage spotlight.

Well, there we go.

Xero's accounting app. When XeroCon in Nashville, they relaunched it when I was there 2 years ago, and I was sitting and listening to one of the keynote stages, right? And I was working on the app, and it was so easy to use, and you just— it works really simply. So you could work in multiple files if you want. That's very nice.

Yeah, so, so I was gonna say, Tierra, since you're here, how is it doing the making the podcast? Because I know you got a larger role now.

We could not do it without you.

No, we can't do a lot of things without you.

I'm so glad that you see that now.

Only because we're on camera.

She tells us what to do.

I get the email from her to bring my face My lotion and everything.

You guys are adorable.

What was the question? Wait a minute, you're the actress, right? I mean, what's it like now? Because your role has kind of changed a little bit. I want to say morphed like a butterfly because you've really like— it's expanded a lot.

It's expanded a little bit, yeah. I've always been sort of the director-producer of the podcast. Podcast, but now I've taken on the role of editor as well. Taught myself how to edit the audio and the video in addition to producing it. So that's kind of grown. And then with the help of Danielle, who we've brought on as kind of our brand and marketing manager, um, just everything is really growing and morphing in a really beautiful, exciting way. So it's been, it's been fun to be a part of for 3 years and it just keeps growing. I know. We just hit 1,000 followers on TikTok.

Oh wow!

Oh yeah, okay.

The other day, over 20,000, and we've got over 20,000 downloads for a very niche podcast.

Yeah, which isn't bad for a podcast about legal accounting.

Yeah, you know. Well, actually, it's just such a reward to like be able to sit here together, all of us.

I know.

The likelihood of us being able to do this.

I'm getting.

I know, I know, right?

You know what I just remembered? The last time you and I saw each other in Denver. What did we do?

We recorded.

We recorded a podcast in front of a 1961 Airstream.

It's a theme.

It's a theme.

What year is this one?

This is like a pre-2000.

Oh, see, we've grown up.

This is beautiful.

The late last decade model.

Oh yeah, as a reminder to everyone listening, if they don't know, Steve is from Denver, Colorado. Linda is from Florida. Sarah is from Portland and I'm from Utah, so it's rare we get to see each other. It's rare that all 4 of us get to be together in one place, so this is really—

We cover a lot of time zones.

And thank you to Xero for bringing us a podcast recording studio.

I know, so cool. Yeah, um, I was gonna say, it's— we're self-funded too. We have not had any sponsor dollars. We've not had any—

there's no commercials.

Yeah, no commercials.

Yes, we've— I mean We'll take any sponsors.

Maybe I can get Airstream to sponsor.

I think that's definitely a future goal with the podcast, is bringing on some partners and some sponsorships.

Yeah, and learning how to say their advertisement and, you know, doing all those things. And, and you're doing— helping us with our editing now. We've upgraded to a different software.

We're Danielle is doing like amazing things. We should give a shout out to Danielle.

She's not here.

She's one of the ones that didn't come here, and she's got little ones, and she's completely changed all our websites. Yeah, she's working on, I think, the lot. Is she working on—

She's working on this, this website right now. Yeah, for the podcast.

It'll be gorgeous.

So be on the lookout. It's just gonna get better and prettier from here, you guys.

More stuff.

You can say you knew us when.

Yeah. Even with the Law Lab, I mean, we've got so— that's just changed so much.

The Law Lab has grown so much. I'm so proud of how much it's grown and changed and all the beautiful work that she's done.

Did you see the shoutouts for the handout you did recently with the one you did for the Chart of Accounts? It was all over our—

No, I didn't.

Oh, it was on Facebook. People are like, thank you so much, this is beautiful.

Oh, fantastic. I'm so glad.

I'm like, Tierra made it beautiful. I'm so glad.

I have to pay attention. I didn't see it.

I better go.

You know what happens is I edit the blog and the videos for the Lolab, and so every week when I'm doing next week's video, I'll get to the end of the video that I'm editing and Lynda will be like, make sure you download this free thing. And I'm like, oh no! So then I have to like run to Lynda and be like, we put it all together. So I'm so glad that, that, yeah, there's a lot of good stuff.

There's a lot of— but you know what's funny is oftentimes she's like, I don't know what you guys do. And now I think you've got a little bit more of a secret window of like, oh, I get it. This is this structure. This is this structure. You're having to like really—

Well, we've got a couple of webinars. We've done a webinar recently with Oliver, and I can't remember the website, but maybe Tierra will find it and add it to the notes. Yeah, but, um, it's a website that's about AI and attorneys, something like that. And And he's, um, we're gonna be doing another one, and Tierra already put the PowerPoint together.

Oh, that's awesome.

I gave you 2.

Oh, okay.

Yeah, 2 different versions. Yeah, but yeah, so in the Law Lab, I mean, almost weekly we're coming out with new resources.

Yeah.

Yes, it's a big download and checklists and getting started guides. In addition to, you know, there's collection of every video from the last 2 years, all the meetings. The resources included in there. I've turned Sarah and Lynda into a chatbot where— that is trained on all of their knowledge across all of their websites, their platforms, their blogs, this podcast. So if you ask them a question, it's like you're talking to them. You're gonna get the answer that they would give you inside of the LawLab community.

Yeah.

You can find the blog there, you can find the podcast there. I think Danielle and I constantly every day we're thinking of new resources And new ways to upgrade it and new, new, new ways that we can add value to our members. And so it's been really exciting to see that.

That's for the accountants, but we are working on one for firm owners. We are working on one.

I like that.

Yeah, so there will be something somewhat similar, different product, uh, that will be utilized.

Specifically lawyers that are trying to do their own books or, or any other questions.

Staff that might be growing their firm.

Somewhere you can go to have your questions answered. Talk to other account owners. What's that called?

Remember?

For which one?

The oh, we haven't launched it yet. The collective part of it. Yeah. So what's it called?

Because it might be launched by the time this launch.

No, I don't know. Oh, I probably. I know that the initialism is LAC.

Oh yeah. Lawyer is accounting collective.

Collective.

Yeah.

Well, you know what's cool?

That was Danielle's baby. You can see that I haven't really been involved.

What's cool about the podcast? too, is it started out our intention was for accountants.

Yeah.

And then this big bridge got built between accountants and attorneys. Everybody's benefiting from it.

I love that. Yeah. I had someone recently ask because they looked at my email signature and they were like, who am I actually talking to? Like, I could— I think they were looking at scheduling a discovery call with the proper trust. Yeah, with you two. And my email signature has, you know, The Proper Trust, Mintage Labs, Artesani Accounting, Accountants Law Lab, and Accountants Law Pod.

Okay.

So they were like, who exactly? Explain this to me. And I was like, we've got something for everybody. But I was like, you know, the Proper Trust is for the firm owners.

Yeah.

The Law Lab is for the accountants. The podcast is everyone. It's, it's a bridge between the two. Um, there's a lot of knowledge and a lot of resources for everybody depending on who you're I was like, just take this all to know that this team knows what they're talking about.

Yeah, there's a lot of passion. So I have a question as we close up here. What, what do we think we want to get out of this conference over the next few days?

A lot of s'mores.

She did not hesitate, by the way, if anybody didn't notice that.

I saw that s'mores bar and I said, that's where you'll find me.

I know, I might get a neck tattoo with your mama.

You should get a neck tattoo.

Oh, okay.

I've got one, it's great.

Well, they're temporary, so yeah. Never in your life would you do one.

No, no, no, no, no, no neck tattoo. No face tattoo.

No, I'm so, I'm so excited for the sessions about working in carbon.

Yeah.

And using Aether and AI and that. Oh, we've—

this might be a perfect time.

It's starting. Um, we're gonna come away from this with some beautiful new photos of you guys.

Yes.

Yes. Yeah, we're gonna do that.

So, well, we're going to a baseball game tonight.

Going to a baseball game.

The big thing is that we're together and we're at a fun conference, one that we're gonna to learn at. There's a lot of AI innovation happening here.

Every conference now has AI stuff, so yeah, so a lot to unpack there.

Well, thank you for the time today. I'm so glad we got—

this worked out.

This was so fun.

Got one in the bucket.

Yeah, yeah, that's a good one.

I confirmed with Tiara earlier this week, I said no, no recording this week, right? And here we are.

And I lied.

Got to keep you on your toes.

You pulled in an Airstream just to do this, didn't you?

I did.

I did. Oh, and we should note, we are the first ones for them to work for us on the first day.

We're the guinea pigs.

We're so— but thank you all. Thank you for the time, and it's a pleasure to be here.

We hope to see you all next at the next ZeroCon in 2 years, right? They're every other year.

No, we can go next year to Australia.

Ooh. Or London.

It depends on how many sponsors we get of the podcast.

Yes.

Send us sponsors, please.

Thank you, everybody.

Bye-bye.

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