Xero integration & volume size
We are looking at moving away from Dear as the transaction volumes are too big for the Xero integration and Xero is failing. It would be ideal if there was an option for Dear to send across invoice totals rather than line by line product details. We don't need all that info in Xero.
This is a worry Helen. Which limits are you getting to in Xero? Is it based on Inventory items per transaction by any chance? I should get ahead of that.
Hi Simon - this was Xero's reply. It's really frustrating as I would happily pay for more capacity! We can have a lot of lines per sales / purchase invoice, and this seems to be a factor too.
At the current time the organisation has 20,969 invoices and 15,700 bills (including deleted and voided invoices and bills which are retained for audit purposes) and several thousand bank transactions which may also be contributing to the performance issues.
When Xero's performance deteriorates it is an indication that Xero is approaching the upper limit of its capacity and that the volume of transactions in the organisation is close to what Xero can comfortably support. There isn't a hard limit at which this occurs as it depends on a number of factors, but typically we find that performance issues can start to arise once transaction volumes reach about 25,000, so in this instance Xero has continued to perform very well. As more transactions are created going forward, the performance may deteriorate further over time. It's not possible to reduce the volume of data in an organisation once the transactions have been created, or to allocate additional storage to individual organisation.
In these situations we recommend considering migrating to an accounting system that will be more suitable for an organisation with larger volumes of transactions.
That's really helpful. Thanks Helen. Hitting 1500x transactions a month isn't necessarily a 'big' organisation, so 25k isn't a great deal. I guess Dear can consolidate transactions daily, weekly and monthly to help ease the burden, but that presents other challenges with reconciliation.
Just throwing around ideas. But in this scenario (at year-end) is it feasible to rename your organisation with the word 'Archived', then start a new Xero account? Good for another 25k transactions then? It may double Xero's charges by running two accounts, but they're easy to flip between. And you can limit extra cost by dropping to a lower tier on the archive account.
No path forward is easy. I certainly can see that.
I think the size of the individual transactions comes into play in a big way. We certainly couldn't not bring across individual transactions, but if they could come across as just the invoice total and vat rather than line by line, I think that would help massively. I think we might well go with the new instance of Xero idea. There are a couple of other limitations with Dear that I am trying to get to the bottom of to see if we can find a way round as I don't want to move away just because of the Xero issue. On the whole I really like both softwares!