Lexware Office vs Xero

Lexware Office

The chart of accounts is real — SKR03 or SKR04, switchable, with existing bookings migrated automatically — calendar months serve as the booking periods, and a monthly locking cycle stands in for the period close. We found no public information on free manual postings, journals, opening balances, cost centres or accruals, and the fiscal year is fixed to the calendar year.

Xero

The evidence evidences invoicing, bank reconciliation and 'real-time reports' — a ledger of some sort exists — but not one word on double-entry, journals, a chart of accounts, SKR03/SKR04, opening balances or a period close. I can only audit what the vendor documents, and that tops out at simplified bookkeeping with no free posting and no close.

Lexware Office

Immutability is documented better than most: automatic monthly locking in a night window with a cutoff to the second-to-last month, an initial locking on activation, manual locking to a chosen date, a protocol of every executed locking with timestamps, and submission of the VAT advance return locks that period's bookings. For what a Betriebsprüfung needs beyond that, we found no public information on corrections booked as reversals, a per-posting change history, retention across the statutory period, a supplied Verfahrensdokumentation, or a data export for the auditor.

Xero

No GoBD claim, no retention statement, no change log, no Verfahrensdokumentation anywhere on these pages; the sole compliance artifact is a SOC 2 report 'available on request', which says nothing about unalterable postings or statutory German retention. The silence is the finding — nothing here survives a Betriebsprüfung.

Lexware Office

The VAT advance return runs end to end — positions filled per transaction, one-click transmission with ELSTER confirmation, null returns, payment by direct debit or transfer, an automatic voucher afterwards — with cash-versus-accrual timing, minimum-cash taxation, §13b reverse charge, intra-community supplies and Dauerfristverlängerung documented. Destination-country OSS taxation is explicitly routed outside the product, and we found no public information on the EÜR or a balance sheet, the Zusammenfassende Meldung, §19 small-business treatment or E-Bilanz; retrospective filings are limited to the second-to-last year.

Xero

Not a word on VAT rates, UStVA, ELSTER, EÜR or OSS; the tax-relevant facts end at 'use multiple currencies' in the Premium tier. The provenance itself concedes the German filing requirements are not targeted, and the evidence proves it.

Lexware Office

Fetched bank transactions receive matching suggestions on each refresh, the matching logic is documented in detail — criteria, improvement markers, checks in both directions, up to 1000 assignments per operation — and a posting only exists once the user accepts a suggestion, with separate guidance on genuinely linking bank transaction and receipt. We found no public information on OCR receipt capture, rule-based matching with learning, ZUGFeRD/XRechnung handling, or documented replacement scanning; an e-invoicing module is named in the product navigation without format detail.

Xero

'Smart Document Capture' plus 'auto-reconcile' and 'bulk reconcile' clear the purely-manual bar and suggest receipt capture with suggested matching. But no evidence of bank feeds for German banks, of ZUGFeRD/XRechnung handling, or of documented ersetzendes Scannen — whether the digital receipt is legally sufficient on its own is unevidenced.

Lexware Office

Four handover scenarios are documented down to the ZIP files — manual DATEV Belegtransfer and Stapelbuchungsimport, or DATEVconnect online via the Rechnungsdatenservice and Buchungsdatenservice — and the export started from the tax-adviser login produces receipt and booking files that link automatically in DATEV Kanzlei Rechnungswesen, booking to receipt image. The adviser seat is free and the last login is visible, but access cannot be restricted to individual areas — the adviser sees everything including connected bank accounts — and we found no public information on corrections coming back from DATEV or an audit of what the adviser changed.

Xero

'250,000 accountants and bookkeepers using Xero' evidences a partner network, but the evidence names no export format at all — no DATEV, not even a generic CSV — and no adviser access model or audit of adviser actions. How the books reach a Steuerberater is simply not documented.

Lexware Office

The vendor presents as a German house from Freiburg, but we found no public information on where the books are hosted or on any subprocessor; only separate privacy statements for the cloud and the desktop products are offered. A manual export of vouchers and booking data remains available even after cancellation, but we found no public information on a documented archive export that keeps retention compliant for the statutory period after leaving.

Xero

The contracting entity is the New Zealand-headquartered Xero group of companies, hosting is stated only as 'Region Global (USD)', and the subprocessor list is unknown — with a ten-year German retention obligation attached to books held under a non-EU vendor with unstated hosting. That is the zero anchor almost verbatim.

Lexware Office

We found no public prices at all in the captured material — no tier price, no booking or document limits, no minimum term, no VAT treatment; the only pricing statement is that the tax adviser access is free. A business cannot compute an annual invoice from these pages.

Xero

Four tiers with public prices, invoice and bill limits, two priced add-ons (expense claims from $4, projects from $7), the 80%-for-3-months promo and one-month cancellation notice are all stated. VAT treatment, adviser access pricing and what happens past the invoice/bill limits are not, so the true annual invoice remains only partly computable.