QuickBooks vs Xero

QuickBooks

The captured pages are a privacy statement, and I found no public information on the ledger underneath the product — nothing on double-entry, SKR03/SKR04 charts, journals, opening balances or a period close. A product name in an accounting category is not evidence of a posting engine, so this sits at the lowest step.

Xero

The evidence evidences invoicing, bill entry, bank reconciliation and reports — the pretty screens — but not one word about double-entry, a chart of accounts, a journal, opening balances or a period close. No SKR03/SKR04 anywhere, so as evidenced there is no German ledger underneath at all.

QuickBooks

I found no public information on GoBD conformity, unalterable postings, an audit trail or a Verfahrensdokumentation — not even the bare "GoBD-konform" line that would lift it one step. The only retention wording captured concerns personal information kept "as long as necessary", which says nothing about statutory retention of accounting records.

Xero

Not even the marketing-page 'GoBD-konform' claim that would earn a 3 — the word GoBD, any retention statement, any audit-trail or immutability description is simply absent from all three captured pages. I've seen GoBD printed with nothing behind it; here they didn't even print it.

QuickBooks

I found no public information on VAT logic, UStVA, ELSTER or any German filing; the captured pages are silent on the entire filing year. The single tax-adjacent statement is that US tax return information is processed and stored in the United States — a different jurisdiction's story.

Xero

No VAT logic beyond nothing: no UStVA, no ELSTER, no EÜR or balance sheet, no reverse charge, no OSS — the pricing pages don't even mention a VAT rate field. The closest fact is 'multiple currencies' in Premium, which is a currency feature, not a filing.

QuickBooks

I found no public information on bank feeds, receipt capture, OCR or matching rules — the banking and receipt side of the product does not appear in what was captured at all. What the pages do discuss is biometric information and session replay, which is privacy plumbing, not a receipt chain.

Xero

'Smart Document Capture' and 'Auto-reconcile / bulk reconcile transactions' are stated, which is a step past purely manual matching. But there is no evidence of automatic feeds for German banks, no OCR named, no ZUGFeRD/XRechnung, and nothing on whether a scan can legally replace paper.

QuickBooks

I found no public information on a DATEV export, a maintained adviser interface or an adviser login of any kind. A buyer cannot even locate the tier where a DATEV export might begin, because no pricing page was captured.

Xero

'Over 250,000 accountants and bookkeepers using Xero' implies advisers can get in somehow, but the evidence names no export format at all — no DATEV, not even the generic 'CSV for your tax adviser' line. Nothing shows how a German year-end would actually reach a Steuerberater.

QuickBooks

The named controller is Intuit Inc. and its group companies, a US contracting entity, with US tax return information processed and stored in the United States and personal information possibly held in "any other country" where Intuit or its providers operate facilities; no EU hosting option is named. Third parties like YouTube, Twilio, the credit bureaus, FullStory and Medallia appear scattered through the privacy statement, but that is not a published subprocessor list, and I found no public information on an export that would satisfy statutory retention after the contract ends.

Xero

The contracting entity is the New Zealand 'Xero group of companies', data residency is unknown, subprocessors unnamed — the 0 of 10 matches the bottom anchor exactly. With no documented exit export, a ten-year German retention obligation would sit on books held by a non-EU vendor with no stated safeguard.

QuickBooks

No tier, price, booking limit or add-on appears anywhere in the captured pages; I found no public information on pricing at all. With nothing public, a business cannot compute even a rough annual invoice, let alone what an extra bank account or a DATEV export would cost.

Xero

Tier prices, promo terms, one-month cancellation, invoice/bill limits and two priced add-ons are public — better than most. But user pricing, bank-account counts, overage and VAT treatment are all unstated, and the sources even disagree on tier names (Lite at $7 in E2 vs Starter at $29 in E1), so the real annual invoice isn't computable from these pages.