Do we like them?

Do we like Xero?

Cloud accounting software for small businesses and their accountants, based in Wellington, New Zealand.

Our score: 6 out of 10. A mainstream, useful small-business tool with no big scandal in our searches. The 2023 job cuts and the thin evidence on emissions and privacy keep us from a high score.

Xero is the New Zealand cloud accounting company that small businesses and accountants use to do their books. In November 2022 it named tech executive Sukhinder Singh Cassidy as CEO, taking over from Steve Vamos in February 2023. She had worked at Google, Amazon and StubHub before that.

Her first big move was a reset. Xero announced cuts of roughly 15% of its staff in 2023, with reports putting it at 700 to 800 jobs, and it closed the Waddle app. Investors cheered and the shares jumped. The people who lost their jobs probably didn't.

In 2025 Xero agreed to buy US payments platform Melio for US$2.5 billion upfront, plus up to US$500 million in later payments. It wants a bigger share of the US market, where it makes only about 7% of its revenue. It raised A$1.85 billion from investors to help pay for it.

On climate, Xero has set targets of a 60% cut in scope 1 and 2 emissions and a 35% cut in scope 3 by FY34. A third-party tracker says its value-chain emissions have risen above the baseline. We couldn't check that against Xero's own reports. No fines or scandals turned up, so we land at a middling-to-decent 6.