Enter your idea

As a small‑business owner using Xero every day, I find the platform’s budgeting and cash‑flow tools invaluable. They help me understand how many sales I need to cover costs and where I can reinvest profits.
The intuitive dashboards and reports make it easy to track recurring and discretionary spending. I believe these same capabilities could improve my household finances. Therefore, I propose an upgrade that allows users to manage personal budgets and bills alongside their business accounts within Xero, using the same login but with clear separation between business and personal finances.

Why Xero is well‑suited for this
Powerful budgeting features – Xero’s guides note that a well‑planned budget gives you the insight to eliminate wasteful spending and reach profitability faster.

The software already lets users track income, expenses, assets and liabilities and compare actual spending against a budget.

These tools could easily adapt to household finances, showing families how much income they need to cover bills, save for goals and avoid overspending.

Financial literacy benefits – Xero emphasises that setting a budget is part of becoming financially literate.

Having a single platform for both business and home finances would encourage owners to apply that literacy to their personal lives.

Unified interface – Many small‑business owners already log into Xero daily. Adding a personal tab or workspace would eliminate the need for separate apps or spreadsheets. Users could switch between entities (Business and Personal) the same way they currently switch between organisations.

Proposed features
Separate personal entity or tab – A dedicated area within the Xero dashboard for household budgeting. It would have its own chart of accounts (e.g., mortgage, groceries, utilities) and separate reporting. Users could toggle between “Business” and “Personal” views while maintaining data privacy between them.

Personal budget templates – Pre‑loaded budget categories and templates for typical household spending (housing, transportation, insurance, education, savings). Users could customise categories or import bank transactions for automated coding.

Bill management and reminders – Tools to log regular bills (rent, utilities, subscriptions) and receive reminders when due. A calendar view could display upcoming payments alongside business obligations.

Savings and goal tracking – Features to set savings goals (e.g., emergency fund, holiday) and track progress against those goals. Insightful reports showing variances between planned and actual spending would mirror Xero’s business budgeting tools.

Secure access and permissions – The ability to invite a spouse or partner to the personal entity, with separate user permissions. Personal transactions would remain hidden from business users unless explicitly shared.

Business benefits for Xero
Retention and cross‑sell – Small‑business customers who also manage their household finances on Xero are more likely to remain loyal and may adopt additional paid features (e.g., premium support, integrated banking feeds).

New market segment – There is a growing demand for personal finance tools that integrate with business software. By adding a personal budgeting module, Xero could capture users who might otherwise use separate budgeting apps.

Brand alignment – Xero’s tagline “Beautiful business” already conveys ease of use and clarity. Extending this to home budgeting aligns with Xero’s mission to simplify financial management.

Conclusion
Xero’s existing budgeting features empower small‑business owners to gain insight into their finances.By enabling a personal budgeting module within the same platform, Xero could help entrepreneurs manage both sides of their financial lives without switching apps. I respectfully request that Xero consider this upgrade to deliver even greater value to small‑business customers who also want a simple, powerful solution for their household budgeting.

It would be really useful for Xero to have a specialised software designed for home use. At the moment there is a distinct lack of good detailed/customisable software available for tracking household income, expenses, bills, etc (at least for anyone that already financially savvy).
Because of this, at the moment I'm using a spreadsheet to do it; it works, but the data entry time is significant and features like bank feeds, receipt uploads and a decent chart of accounts would make it so much easier!
The $35 per month for the Ignite package as an individual is pretty steep, especially considering you can only enter 5 bills per month (setting up recurring bills for utilities, etc to forecast expenditure will use this up pretty fast).
I'd appreciate this being considered as a future product release.

I also wholeheartedly agree that Xero could offer a personal finance package. It would also help make their customers stick with Xero.

Please Xero give it some thought.

do you have a solution for SMSF and or people managing their personal financers
don't need invoicing / payroll etc just the ability to record transactions for different parts of your personal finance.
for example
SMSF
Family Trust
Investment Property
Personal Tax (donations, subscriptions etc.)

How about a much cheaper monthly subscription fee for families wanting to keep very simple household accounts. No need to create invoices or bills. Starter is $35 per month (incl gst) - maybe $15 per month? I suspect lots of salaried people might be interested.

I run my life like a company, seems to work. Just cut down the chart of accounts to the bear minimum you need and away you go. A saving will of course be very helpful… come on Xero back office guys and gals. I am sure you could whip it up over a weekend..

I also agree wholeheartedly. The other personal finance management tools and sites are generally terrible or not available outside of the US, eg Mint.

If Xero could just simplify one of their basic packages, it would be a god-send for us single operators who don't have the time to learn or bother with yet another system.

We also want to stay loyal to Xero and their fantastic product.

It would be great to get a response from Xero if there are plans to have a version for personal use?

I agree wholeheartedly with Laura Gillan's comment of 18:45 on June 5, 2022 re: a version of Xero for personal use!

Hi,

I just wanted to write a quick message because I've used your program for a few years now and its great but I can't understand why you don't offer an accounting program for personal use?

Xero is a great program that offers very simple features to help run a business. Why not apply the same principal to personal finance. Being able to have a xero subscription that was able to connect to my personal bank accounts and could be used to reconcile all of my personal transactions would be fantastic. I could track my personal expenses like my business expenses and see everything in a profit & loss style sheet so I can easily see what money is being received and where my money is being spent.

A subscription like this would have to be affordable at something like $12 - $15 per month but it would offer drastically reduced features that aren't necessary to the average person so the cost would be in line with the product.

Think about the revenue you could create by simply modifying your existing program to work as a household budgeting tool. Right now, xero targets business owners. Imagine targeting the employees of those business owners as well...

Everyone I know still budgets and tracks their expenses in a excel document. Its a horrible experience to say the least.

Sure there are other products out there that offer these types of features but there's some problems with them too. I don't know those programs, I don't trust those programs, they're expensive and I already have a relationship with xero.

It would be an awesome subscription to have.