Xero for Resellers in Australia — Is It Worth It?

Where Xero excels — and where it falls short for resellers

Xero is genuinely excellent for what it was designed for. Service businesses, traditional retail, and companies that issue invoices and track bills will find it comprehensive and well-designed. Bank reconciliation is smooth, the accounting is robust, and most Australian accountants know how to work with it. If you have employees and need payroll, Xero handles that well too.

For multi-platform resellers, the picture is different. Xero has no native eBay or Depop integration — you would need to either manually enter transactions or pay for a third-party connector. There is no concept of per-item cost of goods tracking: Xero treats inventory as a balance-sheet item (for businesses that manage inventory at scale), not as a per-sale cost. Setting it up correctly for a reselling business requires accounting knowledge or paying an accountant to configure it, which adds to the already significant monthly subscription cost (starting at approximately $29/month AU for the Starter plan, which also has transaction limits).

For a part-time reseller doing $20,000–$80,000 in annual sales across eBay and Depop, Xero is expensive, complex to set up, and doesn't meaningfully address the core problems. Franked is built specifically for this use case: platform imports, fee reconciliation, COGS tracking, and clean reporting — without the enterprise-level setup and cost.