Xero is an extremely useful piece of software that has become popular for many good reasons. Smaller and medium-sized businesses appreciate, for example, the way that Xero’s cloud-based delivery model frees them from needing to set up, maintain, and update software on site. Likewise does Xero’s generally accommodating nature mean that it is normally fairly easy to hit the ground running. With adapters for many common data sources and the like, Xero does a good job of providing the kind of functionality that the average user will need the most.

On the other hand, what can look like a high level of flexibility at first sometimes breaks down upon closer inspection. Because Xero has been designed to appeal to the widest possible market, those with particular needs sometimes get short shrift. While Xero will often have an answer that will satisfy a great many users of a particular service, it will sometimes have little to offer to a fair number of them.

This can be seen fairly easy with regard to Stripe. Just like Xero, the Stripe payment processing platform has become a mainstay for businesses on the smaller end of the scale. While some of these find their union a satisfying one, others discover that it can be more difficult to reconcile Stripe in Xero than might be hoped.

That is at least the case out of the box. Fortunately, there are third-party answers to this dilemma that can make things a lot more satisfying. One common complaint regarding how Xero interfaces with Stripe by default, for instance, it that it lumps payments together in ways that can interfere with the processing of refunds or with reporting goals.

While some users will not see this as an issue, this can be nearly a show-stopper for others. Even when that turns out to be the case, though, the use of a third-party plugin can improve the situation greatly. In fact, at least one product of this kind turns a Stripe feed into exactly the kind of detailed stream that most bank accounts present as in Xero already. Simply looking for and making use of the available answers can therefore be all that it will take to make Xero even more rewarding to rely upon.