Draft for Ciaran's read, not published

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Own Your Numbers vs Xero Analytics.

Since 2025, the analytics inside Xero has been powered by Syft, the reporting platform Xero acquired in 2024, and Syft is a genuinely excellent product: it holds a 4.81 average across 476 App Store reviews and whole accounting practices run their client reporting on it. Getting that engine bundled into your existing subscription is one of the better free lunches in UK small-business software. So this page starts from an awkward place for us: the competitor is good, and it costs you nothing extra. Here is the comparison anyway, because the two tools are doing different jobs, and I have watched owners own both and use neither properly.

What is Xero Analytics actually for?

Exploration. Trends, snapshots, projections, the shape of your business over time, sitting inside the Xero screens you already log into. When you have a question - how did last quarter really go, what is our margin doing - it is right there, and it is thorough. For an accountant or a numerate owner who enjoys their numbers, it is a genuinely good place to spend twenty minutes a month.

So why would anyone pay for a separate cash tool?

Because a dashboard you must visit has the same quiet failure mode as the spreadsheet and the bank-balance glance: it depends on you going to look, on the right week, at the right number, and knowing what to conclude. In sixteen years of taking the phone call when cash gets tight, I have never once been rung by someone short of dashboards. They were short of somebody who looked every single week and said: your cushion is 1.1 months, that is high risk, chase these two debtors, here are your five moves.

That is the whole product. Cash, net cash, cushion in months, a risk rating, named debtors, five actions, pushed to your WhatsApp or inbox every Monday, read in a minute, read-only from your Xero. Fast, clear and opinionated on purpose. No screens to learn, nothing to explore, and deliberately so. It is built for the owner who will not go looking - which, no offence intended, is most owners in most months, because they are busy running the business.

When do you need both? Or neither?

• Both: you (or your accountant) want depth on demand AND a weekly verdict that arrives on its own. They do not overlap; one is the library, the other is the alarm.
• Just Xero Analytics: you genuinely open it every week, you can compute your own cushion, and you act on what you see. Free beats paid when the free one gets used.
• Just OYN: you want the verdict and the chase list without the exploring. Fine too - Analytics is still sitting there, free, whenever a question comes up.
• Neither: see the honest case for doing nothing. It exists, for one kind of business.

If you are the accountant, bookkeeper or fractional FD

Analytics gives your clients a place to look; the briefing makes sure somebody does. Connect each client read-only under one account: every client's cushion and risk rating in one Monday scan, briefings you can share without granting anyone write access, and the monthly pack stays yours. The practice workflow is its own page.