Software gets bought without anyone reading the plan the business is already on. That is how a five person firm ends up paying for a separate expenses app when the tier above the one they sit on already includes it.
Xero is a useful example because the plan limits are published and take two minutes to check. The same pattern runs through job management software, CRMs and payroll.
What the Xero plan limits actually are
The UK line-up is four plans. Ignite at £18 a month, Grow at £39, Comprehensive at £55 and Ultimate at £70, all excluding VAT.
Ignite is the one that catches people. Its feature list says quotes and 20 invoices, and entry of 10 bills. Grow and everything above it list invoices, quotes and bill entry with no number against them at all.
If you are on Ignite and your job count has crept up, you have already met this. It shows up as somebody raising the last few invoices of the month somewhere else, or leaving supplier bills in a pile until next month. Nobody reports that as a software problem. They report it as being busy. It is also a slow way to get paid, and the gap between finishing the job and sending the invoice is usually where the cash goes missing.
Auto-reconcile is the other one. On Ignite it is a £3.50 a month add-on. From Grow upwards it is included in the price.
Read the column to the right before you buy anything
Grow includes expense and mileage claims for one user, Comprehensive for five and Ultimate for ten, at £2.50 a month for each extra user after that. Ultimate includes time and cost tracking against projects for ten users. Payroll is charged per person on Ignite and covered for one, five or ten people as you move up.
None of that is exciting. It matters because those are the exact jobs firms go out and buy a second tool for, then spend a year moving data between the two. That is how you end up with five tools that never quite connect to each other, each bought to solve one thing.
So run the sum. What the upgrade costs against what you pay for the separate tool, including the time somebody spends keeping both of them current. Sometimes the separate tool wins, because it is better at the job. Often it does not, and nobody ever ran the comparison.
One practical note before you move. Xero’s own terms say that if you want to drop to a cheaper plan you have to wait a month after upgrading. Go up deliberately, not to try it for a fortnight.
Checking your plan limits takes fifteen minutes
Pull your last bank or card statement and list every recurring software charge, with a name against each one for who owns it. Then take the two or three biggest and open the plan comparison page. Mark what you are already entitled to and are not using, and mark any limit you are working around.
Most firms I do this with turn up the same two things. Something they pay for twice, and a cap they have been quietly working around for months. The second one is usually worth more than the first, because a limit never appears on a bill. It appears as a workaround somebody does by hand every month and has stopped mentioning.
Plan limits are not a reason to change supplier. They are a reason to find out what you have already bought.
If you want a clearer picture of where your team’s time is going and which handoffs are costing you, the free audit at digilyse.co takes about ten minutes.
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Prices quoted in this post were correct at the time of writing on 14 September 2026 and can change without notice.
Published by Digilyse. Practical systems for growing businesses.