Sumly vs Xero

Sumly, and the reason is narrow enough to check yourself: no plan on Xero's Global edition produces a Cyprus VAT return or a VIES statement, so a Cyprus company running Xero buys a second app to get them. That makes the real comparison €39/month for Sumly Base against USD 50/month for Xero Standard plus €19/month or more for the VAT app. Sumly also registers the company, arranges the year-end auditor and handles the Yellow Slip, which Xero doesn't sell at all. The honest split is scope: Xero is a general ledger for the world with a large ecosystem around it, Sumly is one country done completely.

No. Xero runs country editions — the UK page has its own plans in pounds, the US page its own in dollars — and Cyprus falls into the Global, Rest-of-world edition. That edition assigns a default chart of accounts rather than a Cyprus one, and its default tax rates are four generic 0% rates you edit yourself: Tax Exempt, Tax on Purchases, Tax on Sales and Sales Tax on Imports. Xero also says it's designed for reporting taxes in a single country, and offers a second organisation if you need to report to another authority.

Not on its own. The Rest-of-world edition gives you a Sales Tax report that Xero itself describes as a generic report which might contain more information than you need for your return, and its EC Sales List displays sales by customer in GBP on an accruals basis as required by HMRC — a UK report, not a Cyprus VIES statement. Xero's own help page names a free partner for the Irish VAT 3 and names nothing for Cyprus. The route on offer is generate.TAX from Xero's own App Store, which lists the Cyprus VAT Return and the EC Listing / VIES statement from €19/month. Xero also renames the tax label by country, so a Cyprus organisation's screens might read VAT while the report underneath is still the generic Sales Tax report.

Sumly Base is €39/month and does both jobs — keeps the books and prepares the Cyprus VAT return and VIES. The Xero equivalent is two subscriptions in two currencies: Standard at USD 50/month list price, plus generate.TAX from €19/month for the Cyprus part. That add-on alone is €228 a year, against €390 for a full year of everything Base does — and the Xero subscription is still to pay on top. We don't publish a combined total, because adding a dollar price to a euro price needs an exchange rate that moves. All prices read on 26 August 2026; Sumly's exclude VAT, and Xero's Global page states no VAT treatment at all.

Standard, at USD 50/month. Lite and Starter are ruled out by their own caps — 5 invoices and quotes a month on Lite, 20 invoices and 5 bills on Starter, with approving an invoice counting against the limit as well as sending it. Standard is the first tier with no cap on invoices or bills. AI document capture is no argument for going higher, because Xero includes Hubdoc on every plan including the cheapest. The one feature Xero's own plan table gates behind Premium is multi-currency: USD 75/month if you need to invoice in more than one currency and track FX gains and losses in the ledger.

Not itself. Xero's Rest-of-world help centre points customers to specialist payroll apps in the Xero App Store rather than offering built-in payroll in that region, so payroll is a third-party subscription priced by that vendor. Sumly's payroll is an add-on at €15 per employee per month, calculating Social Insurance, GHS and PAYE, and every run posts to the books.

Sumly connects over open banking to the banks Cyprus businesses actually use — Bank of Cyprus, Hellenic Bank, Alpha Bank, Eurobank, Revolut Business and Wise — always read-only, so Sumly can never move your money. Xero publishes a Rest-of-world bank feed table that names no Cypriot institution; it's overwhelmingly UK banks. Xero's own instruction is to search for your bank inside a trial organisation, and its documented fallbacks are an aggregator feed through Yodlee or importing statements by hand, so check it there before you take the published list as the whole answer.

An App Store with hundreds of integrations, unlimited users listed across its business plans, real country editions for the UK and US with local plans in local currency, and multi-currency accounting on Premium that tracks FX gains and losses in the ledger — none of which we list on ours. If one of those is the thing that decides it for you, ask us before you assume either way, and if Xero is the better fit we'd rather you knew now than three months in. What we won't concede is price: the USD 50 and USD 75 plans are dollar-denominated, and neither of them ends in a Cyprus VAT return.

Yes. Connect your bank for read-only feeds, bring your balances in through the opening-balance flow, and run one month in both before you cancel the other — the 30-day free trial covers that parallel month, so you can compare the VAT figures side by side before you pay anything. If you'd rather not do it yourself, book a free call and we'll migrate your existing books for you.