Telleroo vs Crezco vs Apron

In the past year or so a suite of Xero Add-ons have appeared to save time with making payments. We explore their respective merits.

general

All three platforms have a basic time saving premise, namely that instead of logging on to your bank to pay bills or payroll payment by payment, you select which payments to make on their platform and make them in one go.

For anyone with a long list of payroll or suppliers to pay, this can save quite a bit of time with the added benefit that typos will be eliminated.

All three platforms understand that authorisations for payments is an important part of many pay runs and therefore all three have built in a streamlined authorisation process from the business owner or treasurer.

TELLEROO

Functionality

One of Telleroo’s strong points is that the integration works two ways, not only do the bills appear on the platform to be paid, but once paid the payments appear on Xero. The bill now no longer appears on Xero as awaiting payment but as having been paid and the Xero reconciliation is one click for all the bill / payroll payments having been made. This is exciting for bookkeepers though perhaps less so for the business owner.

On the downside, the platform works on the basis of a digital wallet. The business transfers money to the Telleroo account and Telleroo then processes the payments from the money it now holds. This means that two transactions need to be actioned: the transfer of cash to Telleroo and the pay run from Telleroo. If there are not sufficient funds on Telleroo the transfer needs to be done in advance which can slow down the process.

Price

Prices start at £35/month which pays for 50 payments per month.

CREZCO

Functionality

Where Telleroo is firmly a payables platform, Crezco has extended its functionality to receiving payments. However as the focus of this blog is on making payments we will limit ourselves to that side.

Where Telleroo relies on a digital wallet, Crezco relies on Open Banking. The pay run is set up on Crezco which then uses an integration with the bank to pay each bill or payroll item individually. This avoids the problem of keeping a wallet topped up but unfortunately at time of writing it is not available with all banks.

Obviously there is an authorisation process that goes with the integration of your bank to the platform.

Price

Although a free version exists it does not allow for bulk payments so likely users will start on a £20/month package that allows up to 250 bulk payments per month.

APRON

Functionality

What we like most about Apron is that it has eliminated the digital wallet that potentially slows down Telleroo without requiring integration to Open Banking with the problems that we ran into with some banks. In Apron the transfer to the platform that has to be done manually in Telleroo is wrapped up in the payrun.

The payrun can now be done in one go transaction as expected.

On the downside the integration to Xero is still one way and although a reference allows for easy reconciliation, the bookkeeper is left to match bills to one Apron payment.

Price

A free version allows users to bulk pay employee wages. As this will be the main functionality for many users this is a great option. £29/month allows for up to 50 bills suppliers to be paid.

conclusion

As a practice we ended up choosing Apron as the most elegant and user friendly solution. We also believe its free subscription for payroll will help a lot of clients at no cost.