Best Xero add-ons for NZ trades in 2026

Most NZ trade businesses need one Xero add-on, not six, and it is a job management tool that carries the quote through to the invoice. Tradify from $48 a user, Fergus from $53 a plan, ServiceM8 from $29 by job volume, NextMinute at $199 for a crew of three to nine. Receipt capture is already included in your Xero plan.

What does my plan already include?

Before you buy anything, two things are sitting inside the Xero subscription you already pay for, and both get missed.

Receipt and bill capture is one. Hubdoc comes with the Xero Ignite, Grow, Comprehensive and Ultimate plans in New Zealand at no extra cost, per Xero's own document capture page. Photograph a docket, email a supplier invoice in, and the supplier, date and total come back out coded and ready to publish with the original attached. If you are paying a separate receipt app while Hubdoc sits switched off, you are paying twice. The full comparison with the paid alternative is in Hubdoc versus Dext versus typing it in.

Bank rules, repeating invoices and invoice reminders are the other. They are in every plan, they take an afternoon to configure, and between them they cover a decent chunk of what people buy their first add-on to solve. I have written up the menu paths in the Xero features nobody switches on. Do that before you shop, because it changes what you are shopping for.

Which add-on do most crews need?

The problem worth spending money on is the double entry: the quote built in one place and then typed again into Xero as an invoice. A job management tool with a Xero sync kills that, and it brings the job card, the timesheet and the job costing with it. Four tools cover almost all of the NZ market, and they differ more in how they charge than in what they do.

Tool	What it adds to Xero	How it charges	Suits
Tradify	Quotes, job cards, timesheets, scheduling, job costing built into the core plan, close to real-time two-way Xero sync	Per user, from $48 a month on Lite, $52 on Pro, $62 on Plus	Small crews that want the bill to track head count, not job count
Fergus	Same core, plus back costing, supplier invoices split across jobs and phases, and over 100 supplier price books	Per plan, from $53 a month, Professional from $75, timesheet-only seats from $26 each	Crews mostly on the tools, where cheap timesheet seats cut the bill
ServiceM8	Dispatch, field app, forms, job history, with job costing as a paid add-on	By monthly job volume with unlimited logins: $29, $79, $149, $349, then 20c a job over the top tier	High job counts and small head counts, service and call-out work
NextMinute	Full feature set on every band, unlimited projects, setup and training included	Crew bands: $199 a month for three to nine people, from $349 for ten to fourteen	Established crews of five or more, where the band splits well per head
simPRO	Asset registers, maintenance planning, project depth beyond the other four	Quote only. No published price anywhere	Contracting businesses past the point where the other four cope

Every figure above is checked on this site: Tradify and Fergus as at August 2026, ServiceM8 and NextMinute as at July 2026, and simPRO confirmed as publishing no price at all. Vendors move prices, so confirm yours at checkout.

What does a software stack for four people cost?

A four-person Christchurch plumbing outfit. Three on the tools, one in the office. About 140 completed jobs a month, materials bought on a merchant account, Xero already paid for. Here is the same crew priced four ways.

• Tradify Lite: four seats at $48 is $192 a month. Times 12 is $2,304 a year.
• Fergus: one Basic plan at $53 plus three timesheet-only seats at $26 is $53 plus $78, so $131 a month. Times 12 is $1,572 a year.
• ServiceM8: 140 jobs sits inside the Growing tier at $79 a month, which covers 150. Times 12 is $948 a year, with the caveat that one busy month at 160 jobs pushes you to $149.
• NextMinute: the three-to-nine band at $199 a month is $2,388 a year, with setup, training and support inside that number.
• Receipt capture: Hubdoc, already in the Xero plan. Nothing.

For a four-person crew running about 140 jobs a month, the four NZ job tools span $948 to $2,388 a year, a $1,440 spread for the same four people on prices verified here in July and August 2026.

That spread is the whole point. There is no best tool in that table, only a best match between how you are charged and how you work. The plumbing outfit above is a lot of people and not many jobs per head, so the per-plan and per-volume models win. Flip it to a two-person appliance repair business clearing 400 quick jobs a month and ServiceM8's tier maths turns against them, which is worked through in the ServiceM8 pricing post. Put your own crew size and job count into the stack cost checker and it prices all four side by side.

Which add-ons were left out, and why?

This list is short on purpose. The Xero App Store lists hundreds of add-ons and I have price-checked five of them for New Zealand, so those five are what you get. A roundup that lists twenty tools with prices lifted from an overseas page is a worse product than a short list you can trust.

Paid receipt capture is the one deliberate omission from the table. Dext is a real product doing real work, but Hubdoc is already in your plan, so Dext has to beat free before it earns a line on your card. That case exists and it is narrow, and I have set it out in the Hubdoc and Dext comparison rather than pretending it is a default buy.

Xero Projects is the other absence worth naming. It is a module inside Xero rather than an add-on, it sits on the top NZ plan only, and it is built for professional services rather than for a trade crew running staged jobs. If you are a services firm reading this by mistake, I have assessed it in Xero Projects as the WorkflowMax replacement.

Inventory apps, payroll add-ons and expense-claim tools are all outside what I have verified for NZ trades pricing. When I check one, it goes in the price index and then it goes here.

When do I not need an add-on?

A sole trader doing fewer than about fifteen invoices a month does not need any of this. Xero on its own quotes, invoices, chases and reconciles, and a phone camera plus Hubdoc handles the dockets. At that volume the subscription buys back minutes and costs hundreds of dollars a year, which is the wrong way round.

The same goes if you have bought a job tool and never configured it. Adding a second app on top of an unconfigured first one is a way of paying money to avoid an afternoon of setup. Turn on the Xero sync, set the job statuses to match how you work, and see what is left. What remains is either a real gap or a habit, and only one of those is worth buying software for.

And if your problem is that the numbers arrive weeks late rather than that they are typed twice, no add-on fixes it. That is a timing problem, covered in the job costing post.

How do I pick an add-on in one sitting?

Count last month's completed jobs. Count how many people need a full seat versus a timesheet. Run both numbers through the stack cost checker, take the cheapest two on a 14-day trial, and put a real week through each with the Xero sync switched on. The wider feature comparison, if you want it before you trial, is in the four-way NZ roundup.

If you would rather have someone else do the arithmetic, book a free 30-minute call. Bring your crew size and last month's job count and the shortlist usually falls out in ten minutes. If the answer is that you already own everything you need, that is what I will tell you.

Common questions