Xero Projects as the WorkflowMax replacement: fit assessment

Xero Projects tracks time, expenses, quotes and invoices against a job, inside the ledger you already pay for. Two catches. In New Zealand it comes only with the top Ultimate plan, which covers ten project users before a per-user charge starts. And it has no job stages, no purchase orders against a project and no capacity planning, which is a lot of what a WorkflowMax firm used daily. Checked by Balu at Kove (kove.nz). The three-way comparison is the next read, or the stack cost checker if you want the running cost, then a free 30-minute call if you are deciding what to move to.

What Xero Projects does

Xero Projects is a module inside Xero rather than a separate login. Against a project record you can run a start-stop timer or key time in by hand, assign bills, spend money transactions and expense claims to the project, set standard cost and charge-out rates per staff member and per task, and pull inventory items in as project expenses. When the work is done you raise either a fixed-price invoice or a tasks-and-expenses invoice that carries the uninvoiced time and costs across, and you choose how much of that detail the client sees. A profitability view sets what the project has cost against what has been invoiced. Xero sets all of this out on its NZ project tracking page, and the invoicing behaviour is documented in Xero Central.

That is a complete job costing loop. Time in, cost in, invoice out, margin visible. For a firm that spent ten years in WorkflowMax it will feel familiar for about a week, and then the shape of the gaps starts to show.

Which plan it lives on

The first thing that catches firms out is the plan, not the feature list. Project tracking is not part of Ignite, Grow or Comprehensive. It arrives with Ultimate.

Xero Projects is sold on Xero's top NZ plan only, and that plan covers ten project users before the per-user charge starts, per Xero's NZ pricing plans page, read September 2026.

I am deliberately not printing the monthly figures here, because Xero moves plan contents and prices and a number pasted into a blog post ages badly. Read the row yourself on the day you decide. What matters is the shape: the comparison is rarely Xero Projects against a subscription. It is the Ultimate plan against your current plan plus a subscription. Firms that treat Projects as free because it is inside Xero have usually skipped that line.

The ten-user ceiling is worth reading carefully too. Everyone who records time against a job counts, not only the people running projects, so a ten-person firm with eight fee earners and two admin staff sits right on the line.

Where it fits a services firm

Xero Projects holds up well for a specific shape of business, and it is a common shape in Canterbury professional services.

• Work is billed time and materials, or as one fixed fee for the whole engagement.
• A project is one thing with one deliverable, rather than a sequence of stages costed and claimed separately.
• Under ten people record time.
• Cost is mostly labour, with a handful of supplier bills.
• The reporting question you need answered is "did this project make money", asked one project at a time.

A two to six person consultancy, design studio, surveying practice or bookkeeping firm that used maybe a third of WorkflowMax and resented paying for the other two thirds is the natural fit. Everything ends up in one system, timesheets sit next to the ledger, and there is no sync between two products to break at month end.

Where it falls short

Four gaps, in the order they tend to bite.

What you had	In Xero Projects	What it costs you
Job stages	Flat project records, no level below the project	One project per stage, so the list multiplies and the client rollup moves to a spreadsheet
Purchase orders on a job	Xero raises POs, but a PO is not a project transaction	Committed cost is invisible until the supplier bill lands
Capacity planning	Nothing. Time is recorded after the fact	No view of who is over-allocated next month
Reporting depth	Project profitability and a detailed time report	Utilisation, margin by client and WIP by stage get rebuilt outside

The purchase order gap is the one people underestimate. Xero Central's list of what can sit against a project runs to time, expenses, bills, spend money transactions and invoice line items. A purchase order is not on it, and the request to add one has been open on Xero's own community for years. If you subcontract or buy specialist input, the project reads profitable right up until three subbie invoices arrive together. That is the same timing trap I wrote about for trades in the job costing post, and it does not care what industry you are in.

Capacity planning is the other one worth naming. WorkflowMax by BlueRock has since built a drag-and-drop capacity view into its Advanced plan. Xero Projects has no equivalent, so the question of whether next month is overbooked goes back to whiteboards and a shared calendar.

Worked example: what the gaps cost a five-person practice

These figures are an assumption, not a measurement. They are the shape of the arithmetic, so put your own numbers through it.

• Five fee earners. Forty live projects at any time. Each project runs about three stages that get costed and claimed separately.
• Stages have no home in Xero Projects, so keeping stage-level margin means one project record per stage. Forty becomes 120.
• Setting up and closing off a project record takes about 6 minutes. 120 records at 6 minutes is 720 minutes, or 12 hours, and the project list turns over roughly quarterly. 12 hours four times a year is 48 hours.
• Committed cost has nowhere to sit, so 25 supplier orders a month get tracked in a side spreadsheet at 4 minutes each. That is 100 minutes a month, 20 hours a year.
• The client-level rollup across three stages gets rebuilt by hand monthly at about 3 hours a go. That is 36 hours a year.
• 48 plus 20 plus 36 is 104 hours a year, or about two hours a week.

Two hours a week is the cost of the workaround. It is small enough that plenty of firms should pay it and move on, and large enough that it beats the price of a job tool once your charge-out rate is anything above modest. The automation ROI calculator does the hours-to-dollars conversion and the payback period, and the stack cost checker compares what you would pay for the alternative.

Closing the gap without buying twice

Three options, in the order I would try them.

Change the shape of the work. Some of the stage-splitting is habit carried over from a tool that made it easy. If two of your three stages could be scoped and billed as one, do that, and Xero Projects fits without a workaround. This is free and it is the option people skip.

Buy a tool that has stages. If more than half your jobs are costed stage by stage, you are shopping for a job management tool and Xero Projects is the wrong shape. In trades, Fergus is built around exactly this, with back costing and supplier invoices split across jobs and phases, from $53 a month on its base plan. In professional services the field is Projectworks, WorkGuru and WorkflowMax by BlueRock. WorkflowMax lists at NZD $13.89, $25 and $45 a user a month across Essentials, Pro and Advanced, as checked 22 September 2026, and only the Advanced tier has the drag-and-drop capacity view.

Keep Xero Projects and bridge the one gap that costs you. Usually only one of the four gaps carries real money. A small automation that pushes committed cost against a project, or builds the client rollup on a schedule instead of by hand, closes it without a second subscription and without a migration. That is the middle path from the WorkflowMax post, and it is the cheapest fix when the rest of Xero Projects is doing its job.

When you do not need this

Plenty of firms should not move to Ultimate for Projects at all. If you invoice on delivery and record no time, two tracking categories and a well-named chart of accounts will tell you which line of work made money, at no extra cost. If you bill a fixed fee on a handful of engagements a month, a sheet with hours per client is a fair answer and takes minutes. And if the pain you feel is re-keying rather than project margin, the fix is upstream, in how to stop retyping invoices into Xero, not in a project module.

Decide it in an afternoon

Pull last year's job list out of whatever you are on now. Count how many jobs had more than one stage that was costed separately. Under about one in five, Xero Projects will hold your work and you can stop reading comparison posts. Over half, and you are shopping for a job tool. In between, run the two hours a week from the worked example through the calculator against your own rate and let the number decide.

If you want a second opinion before you commit, book a free 30-minute call. Tell me how many stages a typical job has and how you buy subcontract input, and I will work out which of the three options above fits. Often the answer is "move to Ultimate and change nothing else", and I will say so.

Common questions