Tired of numerous sheets with endless rows and columns? Are you looking for an easy yet advanced accounting solution to help you improve your business bookkeeping? In our QuickBooks review, we will analyze the popular accounting solution for small to midsize businesses as QuickBooks Online and give you an unbiased professional opinion on whether it is worth your money.
What is QuickBooks Accounting?
QuickBooks Online is a web-based accounting solution with impressive features, such as advanced reporting, fully customizable invoices, great inventory management, multicurrency support, and more than 650 integration options. Besides, users choose it for its scalability, excellent usability, and extensibility. On the top, the cloud-based version of the software has several additional features like split transactions, scheduled invoices, automatic sales receipts, and others.
Who is QuickBooks for?
QuickBooks Online software would fit many small and medium businesses due to its excellence in such must-have features as paying bills, managing inventories, invoicing customers, generating reports, working with taxes, etc. Overall, it is an optimal variant for:
- Small Businesses: Companies choose QuickBooks Online if they need basic accounting features and great customization options to meet any potential business need.
- Self-employed: If you need no more than basic accounting, QuickBooks is the right choice.
- Invoicing Customers: QuickBooks Online has a fully customizable invoicing system plus the automatic sales tax calculation applied to the invoices.
- eCommerce: QuickBooks Online supports lots of eCommerce integration options for retailers.
- Mobile Accounting: QuickBooks Online has one of the best mobile apps on the market with all the features you can find in the desktop version, plus great usability.
- Inventory Management Companies: Such QuickBooks features as class and location tracking let businesses easily calculate the net profit according to the property or location type.
Why Do Companies Use QuickBooks?
- Save time on paperwork with QuickBooks as it can automatically handle basic accounting tasks.
- Easily customize and generate your reports to see the whole picture of your finances within one accounting software.
- Create a projected balance sheet and profit, loss, and cash flow statements using the format suggested by the US Small Business Administration.
- Do you have a clear picture of what your accounting system should look like? QuickBooks Online can cater to those needs with high customizability. Any sector, such as healthcare, non-profit, contractors, or other small business, would benefit from using it.
- QuickBooks gives you peace of mind thanks to its extreme stability and reliability.
- Get payment quickly just by sending an email, statement, or invoice. QuickBooks Online Billing feature allows your customers to pay directly with their credit card or a bank account transfer. Besides, it has multicurrency support.
- QuickBooks Merchant Account Service allows you to accept credit cards without risks or re-key info. It supports Visa, American Express, and MasterCard.
- With QuickBooks, you can forget about paper checks and pay your bills directly in the program. You can also generate and download your monthly statement for bank reconciliation.
QuickBooks Review: Functionality to Run Finances Smoothly
Payroll Management
QuickBooks Online doesn’t have a payroll feature. However, you can buy QuickBooks Payroll, an additional service by Intuit that allows automation of your tax filing and payments.
Customization
Quickbooks Online gives you the ability to customize your invoices, estimates, and sales receipts. Moreover, change the layout of your sales forms to improve business communication. You need no tech skills to set up customization.
Inventory Management
QuickBooks Online has a basic inventory list that you can use for adding various products and services. However, when you opt for more advanced plans, you automatically get more advanced features like default sales prices, creation of item bundles, inventory tracking, setting default sales prices, setting reorder points, viewing stock levels, etc.
Order Management
Quickbooks Online has no default sales order feature to deal with sales and manufacturing orders. If you need to manage your orders, you need to search for a reliable integration or add-on.
Invoices & Estimates
QuickBooks Online is known for its advanced invoicing and accounting features with numerous templates, automations, and customization options. You can easily generate estimates, mail them to your customers, and even convert your estimates to invoices. Here are a bunch of invoicing features you get:
- six invoice templates
- rich invoice customization feature to change various invoice elements like header and footer, logo, or color scheme
- invoice notification and reminders
- auto-scheduling
- recurring and batch invoices
- tracking of the invoices
- multilingual invoicing (English, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Chinese, and Italian support)
- automated tasks
- comfy client portal
Bookkeeping
Manage and track your finances as well as balance the books. Here, you can get such features as:
- easy bank reconciliation
- expense tracking
- categorization of all your expenses
- transaction matching
- creation of custom bank rules
- customization of your charts and accounts
- journal entries
- import of your bank statements manually or automatically, and many more
Contact Management
Add, edit, or delete your contacts such as customers and vendors. Besides, its useful contact management features let you:
- add the needed contact info (name, address, email, telephone number, website, and many more)
- add your own notes or attachments
- add tax rates and select languages
- add your terms and payment methods
Time Tracking
The feature is available in paid pricing plans and you can:
- track all your one-time activities
- add billable/unbillable time to the needed projects
- create different timesheets
Project Management
QuickBooks online allows you to:
- add your billable/unbillable time and expenses
- generate project invoices
- take advantage of progress invoicing
Reporting & Budgeting
With QuickBooks Online, you get various reporting options — more advanced depending on the chosen paid pricing plan. With Plus and Advanced plans, you also get a budgeting management feature. Overall, you get such features as
- creating and managing multiple budgets (including monthly, quarterly, and annually ones)
- ability to use your former data to generate a new budget
- for more than 80 different reports
Tax Support
No matter what pricing plan you choose, each has a tax support feature, totally free if you do not use e-file. The tax support allows you to:
- generate and print your 1099 MISCs and W-2s
- assign sales taxes to your customers
- track mileage
QuickBooks Pricing: How Much Will It Cost You?
QuickBooks Online has several pricing plans for your convenience:
| Simple Start | Essentials | Plus | Advanced | |
| Cost | $25/month | $50/month | $80/month | $180/month |
| Number of users | 1 | up to 3 | up to 5 | up to 25 |
| Features | Basic accounting | Everything from Simple Start + time tracking | Everything from Essentials + inventory and project management | Everything from Plus + advanced reporting |
QuickBooks Online has a 30-day free trial period for three of its advanced plans (Essential, Plus, and Advanced), a free test drive for its Plus plan, and a free demo for the Advanced pricing plan. Besides, the company often offers some discounts for new users, so you can try it out even cheaper.
Extra Costs
There are some extra costs you have to spend to get additional features in QuickBooks Online:
- Tax Filing — $14.99
- Payroll — $45 per month and $4 for each user (price for the cheapest Core plan out of three available)
- Invoice Template — $4.99
- Payments — 2,4% + $0.25 per each of your transactions
What Are Pros and Cons of QuickBooks?
QuickBooks Online Advantages
- Ease of Use: QuickBooks Online has a very intuitive and easy-to-use interface and sleek design. It is also user-friendly, and easier to navigate than its desktop version. Due to its cloud-based nature, you get increased mobility and its multiple automation options help you save more time.
- Flexibility: QuickBooks Online grows alongside your business. You can easily upgrade your account and get more features or purchase extra services and add-ons like Payroll, Point of Sale, etc.
- Easy Work with Accountants: with QuickBooks Online, you can easily invite your accountant to the app via mail; it is free. There are numerous specialists worldwide who have mastered QuickBooks, and you can even use the ProAdvisor to find an accountant with QuickBook certification.
QuickBooks Online Disadvantages
- Expensive Solution: QuickBooks Online is quite a costly solution; the cheapest pricing plan costs $25 per month for only one user. Besides, this plan doesn’t have time tracking, inventory, or billing features. If you need to get these features, opt for more advanced plans costing you $50-180 per month. Compared to other accounting software, you can find much cheaper options on the market. For example, the cost of FreshBooks starts at $15 per month, and Xero charges $12.
- High Learning Curve: If you have some basic accounting background, mastering QuickBooks Online will be a piece of cake for you. If not, it may take a while to get used to and master this cloud-based software. The more you know, the more functionality you can get from QuickBooks.
- Limited in features: QuickBooks Online doesn’t have as many features as its advanced desktop version. So make sure to compare both variants when opting for a new accounting system.
QuickBooks Online Review of Add-ons and Customization Capabilities
When you opt for QuickBooks Online, you get more than 650 integrations to help you upgrade your accounting system. This includes about 25 various payment options.
If you decide to buy the QuickBooks Advanced pricing plan, you will get Fathom integration completely free of charge. Besides, you can always upgrade QuickBooks yourself as it has an API ready for any developer to work on.
Is QuickBooks Secure?
Intuit takes security very seriously by employing various security measures like
- Testing the routing
- 128-bit SSL data security protocol
- Multifactor authentication process
- Multiple physical safeguards at the data center
What are QuickBooks Customer Support and Training Available?
Customers of QuickBooks Online have numerous ways to get help. You can reach out to the support agents via phone, email, live chat, or social media. Or find answers in Help Center, Knowledge Base, Company Blog, or watch video tutorials. You can also get a dedicated support specialist if you opt for an Advanced plan.
The quality of the QuickBooks customer service you get is quite controversial as many customers state they received the help promptly while others complain they didn't receive the answer.
QuickBooks Accounting Alternatives
FreshBooks
FreshBooks offers its customers services starting at $15 per month. It is a great option for freelancers, self-employed, or contractors with such features as
- self-service
- unlimited number of estimates
- invoices and quotes
- time-tracking
- expenses
These functions are available even in the cheapest pricing plan. However, when you choose FreshBooks, you get a limitation of up to 50 billable customers (for the Plus plan). If you need more, you have to spend more money (about $10 per user).
Xero
Xero stands out as the feature-rich accounting software. Its cheap pricing plans offer an unlimited number of users and inventory management just for $12 per month. Besides, Xero has round-the-clock support, a very intuitive interface, and an easy setup. As for disadvantages, the accounting system includes:
- limitations (you can send 20 invoices and quotes and only 5 bills when using the Early plan)
- time tracking only in the Advanced plan
- no available phone support
Wave
Wave is a free accounting solution with numerous add-ons that would help you upgrade the system even more. It offers its users:
- unlimited invoices
- acceptance of credit cards and ACH payments
- the ability to set up recurring bills
- expense and income tracking
- connection to your credit cards and account users
However, Wave lacks some competitors' features like time tracking and project profitability. Besides, it also doesn’t have phone support; only live chat is available now.
Does QuickBooks Online Meet Your Needs?
QuickBooks Online is great accounting software for small companies with potential scalability in mind. It has a huge list of integrations and a large feature selection, a few of which are unique (like Live Bookkeeping and Capital built-in landing).
However, many customers complain about poor QuickBooks customer service and the software interface as it is sometimes difficult to find specific features. Besides, QuickBooks Online is quite expensive, if you decide to scale your software over time.
Overall, the QuickBooks Online accounting solution will definitely meet the needs of small to medium businesses. It also allows you to get advanced features by opting for numerous add-ons or using one of the best accounting mobile apps. If you can’t decide yet, try a free 30-day trial period. Or if you’ve made up your mind, migrate to QuickBooks Online with ease.
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