QuickBooks offers online chat and phone customer support 6am – 6pm PST during the week, and 6am – 3pm on Saturdays. Customer support is fairly responsive, although a few online have complained about reaching them. Established in 2000, QuickBooks Pro is a desktop-based product that is more mature than its web-based sibling. However, QuickBooks Online is quickly catching up to Pro in terms of users and functionality.
What is QuickBooks Online good for?
About Quickbooks Online
Quickbooks Online is a web-based accounting software that controls all aspects of the financial side of the business. The software can be used in multiple areas such as bookkeeping, payroll, invoice management, bank reconciliation, expense tracking, financial reporting, tax management, and more.
From an accountant perspective, I HATE auto-add, auto-fill, auto-everything. When the auto-add feature is turned on in the bank feed, it can create a disaster. Auto-suggesting https://accounting-services.net/how-to-calculate-overhead-using-abc/ categorizations is fine, but a human needs to lay eyes on the transactions to make sure they are going to the right payee, right category, right class.
Software Advice
This is important to note since you’ll want to make sure that it is capable of doing what you need in a manner that you understand and can digest. The only reason I went with Quickbooks online is because they don’t offer a desktop version for MAC in Canada. They gave me 60% off of their montly price for the first year so I was paying $12 per month. Now they want me to pay $27 per month plus tax so $31 per month for another year. They said I would need to keep the solution for a full year at that price before they could consider a discount again and I feel like they are holding me hostage. Quickbooks online doesn’t fit our needs on the invoicing because you can’t customize invoices.
- When the auto-add feature is turned on in the bank feed, it can create a disaster.
- QuickBooks Online offers several ways to reach a QuickBooks support representative, including phone and chat.
- QuickBooks Online has many more features than those mentioned above, so we’ll give a quick breakdown of the most crucial of these features.
- The software must have features that allow users to set sales tax rates, apply them to invoices, and enable users to pay sales tax liability.
- QuickBooks Online was created to serve non-accountants and novice bookkeepers, and its user interface and navigation tools contribute to its ease of use.
- From here, you can enter the fiscal year and tax year of your company, choose the accounting method, and set up categories to track your income and expenses.
As an accountant user, I love the diagnostics available to us, and other tools available to help the regular user. However, QuickBooks’ monthly subscription fees might prove cost-prohibitive to smaller companies. Because the platform is more of a generalized accounting solution, we don’t recommend it for companies needing industry-specific features.
Mobile App (3.50 /
QuickBooks Online is a scalable application with plans available for everyone from the solo freelancer to the thriving small business owner. Another thing I love about QuickBooks Online is the ability to track both employees and contractors, making it a breeze to prepare those 1099s at year’s end. The Workers screen lets you track information on all of your employees, but you’ll have to add either Self-Service Payroll or Full Service Payroll from Intuit to pay your employees. QuickBooks Online features vary from plan to plan, with many of the deluxe features reserved for the higher-priced plans.
If you’re having trouble keeping up with your expenses and categorizing them, you can hire a live bookkeeper who will work with your business to reconcile transactions and manage your expenses. As mentioned above, you can accept credit card payments or bank transfers. You can also create a unique payment link, which is a convenient way to bill customers through any digital channel.
Add-Ons
These customer pages aren’t as detailed as what you get in Zoho Books, but they cover much more than the basics. QuickBooks offers a separate product — QuickBooks Self-Employed — designed for freelancers and independent contractors, with plans starting at $15 per month. Includes project tracking tools in higher tier plans; has transaction tracking tags; lacks industry-specific reports; users with multiple businesses must pay for separate subscriptions. Has robust reporting tools and report customization options, invoicing for an unlimited amount of clients, inventory tracking in higher tier plans, plus a capable mobile app.
The Essentials Plan, which supports three users, is $27.50 for three months, then $55/month. The Plus plan, supporting up to five users, is $42.50/month for three months, and then doubles to $85/month. The Advanced plan, which can support up to 25 users, runs $100/month, rising to $200/month after three months.
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Later, when reconciling your books, you’ll be able to review these transactions in the For Review tab within the Banking menu. A popular add-on is the payroll feature where you can run payroll and access benefits in one convenient place. It does cost more to access this, which is approximately $22.50 more per month plus $5 per employee, per month.
- Most of the positive QuickBooks Online reviews are attributed to the program’s robust feature set and ease of use.
- If your accountant will be primarily using the software, this shouldn’t be an issue, but for freelancers or very small businesses, this might be a hindrance.
- There are several entries here that take you to various sections of the site, like Customers, Invoices, Estimates, and Products & services.
- Moving up to the Essentials Plan, you’ll pay $27.50 per month for the first three months, $45 per month.
- Users without accounting knowledge may need several weeks or months to achieve proficiency in QuickBooks.
While QuickBooks Online is very popular among business owners, some have problems with the system. Problems stem from the complexity of making simple fixes, such as miscategorizations or duplicate entries. Support is limited, so users are left reading help articles rather than getting a live person to help. It’s a simple accounting program that integrates with a lot of other programs. Everything has to be done manually for reporting and it doesn’t provide good enough tracking on how to gather data for reports.
However, small businesses might find the monthly subscription fees too expensive. Payroll integration only adds to these costs, starting at $45 monthly at $5 per employee. Finally, subscription plans restrict companies to a limited number of concurrent users, maxing out at 25, which some organizations might find too constricting. All system navigation takes place from the Dashboard, Quickbooks Online Accounting Software Review which also offers a good summary of your business, like paid and unpaid invoices, expenses, profit and loss for the month, and a sales graph. The upper-right corner displays current bank balances, and you can add your business logo to the screen if desired. The Sales Tax Center in QuickBooks Online lets you track the appropriate sales tax amounts for all purchases made.
What are the disadvantages of QuickBooks?
- Lack of industry and business-specific features (such as lot tracking, eCommerce and barcode scanning)
- Lack of key reports outside of accounting.
- Instability/system crashes.
- Lack of direct professional support.
- File-size issues/limitations on number of transactions.
- Limitations on the number of users.