My Honest Review of Zoho Books For Accounting

My Honest Review of Zoho Books For Accounting | Accounting Smarts
Charles Hall

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Charles Hall

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June 10, 2022

Zoho provides a full suite of tools to take advantage of, including Zoho Books. The intuitive accounting software gives small business owners the support they need.

Zoho provides a full suite of tools to take advantage of, including Zoho Books. The intuitive accounting software gives small business owners the support they need.

Zoho Books is exactly the type of accounting software suitable for all types of small business owners. There are plenty of features to consider like a simple UI, advanced reporting, and payments that make it an optimal tool for your business accounting all at an affordable price to scale.

Zoho Books is consistently underrated in the small business accounting software market. They offer a free plan that provides plenty of useful features and plans to upgrade with ease to make it more manageable to scale and automate your business. All of your Zoho Books data gets stored on the cloud to give you access from anywhere in the world, making it one of the best options for a technically savvy business owner.

We are always testing new accounting software built to serve microbusinesses and larger businesses to identify the best options available. Zoho Books checks all the boxes for small business owners while maintaining affordable pricing to support the expanded features. This guide will show all of the pros and cons you face when signing up with Zoho Books.  

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What Is Zoho Books?

Zoho Books is an accounting software for small businesses. Zoho Books helps small businesses by making it easier to manage their finances.

The software is web-based, so there's nothing to install. You can create or import customers, vendors, employees, and products; manage inventory; assign and track projects and tasks; create estimates and invoices; generate financial reports; track time spent on tasks, projects, and activities for the day or week.

There is also a multi-currency feature that allows you to send and receive transactions across borders with ease.

Zoho Books can be accessed anywhere, anytime from a computer, tablet, or mobile phone. No more waiting until you get back to the office to enter your customer's address. The cloud-based platform keeps all your data secure with easy access from anywhere.

The software includes features like invoicing, expense management, and sales tax management. They also offer support for financial reporting and automated account reconciliation. You will never need to do the same task twice again.

However, unlike similar competitors, Zoho is not a traditional financial services provider. They have built an entire suite of tools beyond just bookkeeping to manage your entire business online in one place.

Zoho Books is a complete platform for accountants and small businesses to manage everything from day-to-day accounting tasks to strategic planning. You can also work with a partner in the cloud. Zoho Books is best for those looking to take advantage of their entire suite of products due to the ease of integration between each tool.  

Zoho Books Features

Zoho Books features a wide variety of tools that are designed to make day-to-day operations much easier for business owners. The software has been built with individual business needs in mind and is very versatile.

Whether you are a freelancer or run a growing business, Zoho Books has enough variety in its available plans to fit every requirement. The pricing is affordable and makes it easier for you to scale without worrying much about the cost.

Document Management

The Zoho document management platform is a place where users can manage files in a single place and share them with anyone from anywhere.

Zoho document management system offers a secure workspace where users can work on confidential information without worrying about potential security risks like data loss or theft. It is a perfect tool for industries that require strict confidentiality, such as banking, financial institutions, government agencies, etc.

You can also keep track of your file versions and revert back to any lost information. The system is also searchable to find any file easily without needing to search endlessly to find it.  

Quarterly Taxes

Inside Zoho Books, they provide a useful feature that calculates the estimated tax you owe each quarter. This means you can stay up-to-date by making payments instead of waiting to handle it all at the end of the year.

They will also log all of your tax payments made automatically to make sure if you overpay at the end of the year, you can get a refund for your overpayment.

The payment history tab is also useful to see how much you paid and when the payment was made for future reference when tax filing does occur.  

CRM Integration

Zoho provides a full range of tools including Zoho CRM. You can gain access to the CRM to integrate with Zoho Books to ensure your sales and finance teams work closely together and better track important information and data.

The benefits of this integration include more accurate information logging, analyzing key customer metrics in a single place, syncing all transactions, and automating your business workflows.

You can also increase the available time of your team by eliminating tedious tasks from their list of things to do and allowing the software to handle them with accuracy.  

Multi-Currency

If you run a business that manages international transactions, Zoho Books is an excellent choice for your accounting software. Zoho Books’ multi-currency feature takes away the complexity by converting everything into one currency, making it easier for companies to run their entire company from one place.

The Zoho Books multi-currency feature provides an easy way to exchange currencies and update currencies rates so that users can know what their international sales translate to in their home currency. It also provides automatic conversion even when the user changes currency rates. It also has a built-in tax calculator which can update on the fly with any currency changes.

Detailed Records and Reporting

It is possible to create custom reports that are tailored for your business needs. Zoho Books has a lot of useful integrations, which allows you to automatically save data to a spreadsheet or send an invoice from the app itself without any additional information required.

This program allows businesses to create and manage their financial records with ease. With Zoho Books, there is no need to manually enter transactions into the system since they can be automatically imported from bank accounts and credit cards.

Zoho even offers automated expense tracking so that you will never have to guess how much money you spend on a particular item.

Workflow Rules

This software helps you create a custom workflow to suit your specific needs. It's an automated system, so it takes care of things like sending reminders for overdue invoices, reminding you when you need to deal with certain tasks, and taking care of simple data entry tasks like invoice numbers or purchase order numbers.

Simply start by creating a rule, determining the rule trigger, setting the workflow condition, and identifying the action that will be taken. Once the workflow is triggered, your task is automated within Zoho Books and completes the job automatically.

For example, a popular automation is to sync Zoho Books and Zoho CRM and automate the way deals are categorized based on the total value of an invoice. This saves you and your sales team the tedious task of doing it by hand.

Client and Vendor Portal

Depending on the plan you use, you can gain access to both the client and vendor portal. This means that both can log into the specific portal to handle simple tasks like viewing purchase order details.

By utilizing this feature, you can eliminate the back and forth with clients and vendors and improve the workflow process. This frees up more time for your sales and customer service teams and puts your clients and vendors at ease, knowing they can access everything quickly and easily.  

Why Is Zoho Books Good For Accounting?

Zoho Books is an accounting application that includes a full suite of bookkeeping, financial management, and invoicing tools. It helps business owners or managers track expenses, manage inventory, invoice customers and employees, and generate key financial reports to track their business.

It has a user-friendly interface that can be used by people who have never worked with accounting software before. It includes modules like accounts payable, accounts receivable, etc. Zoho Books is a clear choice for small businesses because of its ease of use and affordable pricing plans.

Zoho Books offers many features that are useful to the accounting needs of any small business owner. One of the best features of Zoho Books is its integration with other Zoho services like Google Drive or QuickBooks Payroll, which allows for easy access to your day-to-day operation data. You can even stay on Zoho and use their suite of products like Zoho CRM.

Zoho also creates plans to accommodate freelancers and solopreneurs who need basic tools to track finances. There is a specific option for all types of business owners.  

Zoho Books Plans and Pricing

Zoho offers a few distinct pricing plans to fit a variety of different businesses depending on the size and requirements needed from the software. They even offer a free plan for new business owners who earn under $50K per year. Zoho maintains affordable pricing across each plan too.

Free - $0/mo

  • Includes one user license and one accountant license
  • Full client management
  • 1,000 invoices per year
  • Send and accept payments
  • Automate invoicing and payment reminders
  • Import and export bank accounts and transactions
  • Three payment gateways

Standard - $12/mo

  • Everything in the FREE plan included
  • Three user licenses
  • 5,000 invoices per year
  • Customizable dashboard
  • 11 payment gateways
  • Project and expense tracking
  • Bulk editing and updates
  • Customer user roles

Professional - $24/mo

  • Everything in the Standard plan included
  • Five user licenses
  • Retainer invoicing
  • Sales orders, purchase orders, and recurring bills
  • Multi-currency
  • Timesheet and time tracking access
  • Create workflow rules (10)
  • Email alerts
  • More advanced reporting, tracking, and projections

Premium - $36/mo

  • Everything in the Professional plan included
  • Ten user licenses
  • Custom domain
  • Create workflow rules (200)
  • Custom functions
  • Webhooks, WebTabs, and branches
  • Vendor portal
  • Twilio integration
  • A complete suite of budgeting tools

Zoho Books Pros and Cons

Pros

  • Double-entry account
  • Accounts receivables and accounts payable
  • Inventory tracking
  • Easy to integrate with banking accounts
  • Extensive time tracking tool
  • Advanced reporting is reliable
  • Affordable pricing for scale
  • Plenty of useful integrations
  • Easy to collaborate with other team members

Cons

  • The initial learning curve can be a little confusing for the more advanced plans
  • Workflow automation is limited to lower-tier plans
  • Not ideal for larger businesses
  • It needs more invoice templates and customization options
  • Customer support could be improved

Zoho Books Alternatives

Freshbooks

Freshbooks is an alternative to Zoho Books that simplifies small and medium-sized businesses’ invoicing, billing, and accounting. The company offers a free trial period, and it's affordable for businesses. This software also allows you to monitor your finances with ease.

The best thing about Freshbooks is that it has all the features that you need for invoicing, billing and accounting. They have a variety of templates for invoices, which will help you save time when creating them.

FreshBooks also integrates with many popular platforms for automating tasks like billing, invoicing, project management, expense tracking, time tracking, etc.

Depending on your specific needs, Freshbooks could be a better option for you and your business as reliable accounting software. For example, they provide more payroll functionality than Zoho Books, so if you manage multiple employees, you should consider Freshbooks.

Sage 50cloud

Sage 50cloud is an accounting software alternative to Zoho Books. The product is excellent with key features to improve your business, but it does have some shortcomings.

Sage 50cloud is built for businesses of all sizes to help them run and grow their business faster and smarter. It offers an affordable solution for small businesses who need an easy-to-use accounting suite that serves as an alternative Zoho Books.

Sage 50cloud has the advantage of being mobile, which lets users access everything at any time from anywhere with an internet connection at any time without being dependent on desktop computers.

The biggest issue with Sage 50cloud is the lack of cloud access. While you can store all key information on the cloud, the actual accounting software is not cloud-based. This means you cannot gain access from anywhere, making it difficult to use on the run.