QuickBooks Online Review: Pros, Cons, Alternatives

It is important to pick the right version for you so that you have access to the appropriate features you will need. QBO is ideal for solopreneurs, freelancers, and mid-to-large-sized businesses with employees and 1099 contractors. 1099 contractors are also known as independent contractors, who you may hire to provide services for your business.

While QuickBooks Online is designed for non-accountants, new users will likely have questions. Online help files have improved over the last year, but they’re still not as good as Xero’s, for example. Some questions take you directly to content created by Intuit employees, and other times you’re routed to the community Q&A section or to an answer that pertains to the desktop version of QuickBooks. The $50-per-month Essentials plan does everything Simple Start does and adds bill management, support for up to three users, and time tracking. Practice exercises are included at the end of every section in the first ten chapters.

Sage 50cloud Accounting

If you purchase computers, printers, or other equipment for your business, these items are called fixed assets. When you record these items in QuickBooks, they will be categorized as fixed assets. The majority of the money that flows out of a business is used to pay for business expenses.

Web-based community support and help via chat or email are helpful, but the site is complex enough that more targeted online support is warranted. Some users may need to get personal support from an accountant or one of QuickBooks’ certified ProAdvisors, both of which involve additional fees, as they would with any accounting application. Merchant Maverick’s ratings are editorial in nature, and are not aggregated from user reviews. Each staff reviewer at Merchant Maverick is a subject matter expert with experience researching, testing, and evaluating small business software and services.

QBO New FEatures and innovations timeline

To simulate the creation of transactions that need modification, click add on the right-hand side for the top four items. With the ebook-only version, you’ll get full access in a matter of minutes.

Over the years, the authors added hours of lessons from the Simon Sez IT courses as the software released newer versions. It is ideal for users who transitioned from an older version to the more current versions. QuickBooks can sync to all your business bank accounts and credit cards. Having all your accounts linked in a single space allows for quick reconciling of invoices, payments, bank statements, and transfers. It supports up to 25 users and includes numerous advanced features, such as enhanced analysis and support, and automated workflows. The Advanced plan is geared toward larger businesses that might need to consider midrange accounting solutions. Intuit’s QuickBooks family of accounting websites and software remains our first choice for businesses trying to find the best way to automate their accounting.

QuickBooks Online Advanced

Besides this overview, you can see lists of related transactions and time activities, as well as project reports. The navigation system that QuickBooks Online Plus employs rarely—if ever—causes confusion. Once you click on a link in the navigation bar, you usually find another series of navigation links that divide that area’s functions into subsets of tools and data. The first one is a sales overview that displays deposit and invoice charts and miscellaneous links to additional setup tasks, as well as a few shortcuts to transaction screens.

Run enhanced reports — such as sales, accounts receivable and accounts payable reports. The main dashboard will give an overview of your QuickBooks account, showing your cash flow, invoices, expenses, sales and more. After you sign up for QuickBooks Online, you’ll be able to log in to your account and access the main dashboard view. If you’re moving to QuickBooks from another accounting software, you can import your existing files to your new account. We believe everyone should be able to make financial decisions with confidence.

More options

Competitors like Xero and FreshBooks offer basic inventory tracking for less, but it isn’t as advanced. Let’s say a T-shirt owner goes out and purchases $100 in T-shirts from a supplier. He doesn’t pay for the T-shirts right away, but the supplier will send him a bill later on. For this transaction, inventory increases by $100 and liabilities increase by $100.

Despite the platform’s ubiquity, however, many business owners remain uncertain about the differences between QuickBooks Desktop and QuickBooks Online. Here, we’ll detail everything you should know about the two versions, including their core functions, pricing tiers, hosting location and extra features. Cindy McGuckin is an IT trainer with over 20 years of experience. Cindy is a Microsoft Office and QuickBooks expert and her online courses have received hundreds of 5-star reviews.

The site suggests categories automatically, and it’s better than it used to be. You can also mark transactions as billable to a customer, add attachments, create a rule, and so forth. Beyond their contact information fields, customer record templates contain tabbed sections for notes, tax information, payment and billing preferences, attachments, and custom fields. Intuit added a new language tab a couple of years ago, so you can now create and send sales forms in any of six languages. Once you complete a record, the site displays this information and more in a kind of homepage for each customer. You can switch between an interactive transaction list , related projects, customer details, and late fees. These customer pages aren’t as detailed as what you get in Zoho Books, but they cover much more than the basics.

Wave is easy to use, offers unlimited invoicing, income and expense tracking, bank and credit card connections, as well as account users. It also allows you to accept credit card and ACH payments and set up recurring billing. 3.6 million active users, making them the most popular business accounting software in the world. QuickBooks Online includes a default chart of accounts that is automatically installed during the initial setup process, although it can be customized to better suit the needs of a business. The application includes both AP and AR functionality, with users able to import both vendor and customer data into QuickBooks Online from other applications.

Mobile app

Other common accounting tasks in QuickBooks Online include the ability to create a new bill, create an expense, or process a vendor payment. Customer options are similar, https://quickbooks-payroll.org/ with the option to create an estimate which can later be converted to an invoice. Bills can be scheduled to be paid on a specific date or paid immediately upon receipt.

• After you sign up for QuickBooks Online, you’ll be able to log in to your account and access the main dashboard view.
• If you’re a new user, you may be eligible for a promotion that Intuit runs, which gives you 50 percent off these prices for three months.
• The majority of your expenses are paid via online banking or wire transfer, so you don’t need to write or print checks to pay bills.
• We’ve evolved our previous Full Service offering to now charge for both cleanup work upfront, as well as deliver that cleanup within a month’s time.
• Instructors You must have an instructor account and submit a request to access instructor materials for this book.
• This QuickBooks online course is for students who want to learn QuickBooks Online to apply on their business or to practice it as a career.

QuickBooks Online has converted this opening screen into two tabbed pages. The first tab is labeled Get Things Done and it shows a series of graphical flow charts that illustrate a typical workflow for a small business. It’s divided into Money in, Money out, and Accounting and reports. When you click on Create estimates, for example, you’re taken to the estimate form. I suppose this interactive page might be helpful for beginners, but the second tab, Business overview, is far more helpful. You can now use the Reconciliation Utility to reconcile you QuickBooks Online transaction data with transactions posted in AvaTax.

Xero ($12–$65 per month), which rivals Intuit QuickBooks Online in some areas, doesn’t have as good a user experience, and it has a more daunting learning curve. Neither In Quickbooks Online 2020 can compete with the top-rated applications in terms of features and flexibility, but a small, simple business might find everything it needs there using one of them.

We then talk you through how to edit this information using the My Company feature. We’ve taken a big piece of our QuickBooks Pro 2020 course and made it available as a free QuickBooks tutorial below. No sign-up, no payment, just 4 hours of quality QuickBooks training. Intuit provides a convenient QuickBooks New Features and Innovations timeline showing when new features and innovations were issued for both QuickBooks Online and QuickBooks Online Accountant. Alternatively, if you are not on the Checking Account screen, we can navigate to the Checking Account register by looking to the left-hand navigation menu, hovering Account, and then clicking Chart of Accounts. Once we’re in the chart of accounts, we’ll see the checking Account and view register button.

Deposit times may vary for other payment methods, such as ACH bank transfers, third-party delays, and risk reviews. Select any of your custom fields across customers, vendors, sales forms, PO, and other expenses. QuickBooks® is fast and easy; just forward them to , but what if you’re working with multiple companies? That’s when things can get a bit trickier, and you certainly don’t want to risk sending the wrong bill to the wrong company. To avoid that sort of snafu, you can now create one unique customizable email address per company, so you can make sure every receipt and bill gets forwarded to the right place.

The Self-Service plan requires you to complete this process yourself, although you can pay and file your taxes right from QuickBooks. With the Full-Service plan, QuickBooks prepares, files, and pays payroll taxes on your behalf. The Simple Start is the most affordable of the QuickBooks Online plans, costing $25 per month. However, for a limited time only, you can get QuickBooks Self-Employed for 50% off. If you’re a small business owner new to QuickBooks, the Intuit ProAdvisor program is a great way to get short and long-term assistance with bookkeeping on QuickBooks. This program will connect you with local CPA and bookkeeping experts who specialize in QuickBooks and can help you with everything from basic usage to taxes, corporate structure, and more. QuickBooks Online offers a vast number of written and video tutorials.

If you’ve created service records because of your company’s offerings, you can track billable and non-billable time as single activities or timesheets. Individual timed activity records are exceptionally thorough, with fields for details like employee name, customer/project, and cost/rate. Regrettably, there’s no timer, but you can get one and other advanced time-tracking functionality if you integrate Intuit QuickBooks Online with QuickBooks Time . Icons in the upper right open additional tools, including search, help, and your Intuit account information. The gear icon for accessing the Account and Settings sections is here, too. It contains links to lists and other tools, such as budgeting, user management, data import and export, Chart of Accounts, and an audit log.

Many business owners are familiar with Intuit QuickBooks, as it’s one of the leading accounting software programs for managing payroll, operations, accounts receivable and numerous other financial functions. At a higher monthly cost, this plan offers greater capabilities, particularly for managing bills and time tracking. The Essentials plan is a great option for those who need more than the Simple Start plan provides—especially if they invoice for their time. QuickBooks Online is available on a monthly subscription basis, in four different pricing plans. Each QuickBooks Online plan offers more features, and therefore, a greater level of functionality.

Users would likely have to collaborate in whatever way they see fit to determine who is working on what, etc. Responses are not provided or commissioned by the vendor or bank advertiser. Responses have not been reviewed, approved or otherwise endorsed by the vendor or bank advertiser. It is not the vendor or bank advertiser’s responsibility to ensure all posts and/or questions are answered. Easily manage payroll, HR, and workers’ comp with Intuit Online Payroll. You can switch from QuickBooks Online to Desktop, and many users who are used to traditional accounting and working with QuickBooks tend to do so after giving QBO a try. QuickBooks tries to make it easy to switch from QuickBooks Desktop to QuickBooks Online.

QuickBooks Tips To Make Bookkeeping Easier

Alternatively, it’s possible to jump in and start manually adding transactions, in which case you have to enter customer information, item records, and so on as you go. If you take this approach, you may find that a feature you need hasn’t been activated, or that you need to connect your bank accounts and set up a payment processor. The best course is to explore the Account and Settings area first. There you’ll find a series of tabs on the left for Company, Billing & Subscription, Usage, Sales, Expenses, Payments, and Advanced. QuickBooks Online is better for business owners who want easy-to-use cloud-based accounting that includes anywhere online access, mobile apps, and tons of integrations with other business apps. QuickBooks Desktop is better for small to large-sized businesses that have complex accounting needs and require more customizable features.