Invoicing, Estimation and Budgeting
ZOHO Book has an interesting concept in this area. It provides a simple invoicing system but with an extensive reporting functionality - there are easily accessible invoicing reports based on contacts. Estimations are possible too, but only as individual sales estimation for one contact. Budgeting is not possible in ZOHO Books at all.
QuickBooks has a significantly more comprehensive features in this respect. It provides forecasting capabilities on a much more advanced level, and it allows creating sales estimations which can be then included in reports. Also its budgeting functionality is very comprehensive and works well.
We would go for: QuickBooks.
Working with Third Sides
ZOHO Books has one shared contact list. Contact can have custom fields, which is rare feature in applications of this category. The single shared contact list is then possible to use across the entire application both for vendors and clients and create quick and illustrative reports based on these contacts. But we missed a feature for employee management or management of payrolls.
QuickBooks diversifies contacts into separate modules and contact lists. These modules are focused on common operations with their type of contacts. In this approach, there are separate modules for customers invoicing, creation of payments orders for our vendors or arrangement of pay-roll process. This approach allows for a more detailed settings possibilities, which can be useful namely for larger companies.
We would go for: QuickBooks.
Look&Feel and Application User Interface
ZOHO Books is very simple and intuitive application. All important features are quickly accessible and its functionalities are well integrated, so that the application stays user-friendly.
QuickBooks on the other hand provides a more complex functionality and its interface is more complex, too. At the first sight we can see that QuickBooks is more difficult to use, although its user interface is very well integrated and interconnected. QuickBooks is definitely a more complicated tool and it can be difficult to navigate across this complex application, namely for new users.
We would go for: ZOHO Books.
Banking
ZOHO Books offers only manual evidence of transactions. It is not possible to integrate ZOHO Books with online banking or perform credit card payment directly from the application.
QuickBooks includes an elaborated filter system for transactions which is based on bank rules and works automatically. Quick Books also provides functionality for payments with credit card and integration with internet banking. But for a more comfortable communication with banks and better automation of typical payment processes we would recommend to buy some of the expansion packages (for instance for payrolls operations).
We would go for: Quick Books.
Report Creation
In the report creation both ZOHO Books and QuickBooks provide rich selection of reports. From the common financial reports like profit & loss and balance sheet, over cashflow report to executive summaries. But in addition to that, QuickBooks provides special functionalities connected with basic corporate performance overview and balanced scorecard. The specialty of ZOHO Books is its quick contacts report. But this report is available in Quick Books, too.
We would go for: QuickBooks.
Technical Requirements and Capabilities
ZOHO Books does not have any special requirements and works well in all common modern browsers, but it is not designed for use on mobile devices. It is possible to say yhat ZOHO Books does not have any requirements.
QuickBooks requires for its full functionality Adobe Flash and access from mobile device is supported only from Android and iOS smartphones.
We would go for: ZOHO Books.
Conclusion
QuickBooks is a robust financial application with extensive functionality, but it is also one of the most expensive applications on the global market of cloud accounting software. If you don’t mind the price, with QuickBooks and its accompanying services you will definitely get a really full-fledged platform for your accounting, payroll processing, and bank and credit card operations automation.
ZOHO Books is on the other hand one of the many applications which is provided by ZOHO. ZOHO Books offers understandable and simple pricing model, it is significantly cheaper than QuickBooks, but has still the most of the most important functionality we would expect at this kind of application. In addition, it can be easily integrated with other ZOHO services, which may be an important advantage if your company wants to automate also other functional areas via cloud.
QuickBooks is better if you want an extensive application for accounting and financial management. But if you already have some other applications from ZOHO or you want to try cloud computing also in other functional areas, ZOHO is a good choice, too.