Zoho Books
Zoho Books is a cloud-based accounting platform for business transaction management. This secure software helps companies send bills and invoices, reconcile bank statements, track spending, and eliminate sales tax compliance worries.
Features
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Set up recurring invoices to regular clients
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Reconcile bank accounts with Zoho Books transactions
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Dashboard and reporting for 70+ categories
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Manage all company expenses in one place
Pros
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Free forever plan and 14-day free trial period for all plans
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Dedicated portals for clients and vendors
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Mileage tracking for employee expenses
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Single sign-on and multi-factor authentication
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Export report in PDF, Excel, Zoho Sheets, and CSV
Cons
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Supports only 15 users for the most expensive plan
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One subscription plan works for one business
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Payroll service will cost extra money
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Live chat support is available for users of the Premium plan and above
Accounting Software Review Methodology
Geekflare tested the core accounting features of Zoho Books through hands-on subscriptions. We evaluated essential features and calculated a combined overall rating for each. To ensure an unbiased review, we gathered factual data from official websites and analyzed user feedback from various sources to provide comprehensive insights and detailed reviews.
In this Zoho Books review, we will discuss its features and benefits to see which companies should use it and why.
What Is Zoho Books?
Zoho Books is smart accounting software suitable for self-employed/freelancers, small businesses, mid-market businesses, accountants, and startups. It was established in 1996 in Bengaluru, India, with over 100 million global users and 15,000 employees.
Zoho Books Features
The key features of Zoho Books are invoicing, payments, bill management, bank account reconciliation, inventory management, and more.
Invoicing
Zoho Books allows users to create professional invoices for customizable invoice templates and receive payment in multiple currencies through cash, check, and online portals. It lets users set up multiple invoice reminders for their clients so they are sent automatically. Users can add rows, print the invoices, or send them to the customers directly using email. Zoho Books also supports recurring invoices and lets companies add customer credit card details for secure payment each month.
Quotes Management
Zoho Books offers various templates for creating and sending quotations with contact information, item details, and prices. Its customizable templates allow users to adjust the look of the quote according to the brand identity. Zoho Books supports integration with Zoho Sign for digital signature before sending the quote to the client, adding additional security to the document. Zoho Books also supports the status of the quotation and provides notification upon acceptance of the quote.
Payments
Zoho Books integrates with multiple online payment gateways for instant payment collection. Companies can automatically collect payments weekly, monthly, or yearly. It lets users automatically charge for recurring transactions and send automated reminders to customers.
Zoho Books has a customer portal where clients can make payments. It automatically marks the paid invoices and records vendor payments to track the expenses. It offers customizable templates for payment receipts that users can easily personalize. Zoho Books generates detailed reports on payments received to help companies understand payment trends and customers’ preferred payment methods.
Sales Orders
Using Zoho Books, businesses can easily convert an approved quote into a sale order or turn a sales order into a purchase order. They can even customize the sales orders with a brand logo, font, and color corresponding to the brand identity. Zoho Books creates real-time reports on transactions, from which companies can identify their top customers and best-selling products.
Bill Management
Zoho Books enables businesses to create and send recurring bills for purchases. It also supports adding landed costs to the bills, transaction approval, and bill verification before they appear in the company accounts. While creating a customer invoice, users can add any billable line items previously associated with the customer. Zoho Books also supports one-click bill creation from the finalized purchase order.
Purchase Orders
Businesses can track the ordered items and agreed-upon prices with the vendor using Zoho Books. It lets them attach receipts, bills, or other PO-related documents to the invoice, determine the top vendors and most frequently purchased products, and generate real-time reports based on transactional history. While generating a purchase order, companies can customize it by adding the company logo and background image, changing the background color, and selecting the font. Zoho Books lets users print the purchase orders and share them through email with collaborators.
Manage Projects
Companies can also use Zoho Books for project management to create new projects, add tasks to each one, and assign tasks to employees. It also helps companies perform time tracking using a widget or manually entering the time they spend daily or weekly on a project. Admins can restrict the views and access of the users with role-based access. Zoho Books also lets companies associate all project-related expenses in the bill. Its retainer invoice supports payment collection for the projects.
Bank Account Reconciliation
Zoho Books performs account reconciliation by fetching transactions from your bank and PayPal account. It can locate all the best possible matches to make reconciliation effortless and done within a few clicks. It supports bulk actions for selecting, categorizing, deleting, and restoring multiple items for easy transaction management. Zoho Books’ banking dashboard can predict precise cash flow, fetch past reconciliations, and find mismatched balances.
Inventory Management
Zoho Books allows inventory item organization with data such as product images, vendor details, SKUs, costs, and stock-on-hand. Users can create a customized price list consisting of markups or markdowns to share with preferred vendors and customers. Its inventory tracking feature enables companies to track stock levels, view the current stock valuation, and instantly adjust it for damaged and lost stock.
Expenses Management
Zoho Books offers a single platform for expense tracking, including employee salaries and purchased office supplies, categorizing them, and billing the customer. Here, businesses can create recurring profiles for regular expenses and allow Zoho Books to record those for them automatically. It also supports attaching bills, receipts, and credit notes to associated transactions through the auto-scan feature to fetch all important information from documents.
Documents Management
Despite being accounting software, Zoho Books has document management capabilities. Its auto-scan feature captures document details to turn them into invoices, bills, purchase orders, and sales orders. Users can upload those files to the cloud and organize them in different folders with drag-and-drop features.
Accounting Reporting
Zoho Books’ reporting feature comes with 70+ built-in customizable reports that users can customize to generate profit and loss, balance sheet, and cash flow statements anytime. It facilitates tax report generation according to your country’s regulations. Users can share the reports with teammates and collaborators with reports-only access, save reports in PDF format, or print hard copies.
To make the reporting process automatic, users can schedule them weekly, monthly, or quarterly to get the reports to their preferred email address. Zoho Books supports associating tags with products and contacts, enabling report filtering based on the tags.
Collaboration & Portal Management
Zoho Books users can collaborate with their clients and vendors with dedicated portals for both categories. On the client portal, companies can share quotes with their clients for quick approval, get them digitally signed, allow them to make partial, full, and bulk payments, let the clients update their personal information, and ask for their feedback on areas that need improvement. Using this portal, clients can directly access invoices, quotes, and project details while the companies get notification when a client views, accepts, declines, comments, or makes payments.
Its vendor portal allows suppliers to self-manage transactions, upload their invoices to the portal, track the status of invoices and payments, and get a consolidated view of all transactions. Businesses also get notifications when vendors view their transactions and comment on documents.
What are the Benefits of Zoho Books?
The benefits of Zoho Books are listed below.
Multi-Currency Support
Multi-currency transaction support is available for Elite and Ultimate plans. When users enable this feature for every contact, the customers will see the transaction summary in each currency. Payable balance and available credits are also visible in all available currencies.
Bank Reconciliations
Zoho Books users can reconcile their bank accounts to match the transactions with Zoho Books transactions. It lets companies choose the period for reconciliation from automatic bank feeds. Thus, users can easily find out if there is any discrepancy between these two transactions.
Financial Reports
The Zoho Books reporting feature generates reports on sales, purchases, inventory, accounting, and taxes. Users can schedule the reports to be sent weekly, monthly, quarterly, or yearly to the email address of anyone in their organization, saving them from manually creating and sending reports for these schedules. The feature also supports custom report sharing with others with the preferred user access level.
Automation
Zoho Books enhances multitasking capability through task automation in business workflows. It eliminates repetitive accounting tasks by automatically sending recurring invoices and automatic payment reminders. Zoho Books lets users set up bank rules to categorize bank transactions. It saves customers’ payment details and supports automatic billing from the card details associated with a contact for recurring invoices.
Collaboration
With Zoho Books’ collaboration features, companies can maintain coordination between team members, customers, suppliers, and accountants. Teams can communicate using voice, video, or screen-sharing calls and tag each other with contacts, items, transactions, or journals for context. It also offers necessary features to make collaborations with customers, vendors, and accountants smooth.
Compliant
Zoho Books allows its users to stay compliant with the standards and regulations. Its tamper-proof audit trail feature tracks all activities and changes to meet specific regulatory requirements. It helps to securely collect, store, and process customer data according to GDPR. Zoho Books is also HIPAA compliant, so companies can use it to deal with health information. This PCI-DSS Level 1 certified software encrypts the personal and payment information of the customers.
Smooth Integration with Zoho Ecosystem
Zoho Books integrates with other Zoho apps, such as Zoho CRM, Zoho Invoice, Zoho Analytics, Zoho Mail, Zoho People, Zoho Commerce, and Zoho Projects. This makes data synchronization easier for companies already using different Zoho apps.
Stress-free Tax Processing
Zoho Books makes taxation easy for its users. It reduces the burden of sales tax returns and 1099s with easy sales tax setup, default tax rate, and Avalara integration for updated tax rates and exemptions.
You may check out some more tax planning software if you need advanced features.
Zoho Books Pricing
Apart from the free plan, Zoho Books offers five different plans listed below.
| Plan | Pricing (per organization/month) | Ideal for |
|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | Freelancers and small businesses |
| Standard | $15 | Companies with advanced taxation feature requirements |
| Professional | $40 | Businesses that need detailed purchase management |
| Premium | $60 | Organizations that need customer and vendor portals |
| Elite | $120 | Companies that require advanced inventory management features |
| Ultimate | $240 | Businesses that need advanced analytics |
How to Access Zoho Books for Free?
Zoho Books offers a free forever plan for 1 user and 1 accountant. Companies with less than $50,000 in annual revenue can opt for this free plan. However, it has some feature limitations. For example, it does not offer project management, workflow automation, field customization, advanced inventory, advanced analytics, and advanced taxation features.
Who Should Use Zoho Books?
Small businesses and startups in various industries should use Zoho Books. Companies that need comprehensive accounting software with a user-friendly interface at an affordable price can use it. Small—to medium-sized businesses in professional service, manufacturing and retail, non-profits, healthcare, IT, business, and the telecommunication industry will find Zoho Books ideal.
Who Shouldn’t Use Zoho Books?
Since Zoho Books is an accounting software designed for small and medium-sized businesses, it is not suitable for large enterprises, companies with complex financial needs, and accounting firms that need specialized functionalities.
Zoho Books Customer Support
Zoho Books users can get customer service support through email, phone, and chat. It has help documentation and forums to assist its users. Zoho Books even offers paid support plans for 24/7 access.
Zoho Books Integrations
Zoho Books easily integrates with various banking, payment gateways, cloud, and document management apps. These include PayPal, Stripe, Payoneer, Zapier, Square, Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Drive, Evernote, Box, Google Workspace, Slack, Twilio, and Zoho apps.
Does Zoho Books Have Mobile Apps
Yes, Zoho Books has mobile apps for Android and iOS devices, available in 15+ languages, and an app for Apple Watch.
Zoho Books Alternatives
Companies looking for Zoho Books alternatives can go for other accounting software applications.
FreshBooks
FreshBooks is a popular Zoho Books alternative for businesses focusing on user-friendliness and simplicity. Freelancers and small businesses looking for a straightforward accounting solution with a user-friendly UI and intuitive features should go for FreshBooks.
QuickBooks Online
Businesses that require more comprehensive financial management features or want to use widely recognized accounting software should use QuickBooks Online. QuickBooks is ideal for construction, manufacturing, or professional service industries requiring integration with a large number of business applications and advanced reporting.
Sage 50
Sage 50 is a Zoho Books alternative for construction and wholesale industries that need advanced features and customizations. Businesses belonging to highly regulated industries or with complex financial requirements, such as inventory management and job costing capabilities, should also use Sage 50.
Xero
Xero is better for companies looking to integrate payment gateways, time-tracking software, and project management applications. It is an excellent Zoho Books alternative for streamlined operations and granular data analysis.
Zoho Books Verdict
Zoho Books is an online accounting software suitable for small and medium businesses to manage their finances effectively. It offers all the standard accounting software features, such as invoicing, purchase and sales orders, expense management, payroll, inventory management, taxation, and reporting. Zoho Books receives the Geekflare Excellent Value Award due to its comprehensive set of features.
Zoho Books has several subscription plans, including a free plan from which companies can choose their preferred one. However, it is not suitable for companies that need complex and industry-oriented features, including large enterprises.
Construction-based companies, for example, require specialized construction accounting software that include project cost tracking, job costing, equipment management, and integration with project management tools. Schools and colleges may require school accounting software that offers features like student fee management, tuition billing, financial aid tracking, and fund accounting. A general business accounting software like Zoho Books is not the best for these businesses.