Software Second Look: Zoho Books (Part 1)

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A few years back we had an ‘Accounting Tips Tuesday’ By-line that featured a series on ‘basic accounting’ called ‘Accounting 101’ which covered proper recording of transactions using Zoho Books. While Zoho Books had a fairly large following outside the United States, they didn’t have a lot of subscribers within the US. In the several years since that series concluded Zoho Books has continued to expand their subscriber base and just as importantly over the last few years, they have been recognized by several independent reviewers as one of the best ‘small business accounting software’ offerings.  

It’s hard to imagine that this simple-to-use, highly-functional online accounting software doesn’t have a larger following everywhere because it offers a big feature set for a relatively low subscription price.  You can easily manage the cash-flow of your business keeping track of your customers and invoices as well as your costs and expenses.

Zoho lets you monitor and reconcile your bank accounts in real-time, or work with your accountant if they are providing CFO services for you. And the quality and capability of Zoho reporting will help ensure that you stay on top of your business because you will remain informed at all times with on-the-go access via their mobile App so that you can make decisions wherever you may be.

So, let’s take a look at some of the features Zoho offers on a cash-flow basis starting with Money-in.

Money-in

You start a business for the purpose of producing income, whether you sell or manufacture merchandise, or you provide services, you need a way to manage how you do business with your customers or clients. You also need to keep track of the revenues you generate. Zoho Books gives you a wide variety of options that will fit almost any business situation when it comes to money-in.

Customers/Clients

Zoho not only gives you the ability to set-up and track your customers/clients but they give you the ability to share recent transactions, accelerate the estimate approval process, capture feedback, and let your clients make payments using individual client portals. That’s right, Zoho Books gives you the ability to provide your customers/clients with access to their records (of your choosing) right inside your accounting system. 

Estimating – start and share an estimate (quote) with your customer with them having access via ‘their portal’ as you design exactly what they are needing or wanting in the way of a new Project. You can even capture a ‘digital signature’ as they sign-off on each aspect of the estimate or project change orders, all via their portal.

Projects – Speaking of Projects, Zoho makes it easy to control and manage multiple projects, add tasks for each project, and assign specific tasks to your employees. You can invite staff to be ‘timesheetusers’ so they can log time for their project tasks.

You will easily track all expenses related to a project at the time of billing and then invoice the customer based on the time worked on those tasks or fixed costs for the project based upon the original estimate.

Invoices – Zoho provides nearly effortless invoicing and receivables management. You can send customized statements to your clients and receive payment in multiple currencies. Zoho can let you review invoices before they ‘go out the door’, built-in, no 3rd-party-App needed like with other cloud software.

Zoho makes it easy to collect deposits and advance payments such as ‘retainers’ for professional services or ‘down payments’ on merchandise. Zoho also manages refunds and returns with credit notes and applies them to your customers; future sales, or issues refunds at the click of a button, it’s just that simple. And recurring transactions, no problem another built-in feature that works exactly the way it should.

Sales Tax - Tired of struggling with Sales Tax that just doesn’t work, and can’t be filed because it isn’t right? Not with Zoho Books. You have the choice of totally ‘do it yourself’ sales tax, or fully-integrated Avalara Sales Tax (AvaTax) so you know that your sales tax will be done right, and your sales tax forms will not only be filed right but guaranteed. Either way, you can track as many different sale tax requirements as are appropriate for your business.

Invoice Payments – the payment portal allows clients to make partial, full, or bulk payments of multiple invoices with a simple click-n-pay process. That means it helps to speed up the ‘money-in’ process for your business.

Online Payments – Zoho offers integration with the most popular payment gateways to ensure ease of collecting online payments from your customers/clients. Stripe, PayPal, Authorize.Net, Square, 2checkout, Braintree, forte-ACH, Worldpay, WePay by Chase are just some of these providers. With Zoho, as soon as a payment is recorded on-line the related invoice is marked Paid, you won’t have any manual tasks to be done to record the payment.

There is More to Tell - I'm only 1/2 Done.

I've only begun telling you about just how comprehensive a cloud-based accounting system Zoho Books is, and the features that it includes that you would frequently be required to subscribe to a 3rd-party 'App' add-on in order to have if you were using some other accounting software. In Part 2 of my Software Second Look at Zoho Books I will wrap-up my review, but if you just can't wait till next week then head on over to the Zoho Books website for more details. While you are there you can get a 'free demo' or 'sign-up for a 14-day free trial'.

Zoho is a proud sponsor of Insightful Accountant's 2020 ProAdvisor of the Year and Top 100 ProAdvisor Awards Program.

App Aware articles are editorial features, they are not sponsored content. Even if they contain references or 'inserts' that refer to sponsored webinars or other sponsored content, the actual feature is intended as an informational resource for our readers.