Axero vs. Zoho Books

Specific scenarios where Communifire would be well suited to an organisation, would be companies that are people focused and committed to frequent and open communication channels from both the top-down and bottom-up. It also would suit organizations that are committed to providing the staff opportunities to collaborate, share and actively contribute to company initiatives and planning. If these aren't elements of your organization's culture, the system would still work for you or those companies who just want to push information out and have an effective intranet. Communifire would cater to these scenarios just as well and is more than capable of providing that type of simple solution.

If using other cloud applications and you wish to create Zoho Books transactions via APIs, Zoho Books is great. The overall UI and flow of the application are great. If you need a detailed job cost accounting solution and robust reporting there is some room for improvement here.

Incentivized

• Communifire allows people to connect easily through instant chat and messaging. It works similarly to other social media platforms like Facebook so its not hard to learn.
• Communifire makes it easy to share news and events with our community and the presentation of this information looks very professional.
• I found Communifire quite easy to configure to our individual needs. There were a lot of options to turn things on or off. This was important to us because in some areas of our community we wanted to allow our contractors many features and in other areas we wanted to really limit what was on offer.
• We had a big list of things we needed a platform to do. Communifire ticked all the boxes.

Incentivized

• Zoho Books invoicing and receipting features are second to none. We find it easy to quickly invoice clients and add items to their bills and also for our own receipting internally.
• The accounting features are great for our accounting team to be able to see where we are financially and how the business is doing.
• The ability to add contacts and run a mini CRM channel with clients within Zoho is invaluable. Since we use this in conjunction with our other CRM channels, it helps to have a centralized place to follow up and see through a sales funnel.
• Zoho Books allows us to take payments from clients around the globe a feature we didn't have when we used another accounting system.
• The pricing for Zoho Books is fairly reasonable for an SME organization which is a great for us as it pays itself back many times over every month.

Incentivized

• Some UX issues that could be improved
• Some architecture decisions don't make complete sense to me (though that's just one man's opinion)

• Zoho Books is only available in Texas and California. There is no integration allowed for paying employee expenses. The absolute worst aspect is the fact that if you make even the slightest error in data input there is no backing up. You cannot undo an error.
• The system does not allow change once implemented, so you must get every one of your beginning balances perfect. The practice of Journal Entries is cumbersome. When reconciling, Zoho Books has adopted a number of required steps that significantly overcomplicate reconciliation using practices that are not consistent with general accounting principles in the US.
• On the customer side, you must look in two places to see the beginning balance and the current receivables that might exist for current invoicing.
• The way the system works, you must avoid having much trust with the balances depicted. So far, it appears that Zoho Books uses what we called in school "that new math."
• It would be terrifying to rely on this bookkeeping system to support an IRS Audit. The system violates too many fundamental accounting principles.
• The software is used by so few people that there is concern that we might never find a skilled bookkeeper.

Our business depends upon this software to provide information on all aspects of our business. The future of business is a marriage between web site and customer interaction. This software will allow us to move in that direction.

This rating has a caveat - there is always room for improvement, and this team gets it. You always learn from customers how to do things better and easier, so it is a constant learning of how people use the site. Although the search engine is exceptional, most people do not use it as their first line of research. Much of the usability has to do with layout - and is not just a software usability item, so the rating is severely dependent up on the layout/options you choose for your usage. And their team will do anything in their power to get the results and layout you want. The areas that need improvement - and acknowledged by the team - are the administrative tools. There are a ton of options, and it takes a little to learn some of those. For most people, however, this won't be an issue, because the support team will always help you. This is always the case with more power. If there were fewer options it would no doubt be easier, but they give you the keys to all of the cars in the lot; so a little more to learn.

Customization is the biggest struggle for us and most of the time we need to involve a tech person. The chat support is a great feature and very helpful. It would be great to be able to customize and create invoices and correspondence (templates) such are reminders in multiple languages within one organization. The currency (USD) would be the same. We have clients in different countries that don't speak English but pay in USD.

Incentivized

Never any problems. Quite impressed

Works in real time.

I have always found Communifire support to be exceptional. We have had a personal account manager who has been very helpful.

Incentivized

The support team feels very disjointed. We have filtered through a number of "lead" contacts and are frequently spammed by other Zoho members. Once getting an appropriate support contact on the phone - the team is very helpful, it just takes a lot of hoop jumping to get there. We actually unsubscribed from their support package as we were not getting the value we were looking for.

Incentivized

I found the system to be very flexible and the Communifire team very supportive in helping me identify solutions for my goals.

We selected Communifire for the excellent sales support, strong feature set and quick set up time. We were able to get started immediately and build out features as need required which led to faster execution and higher adoption rates among our team.

We had a lot of problems with Exact Online, support-wise and price-wise. So Zoho Books wins on every point there. While Exact offers way more options, it tends to be really slow... and complex. Again Zoho Books wins. If you want an easy-to-use tool and not pay a lot of money, or if you are a small administration office with a few clients, this tool will be perfect for you.

Incentivized

• We are still building out features of the platform but with implemention of paid features by members, we will be able to cover our operating cost of the platform.

• Integration: Zoho Books offers out of the box integrations to extend the functionality and connect with the applications you love like MailChimp, Microsoft Outlook, PandaDoc, and Quickbooks, etc.
• Flexibility makes Zoho Books great!
• Since I can use forecast reports, I can create customizable sales forecast data from the dashboard to accurately measure revenue forecasts and establish sales quotas.

Incentivized