ContractZen vs. Zoho Books

This is a big step up from our use of an Excel spreadsheet to manage hundreds of clients. There is more functionality in the product than we are currently using. It would be useful to learn from others how they are using the tool as we might discover some improved efficiency that we haven't considered.

Incentivized

Zoho Books is good for a company or organization that wants to keep track of invoices, payments, and cash flow. If you do not have a full-time accountant in your organization, it can work well as whenever you hire one or have someone check your books, the information they need will be there, provided it has been entered into Zoho Books. It works as a one-man operation or a small team. For larger teams, it would depend on how much information needs to be input on a daily basis.

Incentivized

• Download of all entries
• Reminders
• Searchability indexes

Incentivized

• The projects feature is what we use a lot it helps setting up projects as well as tracking expenses and bills for the whole project. The budgeting feature is very developed, allowing you to budget by total project cost, total project hours, hours per task, or hours per staff.
• Customer Estimates and Invoices are very easy to setup and send directly from the app (it also has a very nice and customizable reminder option).
• Stock and pricing listings is very intuitive and easy and makes it a very helpful and time saving feature.
• Bank reconciliation and Financial reporting are very developed and make it easy to share information with bookeepers and accounting specialists.

Incentivized

• No contract lifecycle management.
• Governance may not be adequate for large organizations.
• Sign-in with SSO or without SSO can be improved; it's a bit confusing for new users.

Incentivized

• Printing checks - they only offer one vendor and they are expensive compared to QuickBook alternatives.
• Their interface for bids - retainers and applying them against income could be improved, but once you know how it's easy.
• Their recurring fees don't seem to always work the way I'd want. But overall they work.

Incentivized

The inexpensive ContractZen saves time and money and is a joy to use

Good product.

Incentivized

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

Have not needed much but available when I do have questions

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

The capture of the new contracts is more important than the old contracts, somewhat counterintuitively. Once you start saving time using the electronic signing and retrieval, adding old material is easier. Old material additions fit our annual schedule as we've done them during periods of less administrative work.

The barrier of entry with ContractZen was so low. Competition offered a paid proof-of-concept, multiple sales call, and pre-sales analysis for which we had no time and had low interest. ContractZen gave us a demo in 30 minutes, gave me an account and walked me through the product. The cost was significantly lower. Yes, features were fewer in ContractZen but the features were the right ones we needed. Security of the system was adequate and it was cloud-based, which meant we didn't have to maintain servers on premise. Onboarding was easy and describing the system to others to get buy-in was exceptionally easy.

Incentivized

Cloud vs. desktop, this and the fact that Zoho Books syncs with our other Zoho apps were the most pressing reasons for switching to Zoho Books. As mentioned previously, we consider our accounting software to be an integral part of doing business efficiently, and we can now do that considering our systems are all integrated.

Incentivized

• I have saved 50% of my time when managing and sharing bids and agreements.
• I'll never miss a contract end date - ContractZen has already saved 15% of my total annual contract value.

• I was able to cut my costs for a more complete and easy to use tool.
• Many transactions, and accounting tasks on 1 platform, reduction in time by a lot.
• Clients can pay without leaving your website (less drop-off, better conversions).

Incentivized