Harpoon vs. QuickBooks Online

I think Harpoon works best for freelancers, consultants, self employed people and smaller companies with less client to bill. For larger enterprises with hundreds or thousands of clients, there are larger, more intricate platforms in the market that are better suited for those needs.

Incentivized

It seems Intuit is more interested in generating revenue than taking care of their customers. After only 28 (working) days using it, I've had to call for Help 23 times, and, in my experience, only spoken to 2 people who had an understanding of basic accounting practices and the ramifications of some of their suggested fixes on the General Ledger.

Incentivized

• Makes Sending Invoices & Collecting Payment Easy, for Freelancers
• Tracking Financial Goals (Monthly & Annual) & Projecting Future Results
• Provides Insights On AR, Earned Income, Top Clients, and other helpful but highly relevant data points.

Incentivized

• It enables me to do a P&L for each specific program as requested by the county for the grant money that they give us.
• It enables me to do [an] organizational budget as well as a budget for each specific program
• It enables the accountant and the auditor access at any time for transparency

Incentivized

• Sometimes expense reporting bring up duplicate transactions, which may be more of a fault of the API that connects my account, which is Plaid
• Would be nice if in the future, they can offer ACH as one of the payment options for invoices
• There are some redundancies that pop up when setting time frames for client work and the projects attached to them. If they aren't aligned, it can cause inaccurate reporting. If it just sent it once and it took care of both functions, it would be easier

Incentivized

• The budgets feature leaves a lot be desired - difficult and clunky to populate and maintain.
• Reporting for Budget vs Actual is available but the ability to reforecast based on updated data is not.
• The rules function to default common types of expenses isn't perfect and will get confused if like amounts or a number of similar items present.

Incentivized

It like the product 'right out of the box' and I trust Intuit will continually improve it over the years based on my experience with their desktop products. The large providers of Apps makes customizing the entire package relatively easy and seamless for a wide variety of business types.

Incentivized

While QuickBooks Online is generally easy to navigate, there are some features and functions that often require a Google search in order to find out where they are actually hidden. Additionally, there are some simple customization features that are surprisingly not available for an otherwise advanced program (e.g. only having a pool of 4 fonts to choose from, only having 4 very limited templates for invoicing, not color selection, etc). While I would say that about 75% of users shouldn't have a problem finding their way around with basic functions, there is a learning curve if you want to be able to dive into some of the more useful features, almost to the point that you need to have a dedicated account manager in order to use QuickBooks Online most effectively.

Incentivized

We have rarely had outages in the last 10 years. I can only recall 2 times in the last 10 years where we were not able to access our client files.

Incentivized

There are tab issues. When I tab the field doesn't highlight and I have to backspace or delete what is in the field. Happens on the memo field and sometimes other fields. Very time consuming.

Incentivized

The few times I've needed help or had questions about the platform, the founder got back to me. And fairly fast. The extra effort resonated well with me

Incentivized

Support is great, all incidents been resolved. Quickbooks Online forum is very well organized and helpful. I like the fact that they let the community contribute in resolving issues. Most or many of your answers can be found online. You can also get help on YouTube, but the easiest way to get assistance is through their chat system.

The person in charge of QB needs to be very accurate with record keeping and is recommended to stay on top of tasks. The biggest issue we have is reconciliation, and those issues occur only when too much time has occurred between reconciliations

Incentivized

I've used Less Accounting and & Quickbooks Online. After Less Accounting was acquired, its development was mostly stopped. While the tool was a simple way to manage invoices and expenses, its directional philosophy changed with the new owners. Quickbooks Online was a solid tool, but the company support was unhelpful and hard to work with at times. Harpoon provides a great tool, with a company that cares about its users.

Incentivized

I have used Wave Accounting for another business. I selected QuickBooks Online over Wave because of the features available from QuickBooks. Wave is great since it is free, but I feel that paying for QuickBooks Online is worth it for the features. In addition there is such a robust support network and training available for QuickBooks.

Incentivized

As we have grown along our professional path, we have also expanded our use of QB. The scalability is easy and features seem to be waiting for you until you need them. We have increased profits by over 10x from our first year in business to the current and have yet to find a reason to look elsewhere

Incentivized

• Clear and precise visibility of my financial status.
• Projections of how I'm doing today, this month, and this year.
• Clarity on what needs to happen with client development to reach my goals.
• It shrinks the amount of time I spend on getting clients to pay my invoices.

Incentivized

• It has created a lot of cost and in-efficiency whenever we need to talk to support.
• I spent a lot of time setting up their automatic reminders for past due invoices and it worked for a couple of months and then it stopped. It's currently being worked on by their tech team but it has been months and it is still not working. It would have saved me a lot of time.
• Their multi-currency saves time in sending invoices abroad but it's limiting when a customer wants an invoice in USD instead of a foreign currency so I have to set up different customer accounts for different currencies.