Intuit TurboTax vs. Zoho Books

Intuit TurboTax is well suited for most scenarios ranging from simple filing (i.e., single filing, one employer, limited asset, same state as employer) to complicated filing (i.e., married filing jointly, changing employers, different state as employers or WFH, multiple assets such as real estate and cryptocurrencies, entrepreneurship side-gig). TurboTax does not have wide-range offerings and partnerships with crypto exchanges so crypto owners may use a different service to generate the necessary tax forms for TurboTax to digest.

Incentivized

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

• fill in tables or cells with numbers directly from scanned tax forms (1099s, W2s, etc)
• determine necessary tax forms needed to fill based on users' answers to selected questions
• customization capability for users that are well-versed in their tax situation (i.e., ability to select deductions themselves)

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

• integration with other applications such as Mint
• online and cloud sign-up for multiple Intuit applications is unsmooth
• price point for state tax filing can be made staggered (cheaper for simple form)

Incentivized

• 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.

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

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

We select TurboTax for its wide user base (familiarity), price points (multiple offerings based on users' needs), user experience (intuitiveness), technology (adaptive to user tax situations and simplify user data entry by means of upload feature), customer support (for implementer and end-users) and expert support (i.e., CPA), cloud capability, safety and security. Other products also offer several features like those but not to the same level of comprehensiveness and sophistication.

Incentivized

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

• 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