Lola.com, from Lola Travel Company headquartered in Boston, is a travel management platform featuring employee travel points and other rewards, travel spend tracking and management, generate travel itineraries and receipts, and other features.
$250
per month
QuickBooks Online
Score 8.1 out of 10
N/A
QuickBooks Online is a SaaS version of the QuickBooks product. It contains all of the features found in the local version. Higher-priced plans include greater automation, payment management, inventory and time tracking, and analytics features.
We are currently in the process of planning our company wide retreat in which we need at least 69 people to book their flights. While with that many people traveling at once, I do suspect I'll get some questions and have to assist some folks however by using Lola.com, the time I would have spent prior will be cut drastically. And I'll be able to see who is taking what flight and obtain departure and arrival information without much interruption to anyone's day. Prior to Lola.com this task would have been something truly daunting, but not this time!
QBO is a great solution for small and midsize companies. If the goal is to record all transactions and pull reliable financial reports, QBO is a great option. QBO is also a great solution if most operations are run in a system like Ramp. It syncs well with systems like that and turns the data into something management can use to make decisions. QBO is great because so many people use it. It is easy to find training online, and many people have experience with it.
Provides corporate leadership with great insights into employee travel costs BEFORE they hit corporate credit cards, thereby facilitating better budgeting, planning, and cash flow management
Offers employees who travel a single interface for booking travel
Provides employees who are traveling with concierge level service when booking and while on the road
Workflows for accounts payable invoice review are terrific.
Bill payment allows you to pay vendors online via ACH or check without having to write a physical check, which reduces admin time.
The cloud based login lends well to a remote or hybrid work environment for staff.
QuickBooks Online allows you to pre-configure vendors' general ledger expense accounts. This helps with general ledger coding accuracy and consistency.
QuickBooks Online integrates with Rippling HRIS, Coast, Capital One, JPMorgan Chase, etc., which lends well to an efficient month-end closing and reduced administrative time.
Room for existing features to grow and expand, especially on the administrative side
Visually-speaking, the overall layout and color scheme used within the site, specifically when it comes to placement and contrast of key text info, has led to some confusion at times
Need for more support of existing travel rewards accounts
I dislike that the online bill pay option through QuickBooks is required for their invoicing.
The auto-fill portion of the customer setup, specifically the company name, is listed, but it also auto-fills in the name portion, which is inconvenient and time-consuming to remove.
This is just my guess as I'm not involved in the decision aside from providing feedback on using Lola. I think, from what I've heard, that everyone likes Lola and we'll renew the usage. I say this because we're an all-remote company and this greatly solves the logistics of booking flights for everyone.
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.
Lola is simple and straight to the point in regards to usability. I didn't have to figure things out and felt that the interface was intuitive. I loved it.
Beyond being overkill for a small org's needs, QBO is constantly stealing screen real estate and attention by hammering users for account upgrades, connecting to one of their approved consultants or buying add-ons. The idea of using a simple configurable bookeeping and light accounting interface is completely missing. At the very least, we should be able to hide functions like inventory that we will never use.
Lola's customer support is fantastic. They have frequently contacted us when there are travel alerts, or anticipated flight cancellations to re-book us before it was too late. They are always helpful and pleasant and we have never had any issues.
In my experience, most representatives keep me on the phone for hours, literally, for a single issue and then usually cannot resolve it satisfactorily. I have 10 open cases that need resolution and, in my experience, there has been NO follow-up communication on any of them.
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
Lola.com is much easier to use in terms of UX. Very little Admin and/or user training is needed to get up and running with Lola.com -- which increases our ability to quickly scale the solution. However, I would say that Concur is able to do more inside the travel arena with the addition of expense tracking.
As a freelance bookkeeper, the Desktop version of QuickBooks Online doesn't allow for ease of access from any device. Having to be on a computer with the software downloaded creates additional work to gain access to all required filings etc. Also, I personally find the linking functionality on the Online version to be much more streamlined and user friendly.
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
They have made travel cheaper, so that is a direct reflection to our customers and to us.
Customer Service just makes the stress of travel on our employees not so bad. Knowing we have someone to stand behind us while we travel goes a long way
QuickBooks has given us a useful portal by which to get an overview of our financials.
QuickBooks has given us a relatively easy way to send out invoices quickly and efficiently.
Due to the customization limitations on QuickBooks, we've had to get creative in third-party implementations to better represent our brand and to track financials.
