Odoo vs. Zoho Books

Implementation was a terrible experience for us. Because it required a third party, we ended up way over budget and schedule. While Odoo advertises that it works with many systems, these third-party integrations often don't work out of the box and require extensive coding to set up. Furthermore, these "apps" can frequently break or lose integration.

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

• Ignore requests for support
• continue to collect money from users through micro-charges; apps, supports, etc.
• Offer no support when they do finally respond, saying that it's the app developer's duty.
• Creates a system that forces people that are good with software systems to pay for support

• 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

• We had to work with an implementation team to customize Odoo into something that could truly work for us.
• I would like to be able to run some reports in an easier way.
• We did have to implement the use of an iOT box as well for something like printing barcode stickers.

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.

Once you complete the training with Odoo, you have a great grasp of how the system works, and most every feature is intuitive- There is rarely a task within Odoo that I get frustrated trying to figure out- I can typically look through the system and find what I need to do, and if I ever do need support, the Odoo Support team is excellent

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

Easy - there is NO SUPPORT (like in ABSOLUTELY NOTHING!!!!!!!). Even for legally mandatory requirements where the system MUST work, they will gladly take a month to get back to you with a NON-answer. We couldn't even get our bank statements correctly into Odoo for 2 months - leading to no reconciliation and the company accounts were a mess (still are!!) as a result - Completely irresponsible. Have not EVEN had an apology from Odoo - they couldn't care less !!

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

It is simple to use and the features in Odoo are more advanced compared to zoho. The cost of Odoo is also very less comparatively with other competitors that are available in market. Accessing the in depth reports is very easy with Odoo and a person with low executive level can easily check his performance with Odoo and the security features is very powerful

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

• In older versions, it was super expensive to make it even work. You had to hire third-party developers all the time.
• Newest versions have better built in functionality.
• Cost is pretty high. Odoo plus developers to support it could bankrupt a small business.

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