Ottimate is an automated accounts payable platform.
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QuickBooks Online Advanced
Score 8.3 out of 10
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QuickBooks Online Advanced is a SaaS-based accounting software designed to scale with growing businesses. It includes the functionalities of QuickBooks Online, as well as more robust business analytics, customization, and resource management.
It is well targeted at restaurants and similar service organizations with complex COGS. It dovetails well with complementary systems like FinTech payments. It wasn't designed by accountants, so there is a bit of roughness. Reporting is very limited: would like to see some SQL / build your own report functionality. Lookups are reasonably robust (filter for amount, time, vendor, etc). It is occasionally unstable but recovers gracefully. From our use case, it would be preferable to have the user approving the invoice ALSO have the ability to attach documents. This is left to the payment approver, who in our case is the "check signer".
Well suited: Day-to-day accounting needs such as fixed assets, prepaids, cash accounts and bank recs, integrations into other systems such as bill.com, creating financial statement reporting and management reporting, basic tax tracking, expense tracking. Less appropriate: More complex areas of accounting: lease accounting, stock compensation, automated revenue and deferred revenue recognition, more complex inventory management, consolidations can get tricky.
Budgeting is easy to input. Our entities have multiple departments, so using classes to separate and report the results of each department is important.
Reports are easy to customize to provide meaningful data to the board and department managers.
QuickBooks Online Advanced has a large market share of accounting software in use, so it is relatively easy to find new employees with prior experience with QuickBooks Online Advanced.
Able to open both entities at the same time, which is helpful due to the number of transactions between the two entities.
I want to control how reports are exported so I can directly export my payroll data to our third-party processors (retirement accounts, health insurance accounts).
I want the AI to better recognize when a client is paying multiple invoices in one payment.
I want client accounts to be easier to run ledgers for. For example, we use trust accounting, so I want to see each client's balance in our trust account.
It has become second nature to use Quick Books at the company. If you need a report you log in and pull the report. It helps expedite reconciliation of bank accounts, the automation of most tasks make it easy to get mundane tasks completed quickly.
QuickBooks Online Advanced is highly usable and intuitive for most day-to-day financial tasks. Its interface is clear, and core functions such as invoicing, reconciliation, and reporting are easy to perform. While some advanced features like report customization or integrations can be less straightforward, overall the platform offers a smooth and efficient user experience.
In the 5 years I have been using it, I cannot recall there ever having been an outage or not being able to access the system. Sure, there are issues with internet speeds sometimes that are unrelated to Intuit but it is a very reliable system.
Since we do not integrate the software with other systems, I do not have any issues with speed related to that. Pages tend to load pretty quickly, but there are times when reports or other pages take a little longer to load than usual. It is not an overly frustrating amount of time, though, and it happens infrequently.
I did not participate in this part particularly much. The implementation was simple and easy to perform. There were not any major issues that arose during the process. QuickBooks has made the processes pretty streamless and I believe they had anticipated many difficulties ahead of time. This was easy enough
We used DocuWare first; great experience; however, it was not made specifically for restaurant clients like Plate IQ is. Plate IQ does a much better job of recognizing common items, and they've continued to add a function that is important for restaurant owners. Restaurant 365, we felt, was trying to be a complete package of accounting/AP/AR/inventory. After looking at each piece, we didn't feel that each of them was as strong as the other.
After using QBO, QBDP is marvelous. Take a cue from the desktop version. Vendor, Customer and Employee centers are great. Reporting is okay, but I can live with that. Payroll is excellent and I even file and pay my own taxes. I like that control. The fact that you can open multiple windows at one time is a God send. I do post mortems on all of the jobs and I may have 5 reports open at one time. (This would not be necessary if your reporting was better, linking more of QBDP database.) Everyday I am interrupted in a task to do a new one and I can go to exactly where I was in the previous task because I have multiple windows open. I am not going to stop harping on this until you do something about it. ALSO, I am not using your AI in QBOA
In my opinion, it has had zero impact on ROI now that we are paying for an additional year.
Another negative is that we've spent a lot of time discussing this issue with Plate IQ, to no avail. They feel it's appropriate to charge a company for an entire year of service even though said company emailed to cancel prior to the end of the first year of service.
We also wasted a lot of time onboarding this company only to find out that the software left a lot to be desired.
Spreadsheet sync reduces manual data entry significantly. Exporting data into my customized Excel workbook that has complex formulas and macros for automating makes uploading changes and reconfiguring easy and convenient, saving a lot of time.
Automating AP approval has reduced lost paper copies, improved internal controls, and reduced audit findings.
Having banking connections has improved cash flow management, streamlined credit card expenses and reconciliation. I have found that utilizing it for my primary operating account actually makes things more difficult and can easily double-post payments, so I avoid using it on the checking account. It has been well for the credit card account, though.
