QuickBooks Online vs. Zuora

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.

Incentivized

Zuora is great for smaller subscription businesses that have a limited number of simple or basic products. As more products are added to the catalog, the ability to report on specific product performance has become more challenging. Similarly, as our number of customers has grown significantly over the past few years, the extraction of data through export files is more of a challenge to capture all data points.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• The implementation of Zuora is very helpful. Their interactive training guides are one of the best I've used. It is very thorough and any salesperson can learn how to use it very quickly.
• Their subscription management offers many ways to sell a subscription. These subscriptions can be evergreen (renewing every month) or termed subscriptions. The subscriptions can be amended to add/remove products very easily.
• The ability to quickly pass through large amounts of usage data for our clients is allowing us to perform billing in a time-effective manner. Once usage data is loaded, a few clicks and all of the invoices for our client base can be generated. Invoices are clean and detailed which help us maintain a good customer experience even with our somewhat complex billing model. The reporting is extremely helpful in calculating the end of month commissions, recognizing and deferring revenue, and overall bookkeeping.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• User Interface - Zuora's UI is still a weak point, however, this is negated through the use of its API's. Zuora has done a lot of work in releasing new products to limit its UI experience and the addition of Orders allows for more functionality to reduce the UI issue.
• Complex system - This is both a pro and a con, but in this instance, it is a con because we may not have taken the time to truly understand the implications of all the options that were available. the Flexibility is great however if you do not take the time to understand the product and what problem you are trying to solve, you can make life difficult for yourself later down the track. Take the time to map out your approach end to end and ensure your assumptions at the start are robust.
• Reporting - reporting is weak as such we have moved away to our own reporting data warehouse.

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

Our business is now, more than ever, focused on our core business rather than homegrown support tools for quoting, contracts, billing, invoicing, payments and the rest of the subscription economy. We evaluated other solutions and found this the best and most viable solution given the strong ties to Salesforce and it's integration. Zuora works, and it works well.

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.

Incentivized

I had 20+ years of accounting experience before taking on the revenue role. I had several things to [learn] but was able to easily master the software in a matter of weeks. Zuora is our preferred billing platform that we currently use - very efficient and much more automated than our other platform/process.

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 have only been a few days/instances in the past 2.5 years of using zuora that I, personally have had issues or been notified of issues relating to Zuora.

Incentivized

Everything process has its bugs lately with the new interface. Nothing has worked smoothly since this all began last month.

Incentivized

Zuora does a superb job for all the tasks I use it for. Billing - it is trustworthy and accurate. Customer data- it holds it and keeps past records for even cancelled accounts, and subscription builds - it has the ability to make very difficult subscriptions seem easy.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

A support request is emailed to their support team, then an automated response is sent to you in a couple hours saying "Hey, someone will take a look at your support request soon". Then somewhere around 12-18 hours later, an actual support member responds with "Have you checked out our tutorials? Here's one that sounds like it might help you". I don't want a tutorial given to me that I've already read through that only exists because of the terrible user design of Zuora's user interface

Incentivized

The onsite was so helpful and worth the hours spent. All three people that came to represent Zuora had a lot to offer.

Incentivized

It was reliable.

Incentivized

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 think Zuora did a great job. However, they could have provided more guidance on how to deal with out Payment Gateway and Processor provider, as well as guidance around providing a Mobile Responsive experience for sites using the Zuora HPM.

Incentivized

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.

Zuora provides way more functionality than Recurly or SaaSOptics as a billing engine. However, it is not a general ledger system like NetSuite ERP, it is still designed to be primarily a billing function that feeds into a general ledger via automated general entries. It has simplified our invoice management and automated billing while connecting with Salesforce for high-powered reporting and cross-departmental collaboration. The automation of revenue recognition has the potential to significantly reduce the time spent on accounting close by a few days.

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

The product is capable of a lot, small companies and large companies can utilize it with ease

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Poor support has slowed down our implementation of features and resolution of issues
• Lack of flexibility has led to some complex and unwieldy workaround solutions
• No useful built in AR reporting so we had to come up with our own solution
• Challenges with finance due to unreliability of Salesforce sync