A detailed summary of why I chose QuickBooks Online over competing products - Sales Tax Calculations | Receipt Capture | Customer Service | Accounting and Reporting Functionality
February 27, 2020
A detailed summary of why I chose QuickBooks Online over competing products - Sales Tax Calculations | Receipt Capture | Customer Service | Accounting and Reporting Functionality
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with QuickBooks Online
Quickbooks Online (QBO) is essential to our business because it provides a combination of functionalities that no other software service packages together for a small business of our size. Our small business ships products across the US. We collect and remit sales tax to 43 different state jurisdictions, so in addition to handling our accounting, bookkeeping, tax preparation, issuing our 1099s and giving our CPA access to our books. Quickbooks Online also serves the critical function of calculating the sales tax due with each package we ship. When I create an invoice for our customer through QBO, I enter the 'Ship From' and 'Ship To' addresses, and the software automatically calculates the amount of sales tax that we need to collect and adds it to the invoice total before I send it to our customer. In case you don't know, every state has different sales tax requirements and depending on where you are shipping. You may need to collect sales tax at the state, county, and city level jurisdictions. But QuickBooks does all the calculations for you and is accurate more than 99% of the time. And when it comes time to file our sales tax returns to each state, QuickBooks Online has helpful reports to show the amount due for each jurisdiction.
- QuickBooks Online is the total package for small businesses that need comprehensive accounting software support at an affordable price. There are other options for medium-to-large size businesses, like NetSuite, but their subscription costs are much higher. In contrast, QuickBooks Online offers functionality that will serve most small businesses for a fraction of the cost.
- In the small-business accounting software category, other companies offer competing products. Still, after doing my own research and reading reviews from other users, I found that QuickBooks Online is regarded as the most robust and feature-rich in terms of all of the accounting needs and reporting functionality that your business might need.
- QuickBooks Online has a great feature called Receipt Capture, which allows you to snap a photo of your receipt and automatically upload it into the system for your approval. The software tries to auto-fill the appropriate information like merchant name, transaction date, transaction amount, and account category. The auto-fill suggestions aren't 100% accurate, but the functionality is helpful and is improving with time.
- I have requested a callback from QuickBooks Online customer support numerous times in my two years as a customer, and the callback is usually within 5 minutes. The support is generally beneficial and able to resolve the issue. If your question or problem is easier to address by the representative looking at your session with you, there is functionality built right into QuickBooks Online that allows you to screen share your session with the representative so you can walk through the issues together. It is beneficial, and I appreciate this feature.
- As of February 2020, QuickBooks Online advertises that you can e-file your state sales tax returns directly through QuickBooks Online. This functionality has never been available to me, and I manually fill out and submit my returns directly through each state's online portal. I don't believe this functionality is available for most QuickBooks Online users, despite advertisements indicating that it is.
- As of February 2020, the following QuickBooks Online subscription levels: Simple Start, Essentials, and Plus, do not allow users to bulk upload or import multiple invoices at once. These tiers only will enable you to create one invoice at a time. The highest subscription level, QuickBooks Online Advanced, does allow users to import multiple invoices at once using Excel import, but the price is much higher. For users who can't afford the subscription price of QuickBooks Online Advanced but need the functionality of bulk uploading invoices, there is a software service called Transaction Importer Pro that does a good job, and the price is $20/month.
- Every once in awhile, I find a page in QuickBooks Online that doesn't allow a user to sort, filter, or display the information the way I think would be most useful. Even after submitting feedback using the online feedback tool, I haven't received any response to my communication about these small changes. These are minor issues, but they don't dampen my enthusiasm for all of the other wonderful functionality that QuickBooks Online enables.
- Before I entered all of my receipts and sales into QuickBooks Online, I had a general idea of the startup capital I invested, but I didn't know the exact number. It turns out I was way off, and I had put substantially more into the setup than I thought. It's like that saying goes, "If you don't know your numbers, you don't your business."
- The sales tax calculations that QuickBooks Online builds into invoices are indispensable for my small business. I literally would not be able to operate the business without this functionality, and finding the solution I needed in QuickBooks Online was instrumental in starting this company.