Item: QuickBooks Online
Rating: 8
Author: Charles Fashana, MBA

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

As business grew, tracking revenue/invoices and expenses/payables through excel spreadsheets or other offline/manual methods quickly became challenging and a better solution was needed. However, as a small business, a robust and expensive accounting software wasn't what we needed. We were looking for a simple solution that would be easy to use and handle the basics of our accounting and finance needs, along with giving us some room to grow with the platform as our business grew. We used QuickBooks Online to do this, and the platform what used primarily by myself as COO, a part-time bookkeeper, and a tax professional at times.

Pros and Cons

Easy to link to bank accounts and credit cards.
Intuitive interface for most things.
Manageable chart of accounts that allows for good customization of products and services.
Basic customization of invoices and language to be used in customer facing invoices/emails.
All major financial reports are a few clicks away, most can be customized, filtered, saved, exported.
Allows for rules to be set for common, recurring revenue and expenses - with some limitations.

The budgets feature leaves a lot be desired - difficult and clunky to populate and maintain.
Reporting for Budget vs Actual is available but the ability to reforecast based on updated data is not.
The rules function to default common types of expenses isn't perfect and will get confused if like amounts or a number of similar items present.

Return on Investment

Centralized the accounting function.
Consistent experience for invoicing clients and payments to vendors.
Improved sightline on income per customer, income per product/service.
Streamlined and improved cycle times for AR/AP.
Better reporting across all core areas of the business.

Alternatives Considered

QuickBooks Online was recommended to us by our tax professional, so exhaustive research on other options wasn't conducted.

Key Insights

Do you think QuickBooks Online delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with QuickBooks Online's feature set?

Yes

Did QuickBooks Online live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of QuickBooks Online go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy QuickBooks Online again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Khoros Care (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium), HubSpot CRM

Usability

It really is a simple and easy software to use. I would say to be able to just use the software you need little or only basic financial or accounting knowledge, but to begin to do more customization through your ledgers and chart of accounts, services, reporting, etc. you will need to know your stuff in order to program it and get it working the way you want. But once it is fully set up to your business needs, it's largely on autopilot from there until something changes. The regular ongoing work is routine and simple.

Support Rating

I've only had to connect with QuickBooks Online once to inquire about their limitations on the budgeting and forecasting functionality. While the platform simple couldn't accommodating my preferences, the support team was responsive and did follow up as expected, so no real issues there.

Likelihood to Recommend

It really is a perfect tool for small businesses that don't have a ton of complexity in their needs. It can easily handle a lot of customers, revenue and product types, etc. along with providing pretty good reporting. Where it will fall short is when you try to build out a more sophisticated account function that will look to more regularly report, budget, forecast.

One of the simplest accounting solutions for your small business

Overall Satisfaction with QuickBooks Online