Zoho Books Accounting Software Review 2022

Zoho Books is cloud-based accounting software that makes financial management easier for small-business owners. It automates business workflows, has great invoicing features, offers free inventory software, automatically imports bank feeds and helps you stay on top of receivables and payables.

The software product is ideal for very small businesses — especially those that already use other Zoho applications for inventory, invoicing or customer relationship management.

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Features

Among Zoho Books’ features are:

• Accounts receivable and accounts payable tracking, including recurring invoice and expense creation, payment reminders and receipt scanning. Below is a screenshot of a bill within the software product.

• Auto-generated reports that are sent to your inbox weekly, monthly or quarterly.

• Automated workflows, which let you program Zoho Books to handle recurring tasks (like automatically billing customers and using bank rules to categorize transactions) whenever preset criteria are met.

• Client and vendor portals provide a dedicated space for users’ customers and vendors to view and manage transactions.

• Audit trails let you view and track the history of changes made to any transaction.

• Imported bank feeds make the reconciliation process easier.

• Mileage tracking.

• The ability to track expenses and send estimates.

Customer support

Small-business owners using Zoho Books’ free plan have access to email support eight hours per day, five days per week. Those paying for plans also get chat and phone support. If they need more than that, users enrolled in paid plans can pay extra for 24-hour support five days per week.

Free trial

New users can try out a 14-day free trial of Zoho Books’ Premium plan, the highest-tier plan with the most features, before subscribing.

Zoho Books is available under three standard pricing plans that are offered on a monthly or yearly basis (with a discount for annual subscribers). There's also a free version.

Zoho Finance suite integrations

Zoho Books is part of the Zoho Finance suite, which is designed to help businesses manage their finance and operations. Other applications in the suite include:

• Zoho Invoice for businesses that require simple invoicing software.

• Zoho Expense, which automates expense reports, streamlines approvals and helps you make swift reimbursements.

• Zoho Inventory, which includes stock management, order fulfillment and inventory control software.

• Zoho Subscription, which helps businesses handle recurring billing and manage subscriptions.

• Zoho Checkout, which enables users to build a custom, branded payment page and accept payments without a website.

Low cost

Zoho Books’ free plan is especially attractive to micro-business owners or small-business owners on a tight budget. While you would have to purchase QuickBooks Online's $80-per-month plan to access in-house inventory management, for example, all Zoho Books plans include free inventory tracking for businesses with 50 orders or less per month. And none of its plans exceed $70 per month (not taking add-ons into account).

Limited scalability

Zoho Books’ highest-tier plan caps users at 10. In comparison, Xero allows unlimited users in all plan tiers and QuickBooks Online supports up to 25 users in its most expensive plan. And when it comes to integrations outside of the Zoho Finance suite, the product’s third-party options are lacking.