Zoho Books

What is Zoho

Zoho Books is an American Variant of the Online Accounting Software. A historical profile of the company can be found here. Basically Zoho has been around for about 13 years and is now breaking out into on-line business, productivity and collaboration applications. Zoho itself because of its international flavour has no support for GST/VAT tax codes so must be setup manually and currently no support for importing qif/ofc or csv files into bank accounts. The dashboard is easy to read and has a summary of customer invoices outstanding/payable a graph showing the P&L as well as bank accounts with running totals displayed.  An Accountwatch-list can be manually configured.

Features

All in all this product supports double entry accounting giving accountants the opportunity to record manual adjustments for depreciation, and the program also supports multi-currency transactions and time tracking for those projects with multiple users involved. Online payment methods such as paypal, google check out and authorise.net are supported. Handy for the freelancer is the ability to track reimbursable expense’s that can then be invoiced back to the customer. Additional users can be added @ $5 per month. A simple program well designed with easy access to financial reports and from first look seems to be easy to navigate around.

Problems

Well what are the problems? Well like all on-line accounting systems there is no support for Perpetual Inventory (it must be really hard to do) , no payroll and no option to create multiple pay anyone transactions (ABA) files.  Considering this is an international variant that should be a given I guess. Zoho has the functionality to run GST reports but does not have the ability to run a BAS Worksheet such as Xero or MYOB LiveAccounts. I personally feel the real benefit of Zoho is the abaility to add-on functionality as time goes by and organic growth occurs within the business. Zoho sells and markets a CRM program that can fit over the top of Zoho Books as well as their many and varied online apps.

Conclusion

At the end of the day if it was my $25 I think I would be leaning to a more tried and tested variant but these guys are one’s to watch as online developments can take place quickly and without us in Australia realising what is happening. Feel free to leave comments regarding this post or drop us a line on the contacts page.