An Honest QuickBooks Review: Small Business Accounting

As a small business owner choosing the right accounting software for your business is a very important decision. This cannot be stressed enough because there are many accounting platforms out there, but they are not all equal. They may also not be compatible with your business as an accounting solution.

Intuit QuickBooks is a popular accounting software that is widely recognised as one of the world’s best for small businesses. They offer QuickBooks Online (QBO) and QuickBooks Desktop but today we will concentrate on providing a QuickBooks Online review.

Join us as we give small business owners an honest look at QBO features and discuss the effectiveness of the platform’s new automation capabilities. By the end of the article you will be able to confidently decide whether QBO is for your business or not. Let’s begin discussing the basic features.

Cloud-Based Accounting Software

Let’s begin with what really opens up a world of possibilities for SBOs using this software. Unlike QB desktop, which can only be loaded on a single computer, QBO gives you the capability of accessing the platform anywhere in the world, as long as you have your log-in details.

This allows you to deal with bills, and payments anytime that it’s convenient for you to do so. It also means you have integration with the mobile app (which we’ll discuss shortly), allowing you to scan receipts and review details on the go. If you want to do this at 6am or at midnight somewhere in a hotel room while you travel – no problem.

Also, most SBOs pick this software so they can manage their own accounting. However, if you’ve employed a bookkeeper or accountant to check the accuracy of your transactions and sign off your financials, you’ll be able to add them to your QBO account, and they’ll have their own log-in credentials.

If your bookkeeper is in another town, this is exceptionally helpful because you can add documents for the bookkeeper or accountant to review. Everyone will be on the same page, and gone are the days of sending paper prints to be reviewed by the bookkeeper. This feature makes it so easy for everyone to work when it’s convenient.

Mobile App

QuickBooks Online has a nifty and easy to use mobile app which can be integrated with your small business account. You will be able to keep a constant watch on your finances as it provides your bank account balances, invoice amounts, outstanding accounts receivable, and payments that haven’t been processed.

This powerful app will also allow you to create invoices, expenses, scan receipts for review, add vendors and customers, and receive a payment. It’s QBO in your pocket 24/7.

Now would be a good time to comment on one of the best features for SBOs. The ability to scan receipts with your mobile phone camera.

Scan receipts

Remember the days when you tried your best to keep all the receipts together somewhere so that you don’t lose them before you load them onto whatever system you used? Well, that’s no longer a problem.

With the mobile app, you can use your phone’s camera to snap the receipt as soon as you’ve paid. QBO’s new automation capability will read the receipt and categorize the receipt for you. All you’ll have to do is review the information and approve the receipt. QBO has really upped their game by adding automation – this is even available on the most basic subscription (Simple Start). The receipts will be kept and linked to the transaction where your bookkeeper can review it later for tax deductions.

With a decent enough smartphone you’ll find your images are crystal clear and even when you have an unsteady hand, QBO is pretty accurate at reading the information from the receipt. The categorization lets the platform down a bit, but we’ll discuss that soon enough.

If you’re concerned about security – don’t be. You can use your mobile phone’s biometric log-in to access your account and keep others out.

Connect Bank Accounts

QBO allows you to connect all the bank accounts related to your business. This feature allows all bank transactions (including credit card transactions) to be categorized for your approval. This will save you a lot of time and effort because you won’t have to manually load each transaction into QuickBooks.

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Categorizing of transactions: Accounting automation

Once all your transactions have been pulled into QuickBooks from your bank accounts, QBO will categorize each transaction. This would be a good place to discuss the effectiveness of QBOs new automation capability. It’s fair to say that it’s not bad. It can pull quite a bit of information into the system, and with a bit of tweaking and creating of rules you can get the categorization correct.

However, this will require some knowledge of accounting principles, Chart of Accounts and tax rules to get the system to correctly classify and log your transactions. Even then you won’t be able to take your hands completely off the wheel, as you’ll have to review the accuracy of the transactions. This will still be faster than loading it manually!

QBO Add-on for better data extraction
Is there another way to get around this? The answer is yes! There are a number of add-ons for QBO. One such add-on, Envoice, promises highly accurate data extraction. This applies to bills and receipt data. Envoice applies its automation logic to taxes, items, expenses, and categories. They also offer an extra service of ‘human-in-the-loop’ verification, which promises 99.9% accuracy.

What would be the reasons for purchasing this add-on as a small business owner? Well, accuracy, efficiency, and peace of mind. Knowing that all your transactions are being correctly classified and categorized is the backbone of accounting. It will also prevent you from having to look for transactions that have been incorrectly posted when you reconcile your bank accounts.

It’s also an economical option. QBO’s most basic subscription (Simple Start) costs around $35 a month. Envoice costs $7 a month. That’s less than the next paid subscription from QBO at $65 a month (Essentials), which doesn’t give you better automation, just more features and users. But that’s not the issue – the accuracy of data extraction is, and you can solve that by adding on Envoice at a fraction of the cost.

Also Envoice becomes your complete pre-accounting solution, and that’s where all the hard work lies – with capturing information and correct categorization. And what’s more Envoice can help with pre-accounting workflows, expense tracking, and routing approvals to the correct people.

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Create Customized Invoices

The ability to customize invoices in QBO is a huge plus for the platform. You can add your company logo, change the color of your invoices to match your brand, email your invoices directly to the customer, and add customized messages for your customer.

Get paid faster with QBO payments

Customers can settle up their accounts in multiple ways (credit or debit, ACH, Apple Pay®, PayPal, or Venmo) depending on the subscription they have. You can also accept QuickBooks payments from online customers and face-to-face with the Gopayment app.

QBO will track customer online payments for every invoice (even if it’s partially paid) and will let you know what invoices are outstanding. If you accept payments into your bank account, QBO will ask you if you want to match the payment to an invoice once it is pulled in QBO from your bank account. For small business owners, this is a really powerful benefit. To be on top of all outstanding invoices in your business hour-to-hour puts the power back in your hands to manage your business finances.

Expense management

Managing income and expenses in a small business is everything. QBO helps you with this task by categorizing expenses, and tracking what you are spending vs. the income (invoices).

We previously discussed how easy QBO makes it to keep track of every receipt by scanning it instantly into the mobile app, and importing transactions from your bank accounts. QuickBooks automatically sorts expenses into categories to keep things organized, which means every expense is accounted for. An added benefit of expense management is that QBO will track your expenses that qualify for tax deductions all year long, helping you to qualify for as many allowable deductions as possible.

If you’re more than a one man show and you have employee expenses to pay, they can snap receipts via the mobile app and send it to you for approval. If you remember, we discussed the add-on Envoice. Well, Envoice has full expense management capability at no additional cost ($7 for small business), and the platform will superpower employee reimbursements. Think smart because for a few dollars more you get many advanced features that will help you scale your business in the future.

QuickBooks Dashboard – A bird’s eye view of your small business

That’s it for the basic features that all small business owners can use to keep their finances on track. Perhaps a quick mention of the QBO dashboard is appropriate before we move on to some QBO advanced features. The dashboard is a snapshot of how your business is doing financially. You’ll get valuable insights into bank account balances, accounts payable, accounts receivable, and expenses. You’ll also be able to view your cash flow trend and your profit and loss for the month.

Now let’s take a look at two advanced features before we conclude the review.

Advanced Features

Inventory Management

For advanced features like inventory tracking you will have to subscribe to higher plans such as Plus or Advanced. If the ability to track inventory is necessary for your business then you will be looking at paying around $99 a month for QBO. Medium sized businesses that have large volumes of inventory can still use QBQ as their accounting platform. You’ll always know what’s in stock, and receive real-time updates and inventory reports.

Project Profitability Tracking

In order to track project profitability, you’ll need to subscribe to the Plus or Advanced plan. You’ll get a bird’s eye view of all your projects, all in one place. Be able to easily track labor costs, payroll, and expenses with job costing and see project profitability at a glance with clear dashboards.

Review Conclusion

That brings us to the end of our honest review of QBO for small business accounting. Our assessment is that QBO is good value for money and provides you with powerful features that help you run your business more efficiently, providing loads of powerful capabilities that will save you time and money in the long run (including on tax deductions).

QBO has a slight disadvantage on the accounting automation side, but this can be quickly and easily remedied with the Envoice add-on. The only other difficulty that SBOs may encounter is the initial set-up and if you have a lack of accounting skills you will need to watch many of the QBO tutorials to get on track and troubleshoot problems. Other than that, QBO is a good choice for small businesses.