FreeAgent is an cloud-based accounting system designed for small businesses and freelancers. FreeAgent supports many core accounting features and bank reconciliation, payroll, tax management, project level accounting, and multiple currency support. It is mobile-accessible, and integrates with many apps.
$13.50
per month
Zoho Books
Score8.9 out of 10
N/A
Zoho Books is an accounting solution that is designed to help small businesses manage their finances. This solution includes dashboards and a wide variety of reports. Business users can automate tasks and set up custom workflows.
Zoho offers a 14 day free trial.
$20
per month
Pricing
FreeAgent
Zoho Books
Editions & Modules
FreeAgent
$13.50
per month
FreeAgent
$135
per year
Free
$0
For businesses with turnover <50K USD per annum
Standard
$20
per month per org
Professional
$50
per month per org
Premium
$70
per month per org
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
FreeAgent
Zoho Books
Free Trial
Yes
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
—
Zoho Books is available for both monthly and yearly plans. Users who sign up for the annual plan get a discount.
For micro and small business it is a great solution. The new requirements for MTD for landlords could also be met with this software. Groups and more complex businesses could not use the accounts and tax returns features, however they still could use it for bookkeeping and then export the data to other tax and accounts production software.
Accounting! As you'd expect. Makes it much simpler andmore cost effective. In-coming and out-goings are recorded and assigned to projects and accounts. My accountant can access my books and reconcile so much more easily than trawling through spreadsheets.
Time billing - time spent on projects/client work is recorded and is ready to be invoiced as required. Saves so much time and prevents inaccuracies.
Invoicing - again, it should do this well and it does. Non payment reminders are automatic and clients have no excuses for not knowing the status of their account.
Account dashboard - gives me an instant overview of the health of the business (am I on track to meet my yearly targets) and my accounts.
Zoho Books invoicing and receipting features are second to none. We find it easy to quickly invoice clients and add items to their bills and also for our own receipting internally.
The accounting features are great for our accounting team to be able to see where we are financially and how the business is doing.
The ability to add contacts and run a mini CRM channel with clients within Zoho is invaluable. Since we use this in conjunction with our other CRM channels, it helps to have a centralized place to follow up and see through a sales funnel.
Zoho Books allows us to take payments from clients around the globe a feature we didn't have when we used another accounting system.
The pricing for Zoho Books is fairly reasonable for an SME organization which is a great for us as it pays itself back many times over every month.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Reporting on financials, time tracking and project status is a little poor. It's adequate for what what we need, but would be great to see more advanced features.
API is quite closed so cannot integrate with our other project management tools.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Zoho Books is only available in Texas and California. There is no integration allowed for paying employee expenses. The absolute worst aspect is the fact that if you make even the slightest error in data input there is no backing up. You cannot undo an error.
The system does not allow change once implemented, so you must get every one of your beginning balances perfect. The practice of Journal Entries is cumbersome. When reconciling, Zoho Books has adopted a number of required steps that significantly overcomplicate reconciliation using practices that are not consistent with general accounting principles in the US.
On the customer side, you must look in two places to see the beginning balance and the current receivables that might exist for current invoicing.
The way the system works, you must avoid having much trust with the balances depicted. So far, it appears that Zoho Books uses what we called in school "that new math."
It would be terrifying to rely on this bookkeeping system to support an IRS Audit. The system violates too many fundamental accounting principles.
The software is used by so few people that there is concern that we might never find a skilled bookkeeper.
It is a great software that does everything we need for small business clients. It allows to keep the books in a cloud from bookkeeping to accounts production and tax returns, all in one software. There are no major drawbacks and I would highly recommend it for most of our clients.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
The support team feels very disjointed. We have filtered through a number of "lead" contacts and are frequently spammed by other Zoho members. Once getting an appropriate support contact on the phone - the team is very helpful, it just takes a lot of hoop jumping to get there. We actually unsubscribed from their support package as we were not getting the value we were looking for.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
I have used and tested out many other systems. I was looking at Xero for my accounting system but at the time I chose FreeAgent because of the way it handles the recording of dividends and the inbuilt time recording. The others I trialed were good and many of them cheaper. FreeAgent best suited my requirements at the time.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
We had a lot of problems with Exact Online, support-wise and price-wise. So Zoho Books wins on every point there. While Exact offers way more options, it tends to be really slow... and complex. Again Zoho Books wins. If you want an easy-to-use tool and not pay a lot of money, or if you are a small administration office with a few clients, this tool will be perfect for you.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Professional and uniform offering providing great confident customer service. My clients love it, whether they use it a little or a lot. It's a great piece of software - while sophisticated, it's straightforward to use.
Time saving and efficient use of my team's time. Being able to easily share and compare work / tasks.
Integration: Zoho Books offers out of the box integrations to extend the functionality and connect with the applications you love like MailChimp, Microsoft Outlook, PandaDoc, and Quickbooks, etc.
Flexibility makes Zoho Books great!
Since I can use forecast reports, I can create customizable sales forecast data from the dashboard to accurately measure revenue forecasts and establish sales quotas.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
