Freshbooks vs. Quickbooks

July 7, 2014

As a small business owner, it’s important to keep track of your day-to-day business activities. There are many available softwares for you to choose from, but which is the best?

Quickbooks

Quickbooks dominates the market as the most popular accounting program – your accountants and bookkeepers use it, but is it good for the busy small business owner?

The Good
The Quickbooks Online Accounting Software did a major design overhaul in early 2014 and this greatly improved the overall user experience. The system looks prettier with few options to help simplify your experience. When you register, Quickbooks will customize your options based on your industry and your competitor’s trends. Invoices can now be viewed and tracked online so you can see when users opened an issued invoice and sent payment.

The Bad
Quickbooks provides three online packages, but only the most expensive package contains the necessary tools for your day-to-day business operations. The first two packages contain limited features, many of which most small business owners will never need.

You can send your client’s an invoice, but they are not able to pay it online. You can request a credit card number and store it, but there is no way to charge that credit card without a secondary system. As a busy business owner, we want our clients to pay us without any hassle.

The Lowdown
Quickbooks may be the largest online accounting software that most small business owners use, but it’s not because it’s the best option available. The new system update greatly improved the usability, but the confusing charts and lack of options within the basic packages makes this a software more for accountants and less for small business owners.

Freshbooks

Freshbooks is a Toronto-based company that markets itself as “Accounting made for you, the non-accountant”.

The Good
Customizing Freshbooks for your business is fast and easy – they know how to keep things simple.

Freshbooks automates your business activity so you have less work to do. Start accepting payments online right away and track when your invoices were paid. You can set up Freshbooks to import all your expenses from your credit cards and bank accounts, automatically giving you an accurate overview of your business standings.

Like Quickbooks, Freshbooks has a three-tier package. Unlike Quickbooks, all packages have the same features – you are only limited by the number of clients so that you can upgrade as your business grows.

If you ever run into any problems or have any accounting questions, Freshbooks has a fantastic support system in place. When you call over the phone, you speak directly with an in-house staff member. There is no electronic answering system or wait time.

The Bad
Freshbooks keeps things simple, but with the simplicity it may lack some features. Instead of setting up penalties for late invoice payments, Freshbooks is missing the ability to set up bonuses for early payments.

Freshbooks connections with third-party platforms seems to be dated. The connection with Stripe, for example does not allow you to accept payments from another currency. Freshbooks has a great connection with the Basecamp Project Manager platform, but it will not connect to the new Basecamp.

The Lowdown
No online accounting system is perfect, but so far Freshbooks is the closest to greatness. As an automated system that does most of the work for you, Freshbooks is made for the busy small business owner.

When it comes down to it, Quickbooks may be the most popular software but Freshbooks has a range of features much more suitable for a small business owner. Check out Freshbooks here.