Wednesday, August 13, 2014

The great cloud accounting software search of 2014 (part 5)

This is a continuation of my search from the previous posts (part 1part 2part 3part 3b, part 4).

Last night I conducted a standard test of a few typical accounting functions that I would use to further eliminate candidates from my list of Zoho, Xero + Harvest, and Kashflow + Freshbooks.

In the process I realised that there is an additional integration option of Xero + Freshbooks. I had not considered this earlier because for time tracking options with Xero, I had consulted the list of Xero partners in this section on the Xero website where for some reason Freshbooks is not listed. When I looked at the integration settings in Xero there was a section for Freshbooks though, so I decided to add this as an additional option and this brought the list back up to 4.

The standard test took much the same format as my previous test, although I put much less emphasis on time, more emphasis on accuracy, and the tests themselves were invoicing and accounting functions rather than time-logging. The results came in as follows:
  • Kashflow + Freshbooks: 22.5
  • Zoho: 52
  • Xero + Harvest: 50
  • Xero + Freshbooks: 53
Kashflow-Freshbooks integration gave me an issue whereby a USD invoice was incorrectly integrated to Kashflow as a ZAR invoice. It should be noted that Kashflow's Freshbooks integration is still in beta. This issue severely affected the score for this option as can be seen above. This is something that we will use regularly. As long as there are other options available that do this properly, the Kashflow-Freshbooks option is therefore disqualified. I have logged the issue with Kashflow so they're aware, but for now I have to move on. If they resolve it shortly or come back with a satisfactory answer (perhaps I was being a doofus) I might reconsider.

I've also decided to disqualify the Xero-Harvest option based on a combination of the above and price. Harvest will work out considerably more expensive (±$200 per month) than Freshbooks (±$60 per month) for our organisation and from the testing I've done so for Freshbooks is a marginally better fit for our requirements anyway. It therefore doesn't make sense to consider the Harvest option any further. Again, nothing bad in Harvest, it just seems in our case Freshbooks will be a slightly better fit.

And then there were two:
  • Zoho
  • Xero-Freshbooks
To be continued...

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