Wednesday, August 20, 2014

The great cloud accounting software search of 2014 (part 6 - the final)

This is a continuation of my search from the previous posts (part 1part 2part 3part 3bpart 4, part 5).

After much effort, I finally arrived at a stand-off between Zoho books or Xero in combination with Freshbooks.

To get to a final decision, I decided to make a list of our various accounting requirements, weight each of these on a scale of 1 to 10 depending on how important the requirement is, then score each of the options on each requirement, again on a scale of 1 to 10.

The requirements I rated against included a long list that I'm not going to bore you with, but will provide a short summary of significant differences. The areas where there were significant differences are listed below.

Areas where Zoho had the upperhand (note that in some of these Xero/Freshbooks also has a solution, but for some reason or other I just found Zoho's better or easier to use):

  • Visibility over which projects have unbilled time
  • Google apps integrated login
  • Consulting rates definitions/setup

Areas where Xero/Freshbooks had the upperhand (again note that in some of these Zoho also has a solution, but for some reason or other I just found Xero/Freshbooks's better or easier to use):

  • Export features to Excel/Google docs
  • Sending customer statements in bulk
  • Automatic exchange rate
  • Fixed asset register
  • Automated depreciation
Ultimately the combination of Xero and Freshbooks advantages outweighed Zoho and the final score on my whole list of requirements was 1005 for Xero/Freshbooks and 966 for Zoho. It was therefore a pretty close contest, but the bottom line was that Xero in combination with Freshbooks provides a slightly better fit for our requirements than Zoho.

To make the decision a little more difficult Zoho will cost us $24/month whereas Xero/Freshbooks will cost about $240 per month initially, but will grow by $10 per month with every additional employee we add on Freshbooks. I eventually decided to stick with my decision on Xero/Freshbooks though, since I did decide from the outset that as long as I stay within budget, I would prefer a better solution over a cheaper one.

Thus our journey with Xero and Freshbooks begins. 


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