Zoho Books Review 2023

The bottom line: Zoho Books is an affordable accounting solution for freelancers and small-business owners who want easy software automation and a beautiful, user-friendly interface. For $15 a month (or $20 if you pay month to month), Zoho's accounting solution, Zoho Books, helps you track business expenses, send invoices, and accept online payments. It also automates as many of those tasks as possible, which means less time entering data and more time steering your business towards success.

However, while Zoho Books syncs nicely with the full Zoho suite of products, it doesn't have as many third-party integrations as competitors like Xero and QuickBooks Online. Most importantly, it doesn't have any easy integrations with payroll software. If you have employees and want to cut out manual data entry between your accounting and payroll programs, Zoho Books probably shouldn't be your first choice.

If you want to spend as little time as possible keeping your books, Zoho's accounting features make it a great fit—as long as you don't have many employees. Why? Because Zoho Books doesn't have an easy payroll solution. Other popular accounting software providers either offer their own payroll product or sync with payroll providers like Gusto. Zoho doesn't.

Practically speaking, Zoho's lack of payroll syncing means you'll use separate payroll software to calculate employees' wages. Then you'll re-enter that same information in your Zoho Books chart of accounts to ensure your business finances are accurate.

If this sounds like a hassle, well, that's because it is. As a result, we can't really recommend Zoho Books to companies with more than a handful of employees. But if you work for yourself, employ two or three other people, and don't mind re-entering payroll information (or paying an accountant to do it for you), Zoho's automation, price, and ease of use make it a great choice.

The Standard plan does miss a few key features that businesses with inventory require, including sales orders and purchase orders. It doesn’t include built-in time tracking or billing. Most notably, it doesn’t include workflow automation: you’ll need the Professional plan to start capitalizing on workflows.

The Professional plan starts at $40 a month ($50 when paid month to month) and ups your yearly invoice limit to 10,000 invoices. It also adds two more users, bringing your total to 5, and adds bill payment features (up to 10,000 bills per organization per year).

Along with bill pay, Professional includes these features:

• Sales orders and purchase orders
• Sales and purchase approvals
• Vendor credits
• Multi-currency handling
• Time tracking

And, like we said above, the Professional plan adds 10 automated workflows to your software.

The Premium plan, Zoho's priciest, costs $60 a month when billed annually or $70 if billed monthly. The plan expands your user number to 10 and limits your yearly invoices and bill payments to 25,000 each. It also adds some business website features (like a custom domain) and integration with Zoho Sign (Zoho’s digital signature app). Finally, with Premium, you get up to 200 custom, automated workflows.

Zoho’s cloud-based accounting software has one major flaw that makes it hard to recommend to businesses with employees. Apart from Texas and California, Zoho doesn't offer payroll integration in the United States. With Zoho Books, you'll have to manually enter your payroll data into your accounting software every payday, which works against Zoho Books' time-saving automation in a big way. So if you manage employees, we recommend you look to a competitor like Xero or Wave instead.

And while Zoho does integrate with other Zoho products, it doesn’t integrate with many third-party apps. For instance, Zoho Books syncs with Zoho CRM for CRM integration, but you won’t find many third-party CRM providers that sync with Zoho. (On the flip side, QuickBooks does integrate with some non-accounting Zoho products, including Zoho CRM.)

A recent pricing update means that Zoho Books is no longer one of the cheapest accounting software options out there. With plans starting at $15 a month and maxing out at $70 a month, it’s now more expensive than both Xero and FreshBooks. (QuickBooks is still more expensive than all three options, however.)

And while Zoho Books’s cheapest plan includes a chart of accounts with journal entries, it doesn’t automatically generate those journal entries. Since you make a journal entry every time you debit or credit an account, we can’t recommend the Standard plan unless you record just a few transactions a week.

Like the super-popular QuickBooks, Zoho's cloud-based accounting software is hyper intuitive—ideal for business owners new to the wide world of accounting. Zoho Books is also a touch cheaper: if you pay annually, Zoho starts at $15 a month.

Plus, extra users cost just $2.50 per user per month. That’s not quite as good as Xero’s unlimited users, but it’s certainly better than both QuickBooks (which doesn't let you add extra users) and FreshBooks (which charges $10 a month for extra users).

Zoho is already a user-friendly, highly automated platform. Its two more expensive plans take that automation to the next level by including automated workflows (or Workflow Rules). These workflows let you automate tedious, repetitive tasks, and they’re fully customizable to your business. While the cheapest plan doesn’t include any workflow automations, it does automatically update your bank feeds, allow for bulk updates, and set recurring expenses.

Finally, Zoho Books has a solid mobile accounting app that works well for both Apple and Android users. On Apple’s App Store, the app has 4.8 stars out of 5. The app is more popular among Android users, though: on Google Play, it averages a rating of 4.5 stars from more than 7,000 users. No matter what type of smartphone or tablet you use, though, the Zoho Books app lets you send invoices and track your business’s finances on the go.

Zoho Books is a standalone accounting software solution, but Zoho offers an entire suite of products that integrate with each other and can manage most aspects of your business. For instance, there’s Zoho Projects for project management, Zoho Inventory for inventory management, Zoho CRM for customer relationship management, and Zoho Expense for expense tracking.

Of course, some of these features are included in Zoho Books, such as expense tracking and invoicing. If you have Zoho Books, you don’t need an additional Zoho Invoice subscription. (On the other hand, if you don’t need a full suite of accounting features, Zoho Expense and Zoho Invoice both have lower starting prices than Zoho Books.)

Most Zoho products cost an additional fee, though some (like Zoho Invoice) have free plans with limited functions. If you want all of Zoho’s apps in one package, Zoho One bundles the whole Zoho suite of products into one cohesive platform.