Zoho Books is a full-fledged accounting solution meant for small and mid-scale businesses. It assists them in tracking the expenses of their business, sending invoices, and accepting online payments. Apart from that, it also helps automate several tasks like data entry which results in saving time so that you can concentrate on maximizing profits.
What Is Zoho Books?
Zoho Books is a one-stop solution to manage all your accounting tasks as well as organize your transactions. It offers a secure and centralized location to store all your company's invoices and bills, control spending, reconcile bank statements, eliminate any GST compliance-related issues, oversee projects, and more.
Being GST-compliant, it takes care of your end-to-end accounting and allows you to manage and run every aspect of your business.
Who Can Use Zoho Books?
Zoho Books caters to different kinds of businesses that include:
- Small Businesses: As an owner of a small business, you need to manage your business plans, design marketing strategies, strengthen your customer engagement, manage cash, etc. Therefore, Zoho Books assists you in recording and analyzing financial information in a detailed manner.
- Mid-Market Businesses: Zoho Books also helps mid-market businesses to manage their multiple branches and numerous transactions on a daily basis. Apart from that, it helps with scalability, automation, and collaboration. It also assists in creating financial records for your organization and storing them in the cloud in real time. With Zoho Books, businesses can get connected visibility across different departments, while giving you strong control over your operations.
Popular Features of Zoho Books
- Invoicing: Zoho Books helps businesses generate professional-looking GST-compliant invoices with their company logo.
- Customer Portal: Using the customer portal, you can share your recent transactions, capture feedback as well as let your customers pay in bulk.
- Bills: Provides advanced billing and invoicing management modules to its users, allowing them to send customized bills to their vendors for due payment.
- Sales Orders: Using the sales order module, confirm all your sales before the final shipment, keep the team updated, avoid delivery errors, and more.
- GST: Using this online GST software, stay compliant and updated. It enables you to manage all your finances and file online GST online from a single platform.
- Audit Trail: This enables your business to keep track of every financial activity and maintain a detailed log to prevent any fraud and keep your data secured.
- Reporting: Provides 50+ customizable reports to cover all the payables, receivable amounts, and inventory items. This is to convert data into meaningful information.
- Documents: Enables you to keep all your documents in a centralized location as well as attach them to transactions. It has an in-built auto-scan option that extracts all the vital information from scanned documents and instantly creates sales/purchase orders, bills, invoices, etc.
- Mobile: Offers a dedicated mobile app to manage finances, track inventories, access documents, etc. all from anywhere, on the go.
- Estimates: Allows you to create on-the-spot estimates, add contact details, prices, item details, etc. and send quotes to your clients.
- Expenses: Provides a single platform to its users within which they can keep track of their whole business outlay, track expenses, categorize them, as well as bill them to clients.
- Banking: Users can manage multiple bank accounts. Also, the software is compatible with various online payment gateways like PayPal. This allows you to fetch bank transactions and reconcile all accounts.
- Inventory: Zoho Books provides complete inventory management which involves monitoring stock levels, managing orders, tracking batches, stock expiry, and more.
- Purchase Orders: Allows you to effortlessly generate purchase orders. It maintains a detailed sales history and helps you convert purchases into bills.
- Vendor Portal: Offers a dedicated vendor portal, enabling the vendors to view and access their own transactions and manage all their invoices.
How Much Does Zoho Books Cost?
Zoho Books offers six different plans to its users, each comprising distinct features specific to different business needs and priced differently.
Plans |
Pricing |
Free |
Rs 0/ month |
Standard |
Rs 749/ month |
Professional |
Rs 1,499/ month |
Premium |
Rs 2,999/ month |
Elite |
Rs 4,999/ month |
Ultimate |
Rs 7,999/ month |
Zoho Books Free Plan: The Free plan of Zoho Books is an entry-level offering that is suitable for businesses with revenue less than 25 Lakhs/annum. It offers 1 GSTIN, Zoho app integration, and email-based customer support. Moreover, it offers some other basic features like a customer portal, sales/purchase orders, reports, e-way bills, automatic payment reminders, recurring invoices, an audit trail, and more.
Zoho Books Paid Plans: Apart from the Free plan, Zoho Books offers 5 different paid plans to its users, namely Standard, Professional, Premium, Elite, and Ultimate. Users have the option to select from any of these plans as per their business requirements. Some of the most common features offered in the paid plans include integration with Uber, Zendesk, Zoho People, Zoho Projects, email/voice-based customer support, invoicing, project invoices, reporting tags, custom reports, and more.
Pros & Cons of Zoho Books
- User-friendly and intuitive UI
- Multiple users in paid plans
- 24X7 Customer Support (weekdays)
- Multiple expenses/sales form types
- Customizable reports
- Availability of free plan
- Robust mobile app
- online project management app
- Limited payroll integration and syncing. It’s limited to certain areas like Texas, California, etc.
- Advanced features are only available in premium plans
- Language options to connect with clients in different countries are limited
Zoho Books Support
- Zoho Books offers 24-hour unlimited support, 5 days a week via email or by using the built-in live chat options, or over the phone via a toll-free number.
- It also offers support via different options that can be found on the website. There’s help documentation, blogs, FAQs, migration guides, business guides, videos, forums, and more which adds extra weight to the overall support structure of Zoho Books.
Zoho Books System Requirements/ Technical Specifications
Zoho Books, being a cloud-based platform, can be accessed over the web anytime, anywhere. It also supports multiple integrations and can be customized as per your business needs. It can run smoothly on both desktop as well as mobile platforms.
- Desktop platforms: Web Applications, Windows, MacOS, Linux, and more.
- Mobile platforms: Android & iOS
Zoho Books Alternative & Competitors
The top competitors of Zoho Books include FreshBooks and QuickBooks and hence we have compared all three of them in terms of starting price, free trial, expense tracking, customer support, and more. The comparison here, is as follows:
Features |
Zoho Books |
FreshBooks |
Starting Price |
Rs.749/month, per organization |
Rs. 563/month, per organization |
Free Trial |
14 days |
30 Days |
Expense Tracking |
Yes |
Yes |
Inventory Management |
Yes |
No |
Mileage Tracking |
Yes |
Yes |
Customer Support |
Phone, live chat, email support, website resources support |
Phone, live chat, email support, help center, and knowledge base. |
Techjockey’s Verdict
Zoho Books, as a cloud-based accounting solution, gives you access to a variety of tools for managing your company's financial records. Hence, if you're tired of performing recurring tasks manually, we recommend giving Zoho Books' accounting platform a try. It comes with key features like a customer portal, vendor portal, audit trail, analytics & reporting, and more to assist you with the overall accounting functions of your organization.
You will benefit from its low per-user charge and time-saving options because of automation and user customization. Besides that, Zoho Books outperforms in customer service, with real-time phone and email support, live chat, etc.