Zoho Books Review: Key Features
Zoho Books’s features and integrations are one big reason it stands out as our top pick for the best accounting software. Here’s how it fared across each of our feature-centric research categories.
Core accounting tools
Zoho Books offers a terrific set of features for core accounting needs. You’ll get fully functional tools for invoicing and quoting, tax preparation, journal entries, and reconciliation. Zoho Books doesn’t support tax forecasting and planning functions, but that’s not a huge loss in comparison to other top software, since FreeAgent was the only other competitor to include these tools.
Time tracking is supported as well, so you’ll be able to include accurate hourly billing on your invoices without the need for manual calculations. The platform automatically calculates mileage on expenses, which not every accounting software can handle.
Financial planning tools
Zoho Books delivers everything users might need for forecasting and budgeting, with functions for logging all upcoming monthly bills and expenses, in addition to cash flow projections and budget creation. Users also get inventory management and compliance support.
The platform’s reporting tools were very good, though not completely perfect: Zoho Books won’t let users create new reports from scratch, forcing them to create or modify a report template instead.
Still, Zoho Books comes out ahead in one element of reports. It offers the best importing and exporting function by far since it supports CSV, TSV, and XLS files alike. In contrast, rivals like QuickBooks and Xero only support CSV – and Xero actually gave us an error message when we tested CSV importing.
