Account — bookkeeping where are we?

5 min readNov 22, 2022

Every business needs to properly record financial transactions. This is because, the overall financial effects of transactions determines how a business is doing. However, it becomes overwhelming, to manage financial transactions ranging from debits, credits, loans, etc.

For this reason, various teams have developed solutions, to easily record and maintain financial transactions. In this article we’ll explore 4 solutions that businesses can benefit from, to easily implement bookkeeping.

Zoho Books

Zoho books is a single secure location to keep up with your company’s bills and invoices, reconcile your bank statements, control your spending and oversee projects. With Zoho books, you can manage your finances and automates business workflows.

Zoho books provides the following features:

Invoicing: Zoho books contains an invoicing platform, where you can create customised invoices and get paid faster with integrated online payment options. There’s also an estimates portal, which allows users generate quotes, and later convert them to invoices.
Bills: The bills platform allows you to generate bills, to track the payment you owe your vendors.
Sales and Purchase Order: This feature lets you communicate your requirement to the vendor, as well as send sales orders and confirm each sale before you ship to customers.
Client and Vendor Portal: While you can monitor your business transactions via a dashboard, your clients and vendors can also view and manage their transactions in one place.
Tax and Banking: Zoho books provides the ability to keep track of your business tax liability. You can also fetch bank transactions, categorise them and reconcile your bank accounts with ease.
Inventory: What is a great bookkeeping application without provision for inventory? Zoho books, provides a means to record and manage inventory, in order to keep your business stocked.

Zoho books is built around automating workflow, and the ability to get real-time monitoring for business financial transactions. It has plans, from free to ultimate. While Zoho books is an exclusive accounting software for all your bookkeeping needs, teams who want only an account receivables solution can use Zoho invoice.

Wave Accounting

Wave is an online accounting platform that allows small businesses, freelancers and consultants to manage their financial transactions. Just like Zoho, this software also provides a dashboard, which gives you a quick look at the most important financial information for your business.

Here’s the breakdown of Wave accounting features:

Invoice and Receipt: In the Accounting > Transaction tab, users can upload receipt to Wave accounting. With Wave’s invoicing software, you can create, customize, and send professional invoices.
Expense Tracking: Expense tracking is an important part of accounting. For instance, Wave accounting helps you track your business expenses by categorizing them to gain insights from your spending.
Inventory: Wave accounting provides a means to record inventory. However, you need an Inventory asset account, and a Cost of Goods Sold expense account in order to handle basic inventory accounting in Wave.
Financial Reporting: Financial reporting, help you gain deeper understanding about your business. Wave accounting consists of a reports page that lets you view account reports in accrual and cash basis reports.
Banking: Wave accounting allows users to connect bank accounts for their financial transactions.

Freshbooks

In bookkeeping, time tracking is important. For instance, you want to pay your vendors at the right time, as well as remind clients to pay at the right time. This is what Freshbooks offers, the ability to automate tasks and hit the ground running, without being a certified accountant.

Below, are the features freshbooks offers.

Accounting: The accounting tab in Freshbooks, provides Double-Entry Accounting tools and reports about your business. For instance, you can explore balance sheets, charts of account, tax summary, etc.
Invoicing: Freshbooks offers an invoicing solution which allows users to create invoice, offer clients payment options, and send automated late payment reminders.
Mileage and Time Tracking: Freshbooks time tracking is an important feature as it lets your team to not loose track of billable time when working on a project.
Projects: This feature on Freshbooks allows teams manage projects successfully. Therefore, teams working on a project can collaborate, share files and updates successfully.
Estimates: Estimates allows teams generate an approximation of a monetary amount in the absence of a precise means of measurement. These estimates can be used for the creation of quotes, that invoice can be generated from.

Quickbooks

Quickbooks, offers basic accounting solutions for product-based small and mid sized businesses. This product, provides advanced invoicing, tailored to suit your business. For this reason, quickbooks may not be suitable for freelancers and contractors, as it may not carter for their needs.

Quickbooks offers the following features:

Invoicing: Quickbooks consists of a invoicing templates, which allows users create custom, professional invoices, sales receipts and estimates. It also allows you send payment reminders, and match payments to invoices, automatically.
Financial Reporting: While you can view how your business is doing in the reporting tab, you can also see how it could look in the next 90 days, with a range of popular reports and the cash flow planner.
Payroll and Payment Management: The payroll and payment management allows users manage banking, payroll, as well as payment.

Comparing Accounting Tools

In this section, we’ll compare the various accounting products we’ve explored earlier by their features.

Conclusion

Online bookkeeping and accounting, isn’t at its best yet. However, we’ve gotten to the stage where we can collaborate with our team and get the best possible outcome.

In this article, we’ve explored online accounting/bookkeeping for small and medium sized businesses. We also comapred this products, according to their features. You can reach me on Twitter or let me know if you have any questions or suggestions.