Zoho Books Review, Pricing & Features

What is Zoho Books?

Zoho Books is a detailed and popular accounting software that’s ideal for small and medium businesses. With over 50 accounting reports and features like inventory management, this software will benefit any business that sells physical products. We recommend Zoho Books to those who conduct business across different countries and would like a full-featured product that allows for advanced inventory management.

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Table of Contents

Zoho Books Review Summary

Zoho Books is an accounting software offered by Zoho, a software company with a wide variety of products for businesses of all sizes. Zoho was founded in 1996 by Sridhar Vembu and currently has a customer base of over 60 million users. Zoho offers more than 30 software applications across categories like marketing, finance, human resources, and collaboration tools.

One of the greatest benefits about choosing Zoho Books is that you’ll be able to seamlessly integrate it with other Zoho products that can help your company’s financial organization, like Zoho CRM and Zoho Inventory. Another great advantage is that Zoho Books is accessible to businesses outside of the United States — there are unique Zoho Books editions for 12 countries that will automatically apply relevant tax information and comply with regional regulations.

Zoho Books pricing is flexible and will cost businesses slightly less than QuickBooks Online, though more than FreshBooks. Zoho Books pricing begins at $20 per organization per month for three users. There are also plans that cost $50 per month for five users and $70 per month for 10 users. If you commit to an annual subscription, you’ll receive a discount from the month-to-month cost.

We interviewed current Zoho Books customers, who are very pleased with the software. Gilad Rom, the founder and CEO of Huan, appreciates the time-saving automation features that Zoho Books offers. He also mentioned that using the software to collaborate with your accountant in real-time is crucial.

Overall, Zoho Books is one of the more advanced accounting software tools that we reviewed. It has powerful inventory management features—which some accounting tools like Wave and FreshBooks don’t have—which makes it ideal for both service-based and product-based businesses. Though it has a steeper learning curve than some alternatives, it outperforms its more basic competitors, some of which are mentioned below.

  • Wave is a freemium tool that’s ideal for small businesses
  • FreshBooks is a tool that’s ideal for those who are just starting with an accounting software
  • Xero is a great platform that offers similar functionality with a much better user experience

Zoho Books Pricing & Cost

Zoho Books pricing begins at $20 per month and can cost as much as $70 per month. Pricing operates on either a monthly or yearly basis, and each plan has a limit to how many users can utilize the software. Additional users are billed at $3 per user per month, and customers can also add 50 scans per month for $10.

PlanPricingFeatures
Standard Plan$20 per month
  • 3 users
  • Up to 5,000 invoices
  • Recurring invoices and expenses
  • Manage multiple bank accounts
  • Sales tax
  • Manage 1099 contractors
Professional Plan$50 per month
  • Everything in Standard Plan and:
  • 5 users
  • Recurring bills
  • Time tracking and billing
  • Stock tracking
  • Automatic exchange rates
  • In-app notifications
Premium Plan$70 per month
  • Everything in Professional Plan and:
  • 10 users
  • Zoho Sign integration
  • Up to 200 workflow rules
  • Vendor portal
  • Budgeting
  • Twilio integration
  • Custom functions

Zoho Books Key Features

This review gives an in-depth overview of the main feature offered by Zoho Books. We'll show real images of the software so that you can get a sense of what it’s like to work with the tool. We’ll also discuss the product’s usability, market value, and customer service.

To learn more about how we research and rate software tools, read about SoftwarePundit’s review methodology.

Invoicing

Creating invoices to send to customers is one of the most important features an accounting software can offer. Invoicing with Zoho Books is as easy as with any other tool, but allows for more customizations than some other tools offer. There are 16 invoicing templates, which is significantly more than many accounting competitors offer. Customers can also create their own custom HTML templates.

The Invoicing tab will look like the image displayed below:

Zoho Books Invoice

You can add many detailed customizations to each template, such as the paper size, orientation of the paper, font, and more. You can choose to add a payment link to the invoice email, attach an invoice PDF, and attach other files once you’ve sent the invoice to the customer. Test invoices that we created and sent were delivered to the customer’s inbox promptly.

Along with sending one-time invoices, you can also schedule recurring invoices for return customers.

Sales

The Sales tab within Zoho Books will show your organization’s client list, estimates, payments received, and credit notes.

Client CRM

Zoho Books’ basic client CRM lists all your customers and provides their contact information, as well as any current outstanding receivables they owe your company. While this isn’t the most advanced of built-in CRM systems, it works sufficiently well to capture client information. You can sort clients by name or receivables, and you can import or export customer lists at any time.

Estimates

Estimates are created to send to prospective clients. They’ll look and act much like invoices, as they include payment and service or product information. You can easily convert estimates to invoices with one click.

Payment

Zoho Books offers significantly more payment options than other accounting software tools, which means that you can offer more variety for your clients. Your organization can accept online credit card payments through the following gateways:

  • Stripe
  • Square
  • PayPal
  • WePay
  • Braintree
  • 2Checkout
  • Worldpay
  • Forte
  • Authorize.Net

You can also accept payments directly through a customer’s bank account. Customers we interviewed told us that handling card payments is easier through Zoho Books than through Sage Business Cloud accounting.

Purchases

The Purchases section of the software is where you can keep track of your expenses, bills, payments made, and vendor credits. This section mirrors the Sales section, and that the two are laid out so similarly makes it easier to navigate through the software intuitively.

Payments Made

Within the payments made section, you’ll be able to record your payments, see confirmation of bills that have been paid, and send receipts of payment to your vendors.

Accounting & Reports

Zoho Books offers more than 50 accounting and financial reports across categories like receivables, purchases and expenses, and project summaries. There are many reports that can be created and drilled down to the transaction level. Along with the included reports, customers can sync their Books account with Zoho Analytics for more advanced reporting if needed.

Dashboard

The dashboard provides an overview of your company’s financial performance. The dashboard view will look something like this when you first log into your portal:

Zoho Books Dashboard

You can drill down into each category from this dashboard, and clicking on different sections of this report will take you to the relevant report.

List of Reports

Zoho Books includes reports like Profit & Loss Statements, Balance Sheets, Cash Flow Statements, and many more. The following is a sample of Balance Sheet Report:

Zoho Books Report

Accountant Capabilities

Your accountant will be given access to your Zoho Books account, where they will work to keep your financials in shape. Your accountant will be allowed to create and edit the following:

  • Manual Journals — to transfer money between accounts
  • Bulk Updates
  • Currency Adjustments
  • Chart of Accounts
  • Budgets
  • Transaction Locking — to make sure accounts won’t be affected by any changes

Customers that we spoke with enjoyed this accountant-specific tab within the software, so that they could collaborate with accountants in real-time.

Zoho Books also has a “Find Accountants” button in the dashboard with a list of authorized Zoho Finance partners. If you aren’t already working with an accountant but have selected Zoho Books as your accounting software of choice, this is a great way to find an accountant who is an expert at using the Zoho suite.

Time Tracking

Zoho Books includes a time tracking and project management feature. While this feature isn’t for employees, as it does not keep track of your employees’ timesheets, it’s designed to log the time you spend on projects so that you can charge customers according to the time spent performing labor.

Zoho Books Customer Support

Zoho Books offers notably responsive customer support, with many ways to contact the team. Customers can use live chat from within their account to contact the Zoho team from 9AM to 9PM EST. There’s also a customer service phone number as well as a support email. When we used live chat to contact the team, we got responses in under a minute. There are also how-to videos built into each section of the interface, so customers have ample opportunity to learn about the software.

Customer Support ChannelsLive Chat, Email, Phone
Other Support ResourcesHow-To Videos, Help Center, Blog
Application Status PageNo

Zoho Books Alternatives & Competitors

In terms of user experience and complexity, Zoho Books is similar to QuickBooks and Xero. Compared with Wave and FreshBooks, Zoho Books is similarly modern but is much more advanced and nuanced.

One-To-One Software Comparisons

Is Zoho Books Right For You?

Zoho Books is a mid-tier accounting solution with more advanced features than competitors like Wave and FreshBooks. It offers great inventory management features and is therefore better for medium sized businesses than some alternatives. Zoho Books is also valuable because it can integrate seamlessly with other Zoho software tools, making it easy to synchronize all your applications if you use the Zoho suite of products.

Zoho Books is a little difficult to learn to use, however, and is therefore not ideal for companies that need to get up and running quickly. If you have the time and patience to learn a more complex tool, then this shouldn’t be an issue.

If you are interested in trying Zoho Books, sign up for a 14-day free trial.

Katelyn Anderson

Katelyn is a Junior Research Analyst at SoftwarePundit, where she conducts in-depth analyses of technology markets & products and writes software-related content. She graduated summa cum laude with degrees in English and Psychology. Her main areas of interest are content creation, user experience, and search engine optimization. You can connect with Katelyn on LinkedIn.

Katelyn is an expert in several software categories including:

  • Accounting software
  • Integration software
  • Live chat software
  • Vacation rental software
  • Video conferencing software