The last time I reviewed QuickBooks Online Plus, I gave it three and a half stars and no Editors' Choice award. Intuit has done a lot of work on the Web-based solution since then. It has a revamped interface, for one thing, making it look lighter and fresher and more state-of-the-art. There are more add-ons in the App Center and additional time-saving tools, like batch processes and the innovative Income List.
But it still has three notable deficits. First, price. If you use the top-of-the-line app, Online Plus with Payroll, you'll pay $63.16 a month for five users—more, of course, for more team members. Second, it still does not support multiple currencies. Finally, QuickBooks Online's lack of a robust tablet app is troubling. QuickBooks Mobile, which runs on the iPhone, Android, and Blackberry smartphones, offers a very limited set of tools. And, while you can access QuickBooks Online from within a tablet's browser or a remote-access solution like LogMeIn or through a third-party application called QBooks (which actually synchronizes with QuickBooks desktop data), Intuit has yet to produce a tablet-optimized version of QuickBooks Online. Competitor Kashoo launched a tablet-based app a year and a half ago.
We reviewed Online Plus with Payroll, which is the top-of-the-line solution, but there's a whole family of QuickBooks Online applications that you can subscribe to for as little as $12.95 per month (Online Simple Start, which primarily supports sales functions).
Online Essentials ($26.95 per month) brings in multi-user, more reports, sales tax, billing, and QuickBooks desktop import. Online Plus ($39.95 per month) adds more reports and features like purchase orders, item- and time-tracking, and multiple location support. Even without payroll, this is a higher subscription price than competitors charge, though none of them offers all of QuickBooks Online's extras.
Masterful Navigation and AccessibilityQuickBooks Online scored higher than its competitors because of how it works as much as what it does. Its home page—its dashboard—is more comprehensive than what's offered by the other sites reviewed here. And it, like every other content-centric section of the site (Company, Customers, Banking, etc.), not only presents what's expected there, but it also anticipates other related activities that users may want to pursue at that moment. It doesn't screech to a halt when the current task is completed.
The core elements of the dashboard include abbreviated versions of a to-do list; a graphical snapshot of income and expenses; recent messages from team members; and activity of any kind from other users (transactions entered, deposits made, sign-ins and sign-outs, editing of records, etc.). You can link from any of these to see them in their entirety.
The dashboard also displays context-sensitive help and transaction links. And by clicking on sub-tabs there, you'll find tools and content that might be of interest to someone just starting out, like tutorials (since this is the home page). This tab/subtab navigational theme is carried throughout the site: You click on the Customers tab, for example, to get to your list of products and services, estimates and invoices, customer records, etc. All of the sites reviewed here have excellent user interfaces and navigational schemes. QuickBooks Online, however, has more features and therefore a tougher job to do, interface-wise, yet it still beats the competition.
An Innovative New Tool, and Data RecordsOne of these subtabs opens the Income List, which is a fairly recent addition to QuickBooks Online. It's a comprehensive list of income-related transactions that can be searched by filters like Type and Payment Status. This is also where you complete batch actions: printing and sending transactions, and printing packing slips. The "Money Bar" across the top gives you instant access to groups of unbilled estimates and time/costs, and unpaid and paid invoices. It's the best one-screen access to sales transaction data that I've ever seen.
One of the things that can make a thorough setup so arduous is the creation of records for customers, vendors and items (and in the version we reviewed, employees). You can import existing lists from QuickBooks desktop, as well as CSV and Excel files (competitors have comparable options as well as their own unique data sources, like Less Accounting's connection to gMail), but if you're starting from scratch or from a paper list, it's a major chore. Kashoo is the closest competitor in terms of the comprehensiveness of customer, vendor and item records. None of the sites offers sophisticated inventory management, just simple descriptions, prices, and corresponding accounts. You can, however, track the number of product units available in QuickBooks Online.
The Best Online Accounting Suite: QuickBooks Online Plus
