I did it! Last week I finalized my conversion from QuickBooks to ZOHO books. I’ve been working on this since January. I am not a slacker; frankly, I was just scared to make the final plunge. After all, I have been using QuickBooks since I started by business over 20 years ago. I am a former QuickBooks Pro Advisor. I have a degree in Accounting. I know QuickBooks like the back of my hand. And I am very set in my ways. This was not an easy decision.

But, as they say at the gym, “No pain, no gain.” And QuickBooks was proving to be a big pain.

What I Hate About QuickBooks

Where do I begin? Here’s my short list:

• The price. My QuickBooks Enterprise was costing me $1500/user. ZOHO Books is part of the ZOHO One subscription which costs $360/user and includes CRM software.
• The price. An Intuit merchant service account is expensive.
• Tech Support. As a longtime QuickBooks user, I have endured countless changes to my account number meaning I could never be “found” in the system. Last September I started receiving email telling me that my subscription was about to expire yet when I called into Intuit I was told my account had a zero balance. A month later my QuickBooks license expired; of course, this was the exact moment that i was vacationing in Vietnam with a 13-hour time different to deal with.
• Outlook integration. Hey, Intuit, don’t you think your users should be able to send invoices and quotes without receiving error messages?

What I Miss About QuickBooks

At first, I thought there would be a lot of things I’d miss when I moved from QuickBooks. But, as I started using ZOHO on a daily basis, I found that there are actually only two things I miss about QuickBooks: ZOHO Books doesn’t have a traditional “register” which I am slowly getting used to. It’s just a bit less forgiving than QuickBooks and has made me brush up on journal entries. My other major complaint with ZOHO Books is that it lacks the ability to create custom reports and dashboards from within the ZOHO Books product.

What I’ve Gained from Moving from QuickBooks to ZOHO Books.

I can honestly say I am loving my ZOHO Books and am happy to wave “bye-bye” to QuickBooks. The absolute biggest advantage about ZOHO Books is that I can create a Lead in ZOHO CRM, convert it to a Contact, and create a Quote with a few clicks.  No more double entry. And then my customers can accept the quote and make payments without any intervention from little old me. My employees can create Quotes and see the status of payments in CRM without having to have access to ZOHO Books. This is saving me literally hours of work. I’ve also been able to do a bit of custom programming and created a way to track commissions – something that I was never able to accomplish in QuickBooks.

Do you need help with a QuickBooks to ZOHO Books conversion? The ZOHO Books specialists can help!

Click Here if you’d like to sign up for a 30-day trial of ZOHO Books. Or, better yet,sign up for a ZOHO One trial and experience for yourself the ZOHO CRM to Books integration!