So I normally blog about web design topics, but today I am switching things up a bit. For today’s blog I am going to focus on our switch to Zoho Books, and why we think other business owners might want to make the change.
Software solutions: CRM, Project Management, Accounting, Billing, and Client Support
Over the last month or two our web design business has been going through a time of transition. We have been looking at all of the software that we use to run our day-to-day business operations and deciding if they are still the best fit. Until recently our software mix included Insightly for CRM and Project managment, QuickBooks for billing and accounting, and Zendesk for support tickets. After a lot of research and several free trials we decided to switch out everything. Zoho was the clear winner for us almost across the board and will replace QuickBooks, Zendesk and the CRM portion of Insightly. Teamwork Projects will be our new project management software. (Zoho was a close second for the project management portion and would have won if it had better integration with their other products.)
We are really excited about all of these changes and are currently working to implement them one at a time. Zoho Books was the first software change to be implemented, and while switching over has been time consuming it is so worth it. We are already seeing huge benefits on our side and our clients seem to like it as well.
Our history with QuickBooks
To better understand why we are recommending Zoho Books I would like to give you a little background. I was actually an accountant for many years prior to co-owning this business, and QuickBooks was always my software of choice. For many years I even taught QuickBooks classes. Logically when my husband and I started the web design business QuickBooks was our accounting software.
We used the desktop version of QuickBooks for many years and it worked fine. Eventually the time came when he and I both needed to use the software from different locations necessitating an upgrade to the online version. This is when our experience started to go south. The online version did not have a lot of the standard functionality we depended on. I would read the QuickBooks forums trying to find solutions, and I would see many with the same complaints that we were having. Most of these problems had been listed for several years with no solution from QuickBooks in sight. After a year of trying to use “work arounds” we were ready for something different.
Looking for Time Saving Accounting Software
Once we decided it might be time for a change we sat down and tried to decide what our priorities were in a new software. Our business has seen a lot of growth lately forcing us to look at how efficient our processes are. Surprisingly we realized a lot of time was being spent on invoicing and payment tasks that could be made more efficient with the right software. This is where Zoho Books comes into play. First of all it solves the problems we were having with QuickBooks online. Secondly it adds several important time-saving features. Overall we estimate that this one software switch is easily going to save hours of work every month.
Zoho Books Free Trial
I want to give an in-depth explanation of the features that make Zoho Books so amazing, but I am out of time for this blog. I am going to write that post next. In the mean time I highly suggest you check out Zoho Books for yourself. You can try a full featured 14 day free trial of Zoho Books with no credit card required.*
*This is a referral link – We have been so happy with Zoho Books that we recently signed up to get referral credit.