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Zoho Books is the best overall accounting software for small businesses due to its combination of advanced mobile functionality, stock tracking, and fair pricing starting at $15 per month.
It offers all core accounting tools, including inventory management, cash flow projection, and invoicing with time tracking support. You’ll be able to try it all with the limited free plan before you commit, as well.
It’s not perfect, as live support hours are limited, and the number of custom reports will be restricted, depending on which subscription plan you’re on. In this Zoho Books review, we’ll explain all the pros and cons, diving into which features Zoho Books excels at and which functions it lags in.
- Zoho Books is ranked as the best overall accounting software for small businesses due to its high usability, mobile app functionality, and fair pricing.
- A limited free plan is available for solopreneurs, with paid tiers starting at $15 per month for the Standard plan up to $240 per month for the Ultimate plan.
- Key features include automated mileage calculations, inventory management, open API access, and multi-format file import/export supporting CSV, TSV, and XLS files.
- Zoho Books is especially well-suited for retail businesses due to integrated stock management tools and delivery order fulfillment features.
- Notable drawbacks include weekday-only support between 9 am and 9 pm, restricted custom reports, and lack of native automated cloud backups.
Is Zoho Books Right for Your Business?
Zoho Books is a comprehensive accounting solution designed to help businesses manage their finances, sales, and inventory more efficiently. Here’s a closer look at what it has to offer:
- Great for businesses tracking sales and inventory
- Impressive transaction documentation
- Seamless inventory tracking
- Great importing and exporting capabilities, with support for three different formats
- Accurate time tracking function that can be easily converted into billable hours
- Free plan available for businesses with minimal accounting needs
- Comprehensive mobile app
Who is Zoho Books best for?
Zoho Books is best for any small, medium, or large business that needs to balance its books every quarter. This is because it delivers the broad functionality that smaller operators need, while including tools that are best for larger franchises, such as the ability to navigate between businesses while staying within the same interface.
That said, Zoho Books stands out in certain areas that will attract specific industries. It’s a particularly useful platform for any retail operation, for example, because it offers stock and inventory management tools that will ensure all product purchases and sales are tracked and accounted for. Plus, Zoho Books has delivery order fulfillment tools, so those products’ entire journeys to your customers can be correctly invoiced.
My experience with Zoho Books
Both other testers and I found that Zoho Books delivers modern software that’s easy to navigate and use. Commonly used tools like the invoicing system were well-designed, making the platform particularly useful for small companies or teams with limited time to dedicate to learning complex or unapproachable software.
“The dashboard provides everything a small business owner might need to see straightaway, like cash flow and payments.” -Tech.co tester
Report templates come in easy-to-read formats, and the help and support tools can guide users through tasks like customizing their settings.
However, as with any software in the notoriously complex world of business accounting, the interface presented us with some challenges. New project creation was a lengthy process, and it was hard to find and customize notifications. Images could only be added to reminder emails with a URL, rather than a more modern drag-and-drop. Some navigation choices were unintuitive: Customers were listed under “Sales,” for example.
Not all of the issues with Zoho Books can be chalked up to the complexities inherent to accounting tools. I found that the search bar didn’t effectively guide me to the information I needed, turning it into a source of frustration. You’ll likely face a bit of a learning curve when first attempting to figure out how to accomplish all your accounting tasks.
What are Zoho Books’ key features?
The features and integrations in this Zoho Books review are one big reason it stands out as our top pick for the best accounting software. Here’s how it fared across each of our feature-centric research categories.
Core accounting tools
Zoho Books covers all core accounting needs with built-in invoicing, quoting, tax preparation, journal entries, automated mileage tracking, and bank reconciliation.
Zoho Books does not support native tax forecasting or planning features, but that’s not a huge loss in comparison to other top software, since FreeAgent was the only other competitor to include these tools.
Time tracking is supported as well, so you’ll be able to include accurate hourly billing on your invoices without the need for manual calculations. The platform automatically calculates mileage on expenses, which not every accounting software can handle.
Financial planning tools
Zoho Books includes full forecasting, budgeting, cash flow projection, and stock management capabilities. Users also get inventory management and compliance support.
The platform’s reporting tools were very good, though not completely perfect: Zoho Books won’t let users create new reports from scratch, forcing them to create or modify a report template instead.
Still, Zoho Books comes out ahead in one element of reports. It offers the best importing and exporting function by far since it supports CSV, TSV, and XLS files alike. Rivals like QuickBooks and Xero support CSV, Excel/XLSX, and other file formats, though Xero gave me an error message when I tested CSV importing.
Operational efficiency tools
Zoho Books earns perfect scores for its collaboration, thanks to its support for user roles and a client portal that lets clients make payments, accept transactions, and even upload documents.
The mobile app was another standout tool, with a host of tools including the ability to read reports, enter payments and mileage, and create new invoices, customers, expenses, quotes, and payments. No other accounting platform offered as much mobile functionality.
Zoho Books automatically prevents duplicate entry errors by flagging identical invoice numbers. However, it didn’t flag identical client profiles, a popular feature that accounting software including QuickBooks, Xero, FreshBooks, and Clear Books does offer.
Finally, while the Zoho software does allow report template modification, the cap on custom reports varies by plan, and only the four biggest report templates (Profit and Loss, Balance Sheet, Cash Flow Statement, and Invoice Details) can be customized at all.
Integrations
Zoho Books includes an internal app marketplace for third-party add-ons and an open API for custom integrations. This isn’t uncommon for accounting software, although a few platforms add annoying restrictions (QuickBooks API is only open to those with an Intuit Developer account, while Xero requires users to register as an API partner).
How much does Zoho Books cost?
Zoho Books offers five plans (in addition to a limited free plan), ranging from $15 per month to $240 per month.
We cover all the features and user caps included with each plan in our full guide to Zoho Books pricing, but you can check out the table below for a quick summary. The most popular plans are the $15-per-month Standard plan and the $40-per-month Professional plan.
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Price
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Users
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Create and send invoices
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Track expenses
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Track bills
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Record fixed assets
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Multi-currency transactions
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Advanced analytics
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Budget management
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Custom reports
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Free |
Standard |
Professional |
Premium |
Elite |
Ultimate |
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Free |
$15/month |
$40/month |
$60/month |
$120/month |
$240/month |
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1 |
3 |
5 |
10 |
10 |
15 |
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1,000/year |
5,000/year |
10,000/year |
25,000/year |
100,000/year |
100,000/year |
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1,000 expenses |
5,000 expenses |
10,000 expenses |
25,000 expenses |
100,000 expenses |
100,000 expenses |
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10 reports |
25 reports |
50 reports |
Unlimited |
Unlimited |
What Support Options Does Zoho Books Offer?
Zoho Books’ support options are a mixed bag. There are plenty of ways to access support, including phone, email, and live chat (both human and bot), as well as an online forum and knowledge center.
Resources are plentiful as well, with both video tutorials and webinars available to users. The platform complies with relevant payment standards, including PCI DSS, PSD2, and SOC 2 Type II, too. You’ll need to get an integration with a third-party service to set up automatic cloud backups, since Zoho Books doesn’t natively support it.
However, the biggest drawback to Zoho Books’ support is that during testing, the knowledge center was unclear when I tried to look up how to track time and similar tasks.
Meanwhile, the phone and live chat support hours are limited to weekdays between 9 am and 9 pm ET, leaving night owls or weekend warriors unable to get help. These limited hours aren’t unheard of, but most other software providers offer a little more availability. Xero even offers 24/7 support.
What are the best alternatives to Zoho Books?
Zoho Books might be the best accounting software on the whole, but that doesn’t mean another popular platform isn’t the best one for you.
For example, if you want something that’s tailored to your specific industry, Xero is great for online businesses, such as ecommerce. Meanwhile, QuickBooks offers the most customizable reports, which is ideal if you’re running a data-heavy operation.
Whatever the case, check out our overview table here, or take a quick look at our summaries of your best alternatives worth considering.
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Starting price
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Free trial
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Best for
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Pros
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Cons
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Try now
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FreshBooks |
Xero |
Zoho Books |
FreeAgent |
QuickBooks |
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Free |
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30 days |
30 days |
14 days |
30 days |
30 days |
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New businesses |
Experienced accountants and established businesses with complex financial needs |
Integrations |
Budget-conscious businesses |
Businesses needing advanced financial insights and customization |
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| Try FreshBooks | Try Xero now | Try Zoho Books | Get Quotes | Try QuickBooks |
Xero: Best for online businesses
Xero handles all your bookkeeping needs, but it also integrates with all the top tools an ecommerce manager might be using: You can connect Xero to your accounts with sellers like Amazon, Shopify, or Etsy, and you can do the same with website builders such as Squarespace or Square Online.
Plus, there are no user limits on any plans – unlike Zoho Books, which caps users at three for its Standard plan and five for its Professional one.
QuickBooks: Best for advanced customization
QuickBooks is a complex platform packed with features. It offers intense customization options, so you can craft the perfect interface menus and unique report templates. The adjustable cash flow projection tools in particular are worth shouting out, but anyone who loves to tinker and appreciates data will love this accounting software. Check out our guide to QuickBooks pricing for more details.
FreeAgent: Best forecasting and prediction tools
FreeAgent’s simple but functional interface delivers the basics and stands out for its tax timeline, which includes alerts to keep users on top of their upcoming deadlines. Small businesses can also use the software’s forecasting and scenario prediction tools to plan for long-term sustainability.
Check out our guide to the best free accounting software as well.
What’s New Since Our Last Zoho Books Review?
Zoho Books has rolled out several key updates this year, including AI automation, inventory, and compliance. Here’s a breakdown of its most notable updates:
- AI-powered bank reconciliation: Features field prediction capabilities to auto-fill categories, ledger accounts, and vendor data during reconciliation.
- AI-powered custom fields: Introduced AI-driven extraction features including image-to-image text extraction, keyword extraction, and sentiment analysis for custom fields.
- CoCreate Agent: Integrated Zoho’s AI co-creation assistant directly into workflows for managing items, Transfer Orders, and Inventory Adjustments.
- Record locking & validation: Added two-level record locking and validation rules for Purchase Reviews, TOs, Composite Items, and Inventory Adjustments.
- Public links for Purchase Orders (POs): Share POs with vendors via a secure public link so they can view, accept, or decline without needing Vendor Portal credentials.
- Warehouse-level purchase receiving: Filter line items by specific warehouses directly within the Purchase Receive creation page.
- Sales tax automation: Automatically calculates and applies correct regional sales tax rates and exemption rules dynamically.
Methodology: How We Tested Accounting Software
At Tech.co, we take our impartial research and analysis seriously, so you can have complete confidence that we’re giving you the clearest, most useful recommendations.
After conducting an initial investigation to identify the most relevant, popular, and established accounting tools in the market, we conducted further research, including testing six major accounting software platforms.
Based on years of market and user needs research, we’ve established an accounting software testing methodology that scores these platforms against six main categories, and 25 subcategories — with a total of 1,512 areas of investigation being considered overall.
We also put the platforms through their paces with hands-on testing to gain a deeper grasp of their average user experience. We dedicated 57 hours to carrying out 37 user tests, with a total of 555 tasks being completed in total.
Our main testing categories for accounting software are:
- Core accounting features: We check how adept a platform will be at managing accounting tasks, focusing on key bookkeeping features like invoicing, tax preparation, journal entry, time tracking, financial transactions, and payment support.
- Operational efficiency: We determine how capable a system is at ensuring day-to-day processes run seamlessly, paying close attention to third-party integrations, collaboration tools, AI automation, and customization options.
- Financial planning: We assess how capable a system will be at measuring income, profits, and losses. Specifically, we check for the presence and quality of forecasting and budgeting, inventory management, reporting, and compliance tools.
- Help and support: We assess how useful and reliable a platform’s support system is, focusing on support options, whether it’s 24/7 support or knowledge center accuracy, as well as cloud backup, and security safeguards.
- Pricing: We compare the overall cost of each platform, taking factors like monthly costs, set-up fees, hidden fees, and free plans into account. We also measure how strict contracts are, and how much it would cost for a business to terminate them early.
- User experience: An overall judgment of how easily users can interact with the platform. We tested each accounting platform and got our team to report how easy they were to use, how they felt when they were using them, and how likely they were to recommend the platform to another business.
When it comes to calculating a product’s final score, not all testing areas are weighted evenly, with factors like “core accounting features” and “operational efficiency” being prioritized for small businesses, while sector-specific features are valued more highly for businesses across different industries.
We understand that accounting software is always evolving. That’s why at Tech.co, we have full-time product researchers to re-run this testing process regularly. It’s the only way to ensure our results remain reflective of the present day.
Learn more about our research.
I strongly recommend Zoho Books for any business, small or large, due to its impressive feature set, great value, and useful interface.
The help and support options aren’t perfect (you won’t get live support over the weekend), and you can expect a bit of a learning curve. However, the platform offers a free plan, so you can try it out all you want with no commitment required.
If you’re ready to start reconciling your books, check out the best Zoho Books deals today Or, keep browsing with our main accounting software comparison page.
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FAQs
Yes. Zoho Books offers monthly and annual subscription plans with no long-term contracts. You can upgrade, downgrade, or cancel your subscription at any time directly through your account billing panel.
Yes. Transaction and invoicing limits depend on your plan.
For example, the Free plan allows up to 1,000 invoices per year, while higher tiers increase this limit (e.g., Standard allows up to 5,000 invoices per year, while Elite and Ultimate tiers offer up to 100,000 invoices and expenses annually).
Yes. Zoho Books integrates natively with major payment gateways, including Stripe, PayPal, Authorize.Net, and Square, allowing your customers to pay invoices online via credit card or bank transfer through the client portal.
Yes. While Zoho Books is primarily cloud-based and accessible through web browsers, it also offers dedicated desktop applications for macOS and Windows, as well as full-featured mobile apps for iOS and Android.
Zoho Books complies with strict security standards, including PCI DSS, PSD2, and SOC 2 Type II, using multi-layer encryption for data in transit and at rest.
While it does not include native automated cloud backups, users can manually export their data in CSV, TSV, or XLS formats at any time or connect third-party backup integrations.
