Zoho Books Pricing & Review

Zoho Books pricing starts at $15 per month, with more expensive plans reaching as high as $240 per month. The accounting software also offers a free forever plan for businesses making less than $50,000 in revenue per year, and provides a 14-day free trial to test out the more advanced features. For freelancers or gig workers, it’s worth exploring the best accounting software for the self-employed to see how Zoho Books compares to other options tailored to individual needs.

As part of the Zoho family of apps, Zoho Books is one of the better accounting software providers available today. While it’s not quite as impressive as the likes of Quickbooks or FreshBooks, it offers some of the most advanced automation features, which can save you a lot of time on a day-to-day basis. It also scored a perfect 10 out of 10 for bookkeeping features in our in-depth research.

In this guide, we’ll cover everything from pricing and features to competitors and value, so you can make the right choice for your small business. And if you want more information about accounting software, check out our comparison guide to understand what your options are when it comes to this helpful business tool.

In this guide:

• Zoho Books Pricing Plans
• Does Zoho Books Have a Free Plan?
• Zoho Books Features
• How Does Zoho Books Compare to Other Providers?
• Verdict: Is Zoho Books Right for You?
• Frequently Asked Questions

Zoho Books Pricing Plans

Zoho Books offers five different pricing plans, as well as a free forever plan for businesses that make less than $50,000 per year. The plans — Standard, Professional, Premium, Ultimate, and Elite — range in price from $15 per month to $240 per month.

Take a look at the table below to see what these plans offer and keep scrolling to learn more about how each plan can help your business organize your accounting.

Zoho Books Standard plan

The Standard plan is the most affordable option from Zoho Books, costing only $15 per month. This plan allows for up to three users to access the platform and allows you to manage up to 5,000 invoices. 

As you can imagine, this plan is a big step up from the free plan, adding features like recurring expenses, project tasks, custom fields, payment gateways, and a whole lot more. You’ll also get improved help and support, adding phone and live chat, as opposed to just email. This plan also adds a few available integrations, like Avalara and Zendesk, so you can turn it into a comprehensive hub rather than just a piece of accounting software.

Zoho Books Professional plan

The Professional plan from Zoho Books ups the price substantially, costing you $40 per month, which is more than a 50% increase from the Starter. This plan allows you to add five users to the platform and up to 10,000 invoices per year.

The price increase may be substantial, but you really do get a lot for paying the extra amount. The Professional plan unlocks all of the professional features of Zoho Books, including options like retainer invoices, bills, payments made, recurring bills, currency adjustments, stock tracking, landed costs, custom roles, and a bunch more. The value truly lies with the Professional plan.

Zoho Books Premium & Elite plans

These two plans from Zoho Books — Premium and Elite — are robust options that are aimed at larger businesses. They cost $60 per month and $120 per month, respectively, and both allow for up to 10 users on the platform and up to 25,000 invoices per year.

The Premium plan isn’t much more expensive than the Professional plan, adding a number of customizability features, like custom fields, custom reports, and custom buttons throughout the platform. You’ll also get access to a vendor portal, which will help you track vendor activity for your business.

The difference between the Elite and Premium plans is that Elite unlocks a wide range of advanced inventory controls, including serial number tracking, shipping tracking, and the ability to manage up to five warehouses. You’ll also unlock an integration with Shopify, which is helpful given its one of the best ecommerce website builders on the market.

Zoho Books Ultimate Plan

The Ultimate plan is the enterprise-level solution for Zoho Books and will cost you $240 per month, allowing for up to 15 users on the platform.

This plan is all about adding advanced analytics to your business. You’ll get access to reporting tools like real-time dashboards, customized reports, collaborative features, and the ability to export and print reports in Microsoft Excel or PDF. You’ll also be able to combine Zoho Books data with other third-party information, creating a comprehensive report to keep track of everything in one place.

Does Zoho Books Have a Free Plan?

Yes, Zoho Books does have a free plan with no time limit. It does comes with some other limitations that might make it hard to use in the long run. For one, your company can’t make more than $50,000 per year and still use the free plan. It allows for a single user and a single accountant, and allows you to manage no more than 1,000 invoices per year.

Other than that, though, you still get a lot of functionality, including a client portal, online and offline payments, multilingual invoicing, reporting and analytics, and a wide range of other Zoho Books features that make it so popular. You will only be able to integrate with other Zoho apps but, given the sheer number of those, you should be set for a while.

Zoho Books also offers a 14-day free trial for its paid plans, so you can see how they work before making a financial commitment.

Zoho Books Features

Accounting software comes with a lot of different features for a lot of different purposes. To fully understand what Zoho Books offers in terms of features, we’ve broken it down to give you a better idea of what you can expect from the accounting software.

Bookkeeping

Arguably one of the most important aspects of accounting software, Zoho Books offers some of the best bookkeeping features in the industry, scoring a perfect 10 out of 10 in our in-depth research. Zoho Books offers automatic bank reconciliation, as well as the ability to manually add transactions and import bank statements. It also provides inventory management functionality, but only in the Professional and Premium packages.

However, there are some caveats when it comes to certain features. If you want to scan receipts, you’ll have to purchase an add-on that costs extra, but you can get a 14-day free trial. Plus, if you want to record fixed assets, you’ll have to create a journal entry in the platform. Even if you there are a few issues along the way, Zoho Books still offers all of the primary bookkeeping features.

Accounts Payable

Zoho Books performs admirably when it comes to accounts payable features as well, scoring a respectable 8.5 out of 10 in our research. While the platform offers all the features in some capacity, all of them are only available in more expensive plans, which prevented it from getting the full 10.

That’s right, features like billing tracking, recurring bills, multiple currencies, and bill scanning are only available on the Professional plan and above, so if you opt for the Standard plan, you’re out of luck. Still, at only $40 per month, you’ll get access to all these plans at a reasonable price.

Accounts Receivable

As with accounts payable, accounts receivable is another category of features that accounting software just needs to get right. Fortunately, Zoho Boks offers plenty of competitive features that should make running the finances of your business easy. In fact, Zoho Books offers all but one important accounts receivable feature, giving it a score of 8.5 out of 10 in our research.

Zoho Books offers features including a client database, online client payments, the ability to create and send invoices and estimates, and payment reminders. The only weak spot for Zoho Books is that it does not offer the ability to track invoices, which could be a deal-breaker for some businesses. Still, most of these features should get the job done, which is why Zoho Books scores so high in our research.

About Our Research

At Tech.co, we take business software reviews very seriously. Rather than just eyeballing it and giving you some cursory recommendations, we research each provider thoroughly to make sure we understand exactly what each offering is good at and what they need to improve on. This is especially true for accounting software, as our team has spent our reading through pricing plans, features catalogs, and help and support options to give you the best idea possible of what to expect from these providers.

Here are a few criteria we measured when it comes to accounting software, so you know exactly what you’re getting from these products:

• Bookkeeping – obviously important to accounting software, this category focuses on the ability to perform tasks like receipt scanning, inventory management, manual transaction adding, and more.
• Accounts payable – this metric is primarily concerned with features like tracking expenses, scanning and tracking bills, setting up recurring billing, and establishing a supplier database.
• Accounts receivable – in this category, researchers focused on the ability to create and send estimates and invoices, online client payments, payment reminders, invoice trackers, and also client databases.
• Financial reporting – understanding how your accounting is going can be vital to your success, which is why researchers measure how well each provider offers analytic tools.
• Pricing – the price and value of accounting software will always factor into the decision, which is why our researchers took a deep dive to look at varying pricing plans.
• Help & support – for this metric, researchers evaluated the customer support options from providers, in case you ever get stuck and need some help getting it fixed.

How Does Zoho Books Compare with Other Providers?

Zoho Books obviously isn’t the only accounting software out there. In fact, there are lot of respectable options that might be a better fit for your business, depending on your particular needs. Take a look at the table below to see how these providers compare, and keep scrolling to get an in-depth look at some of the options we think are better than Zoho Books.

Zoho Books vs Quickbooks

While Zoho Books is a decidedly respectable option for accounting software, our research found that you just can’t beat Quickbooks Online. It offers lots of features across all plans, it’s reasonably affordable for what you get, and provides robust analytic tools across the board.

As far as what it has that Zoho Books doesn’t, Quickbooks Online is one of the few accounting software providers that offers forecasting tools, so you have a better idea of what the future looks like for your business. Additionally, it has no limits on invoices, so you can create as many as you need without having to worry about running out.

Check out our full guide to Zoho Books vs Quickbooks for more insight on how each service plan compares to the other’s.

Zoho Books vs FreshBooks

FreshBooks is another great piece of accounting software that could be a good fit for your business, particularly if you’re in the retail industry. This platform offers a wide range of inventory management features on its most affordable plan, while other providers often offer them on more expensive plans.

Another benefit of FreshBooks over Zoho Books is that it offers a lot of third-party integrations, like Shopify, Squarespace, and BigCommerce, whereas Zoho Books doesn’t offer anything other than Shopify, and that’s only in the more expensive plans. Simply put, FreshBooks works better with others, whereas Zoho Books works better with other Zoho apps.

Frequently Asked Questions