QuickBooks Review

QuickBooks online accounting software provides small businesses a solution for their accounting and payroll needs. We are QuickBooks Accountants. We have many clients that use QuickBooks to do their online bookkeeping, VAT returns, management accounts, and payroll. We also do bookkeeping for our clients using QuickBooks. You can see all of our fees and get an instant quote from the menu above. This is our QuickBooks review covering their online accounting software.

Is QuickBooks any good?

This is our QuickBooks review which gives a detailed opinion on various parts of the software. If you’re looking for a quick review of QuickBooks, our overall rating is 4/5.

How much does QuickBooks cost?

Even though prices range from just £8pcm up to £70pcm (plus VAT), we’d say QuickBooks is a mid-range option. The Essentials plan should be sufficient for most small businesses which is £22pcm and is £6pcm cheaper than the Xero standard plan. Our QuickBooks review for cost is 4/5.

How easy is it to use QuickBooks

QuickBooks could be more intuitive at times but once you get used to it, it’s quite easy and quick to use, with a clear layout. Read on below for how easy it is to do various things on QuickBooks. Our QuickBooks review for overall ease of use is 4/5.

Sales and Purchase Invoices

To add new sales and purchase invoices, just click on New, select Invoice or Bill, then add the details to each section. The layout is in the style of an invoice, so it’s clear what information needs to go where. There is an option to make recurring, which can save a lot of time. You can also add payment options to give customers an easy way to pay the invoice. Adding attachments is a useful option which will make it easy to find the original bill, or to show the customer their order. Once you’ve finished you can select various actions such as Save and Send, or Save and New.

Banking

Connecting Bank Accounts

Connecting Bank Accounts was easy but with mixed results. It involves choosing your bank, then logging into that bank account with your online banking details. Then you can choose the specific account to import and the date you want to import transactions from. HSBC worked fine, but there was a unknown problem with Lloyds Bank and it said to try again in a few hours. However, a second attempt using a different account worked.

Importing Bank Transactions

If you can’t connect to your bank account, or if there are transactions missing, you can upload your bank transactions instead. First, you need to log into your online banking account and download your bank transactions. The download needs to be in the CSV format or some others might work, but not PDF. Once you have that click on Banking in the QuickBooks. Then (not very intuitively) click on the drop down next to Link Account, and Upload from File, then select your downloaded file. At this point you can either select an existing bank account, or add a new one. You’ll then need to look at the downloaded data and select the correct options on QuickBooks. For example, which column contains the money received.

Manually Adding Bank Transactions

To manually add bank transactions on QuickBooks Online Accounting, you need to work out what kind of transaction it is first. Then click on New and choose from Customer payment, Sales receipt, Supplier expense, Cheque, Pay bills, Bank deposit, Transfer, Pay credit card. Within the options for each of these, you can choose which bank account it applies to.

Categorising Transactions

Once your transactions are imported into QuickBooks, you’ll need to categorise each one. For manually added transactions, you will have done this when adding the transaction. Click on the bank account, then For Review, which will bring up all of the transactions that need to be categorised. To do this, click on the transaction, then select the correct category and any other details required such as name and VAT rate, then Add. If it relates to a sales invoice or purchase bill, use the Find match option. There are also options for Transfer and Credit Card payments.

Time saving features

QuickBooks will try to suggest matches to invoices and bills. If it’s correct, you can just click on Match. It may also suggest the category etc to use, and if everything is correct you can just click Add.

You can set up rules to deal with transactions that meet a set criteria. Again if this rule is correct, just click Add. To add a new rule, click on the transaction, then create a new rule, then set up the various options. For example Description, Contains, Vodafone, and Telephone Expenses, 20% VAT. The Auto-Add option will add the transaction automatically so you don’t need to click on Add every time the rule is applied.

If the options above don’t help, you will need to go through each transaction. You can put them in order of description or payee, then you can bulk categorise similar transaction. This is done by ticking all the transactions that need the same options, then Update, then select the correct options, Apply and Accept.

VAT Returns

Preparing and submitting VAT returns on QuickBooks is very easy once you’ve entered the VAT setting and connected the account to HMRC. Just click on Taxes, Prepare VAT for the period, check the numbers, then submit. To check the numbers you can click on them, or rather than clicking Prepare there are other options to view different VAT reports.

Reports on QuickBooks

QuickBooks provide a good range of useful reports, most of which can be tailored slightly to show different data over different periods. You can also save a customised report to save time in the future. Our QuickBooks review on reporting is 4/5.

Support and other features

Support

There’s no telephone support, but there’s usually an online chat facility available which has answered various questions for us in the past. The help button also tries to provide guidance and videos related to your search, before offering the contact options.

Payroll

The integrated payroll facility (from £2pcm) allows you to prepare, send, and submit all the necessary payroll reports. As it’s integrated, it makes the accounting adjustments automatically so you don’t need to worry about importing or adding the payroll amounts yourself.

Bank reconcile

The bank reconciliation feature walks you through how to check that the bank balance on QuickBooks is the same as the bank balance on your bank statements. Reconciling the bank is vital to ensure that there are no errors and this provides an easy way to do this. However, it’s an extra job to do which may not happen. We prefer Xero’s method of continuously comparing the balance for you so you can investigate if it doesn’t agree.

Our QuickBooks rating for support and other features is 4/5.

Overall QuickBooks Review

Overall we rate QuickBooks Online Accounting 4/5. It’s a cheaper alternative to Xero but provides just as much functionality in the main product. At CloudBook Online Accountants, we help out clients with whichever online accounting they choose to use, all for a low fixed monthly fee. See our prices or get an instant quote below.