Alternatives to Quickbooks
In this video, we talk about the top 5 Quickbooks alternatives that you may consider. While we primarily work with Quickbooks, reviewing some of the alternatives is still a good idea.
00:00 Introduction
00:38 Why Quickbooks is superior
02:13 Xero
03:33 NetSuite
05:14 FreshBooks
05:46 Wave
06:14 Accounting Seed
06:40 Excel/Google Sheets
08:16 Closing Thoughts
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There are very few startups that are still using QuickBooks Desktop. There are some companies that have inventory that do use QuickBooks Desktop, but a lot of the plugins that handle inventory are progressing pretty rapidly for the QuickBooks Online Ecosystem. So even that's starting to change. But there are a couple of people who don't want to use QuickBooks. And, you know, personally and at Kruze we think QuickBooks is the superior piece of accounting software in the industry. And there's a few reasons why. It's really kind of industrial-strength, great security, never you know, very, very rarely goes down. It also has a huge ecosystem of other pieces of software that integrate into QuickBooks. And, you know, QuickBooks has made a lot of progress on the APIs, even Kruze like we've built a bunch of software internally that automatically categorizes transactions and pulls financial reports automatically. It does just a ton of other stuff.
Xero is probably the number one alternative for the smaller company segment. And Xero started in New Zealand it's actually a great company. I actually own stock in Xero. They are very, very strong in Australia and New Zealand, Asia, and some in the UK. And Xero was really the first cloud accounting software like truly cloud and that was a huge innovation. Actually, when Vanessa first started going to Kruze and I joined Kruze a couple of years later, we did do some Xero work. Sadly, we've never really been able to get a direct response to this, but it feels like there's different versions of Xero. And the United States version just doesn't feel like it has quite the horsepower, we've even had issues where data did disappear and that was a few years ago. I think Xero's gotten significantly better and you know, we're kind of a startup too. They've been investing in the product and making it better. They do have very good APIs. That is a strength of Xero. They have good API access. They were a real leader in that before QuickBooks kind of got their act together.
And so we typically recommend QuickBooks up to that point. We have probably, you know 5% of our client base on NetSuite, we're very familiar with it. It is very powerful. One of the areas that NetSuite really excels for our client base is international consolidations. Like if you have a subsidiary in another country, that's kind of a pain in the butt to do with QuickBooks, you have to basically do a manual Excel, Google sheet consolidation. That means putting the two companies, the parent company and the subsidiary companies financials together. You have to do that through Excel. And that's a lot of work. It's not very easy. There's currency problems. NetSuite makes that very, very easy. So, and you know, eventually, the companies get so complicated that it's time for them to switch to NetSuite.
Now there's a few other software companies like FreshBooks which is really great for independent contractors or super small businesses. It's basically, it's mostly, it started its life as an invoicing solution. And I actually worked with FreshBooks way back in the day before Kruze Consulting. Great company, great management team, huge commitment to customer service. They're famous for only letting the phone ring one time before someone picks it up. So if you're looking for that great customer service and you're a very small company maybe an independent contractor, FreshBooks can really work for you. Wave was another company we saw a little bit kind of back in the day, it's been kind of quiet on the Wave front now, but they actually entered the market as being free and then tried to monetize through some other avenues which actually works for them. I believe they were acquired, I have to confirm that, but they had a good exit, but it wasn't quite as powerful as QuickBooks. And, you know, once they were acquired, it made it kind of it wasn't like going to be the industry standard.
There's another company called Accounting Seed which is based on Salesforce, which I've seen once or twice. This is kind of one of those things where if you're using Accounting Seed, it probably works but you're probably also kind of limiting your pool of exceptional accountants that you can work with. So just be aware of that. It is built on top of Salesforce. It seems like, you know, a perfectly fine alternative. I haven't used it that much.
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