| Zoho Books’ bookkeeping software plans provide great value for their target users. It offers a comprehensive set of accounting features at price points lower than many competitors, even at higher tiers. It is also one of the few companies to offer a free plan. This combination of affordability, functionality, and straightforwardness makes it a competitive choice for small businesses. Price: $0, $15, $30, or $40 Visit Website | |
| Pros | Cons |
| ✅ Free account available ✅ Recurring invoices available with all plans ✅ Mileage tracking available with all plans | ❌ No automatic bank feed synchronization for free plans ❌ Inefficient customer support ❌ Limited user seats |
Zoho Books is a bookkeeping solution designed by software developer Zoho. As part of the Zoho ecosystem, it integrates closely with other Zoho apps, supporting businesses looking for an all-in-one financial management solution. It offers core accounting tools such as invoicing, expense tracking, bank reconciliation, reporting, and tax management, with scalable features across multiple affordable pricing tiers.
Featured in:
- Best Bookkeeping Software for Small Businesses: Best for existing Zoho Suite users
- Best Bookkeeping Software for New Ecommerce Businesses: Best for mobile-first and multilingual ecommerce businesses
- Best Bookkeeping Software for Restaurants: Best free plan with scalable features for growing restaurants
- Best Bookkeeping Software for Construction Companies: Honorable mention
Zoho Books Interface Overview
The Zoho Books dashboard
The Zoho Books interface is a little less straightforward than most competitors, part due to the sheer volume of available features. It consists of two navigation bars: a sidebar linking to organized groups of bookkeeping tasks, and a utility bar on top for secondary actions.
The main sidebar links out to all possible bookkeeping actions. To save space, it groups these actions by category, then hides them in a dropdown menu under the category name.
- Home: The homepage provides easy access to all essential information. It includes a Dashboard tab for at-a-glance visualizations of financial activity, a Getting Started tab for platform guides, an Announcements tab for Zoho news, and a Recent Updates tab for software updates and bug fixes.
- Items: The Items dropdown menu links out to all tasks related to business items. This includes Items, Price Lists, and Inventory Updates.
- Banking: The Banking page summarizes activity within connected bank accounts. It provides a graph visualization of bank balances, card balances, cash in hand, and payment clearances, followed by a tabular summary of all accounts.
- Sales: The Sales dropdown menu leads to all activities related to sales. It lets you create, view, organize, and edit customers, estimates, retainer invoices, sales orders, invoices, payments received, recurring invoices, and credit notes, depending on what is available in your plan.
- Purchases: Similarly, the Purchases menu leads to all activities related to purchases. You can create, view, organize, and edit vendors, expenses, recurring expenses, purchase orders, bills, payments made, recurring bills, and vendor credits.
- Time Tracking: Zoho Books Professional subscribers get access to the Time Tracking dropdown menu, which links out to the Projects and Timesheets pages. These pages let you create, view, edit, and organize projects and timesheets, respectively.
- Accountant: The Accountant dropdown menu is meant for accountant or bookkeeper access and links to all pages related to accounting. You can create, view, edit, and organize manual journals, bulk update accounts, view tax payments, tax adjustments, and currency adjustments, customize your chart of accounts, or lock transactions.
- Reports: The Reports page lets you run a wide range of bookkeeping reports. You can also add reports to favorites for easy access.
- Documents: The Documents page lets you save files to the Zoho Books storage. These include spreadsheets, images, bank statements, and more.
- Configure Features List: The Configure Features List button opens a popup that allows you to enable or disable different business modules. These include estimates, retainer invoices, timesheets, price lists, sales orders, purchase orders, and inventory.
Meanwhile, the utility bar links to different supporting actions. It includes the following buttons:
- Zoho Books Logo: This button links back to the home page.
- Recent Activities: This dropdown shows all recent actions.
- Search Bar: The search bar allows you to search files and items within the platform. You can search within customers, items, price lists, inventory adjustments, banking, estimates, retainer invoices, sales orders, invoices, credit notes, vendors, expenses, purchase orders, bills, vendor credits, projects, timesheets, charts of accounts, documents, and tasks. It also provides an advanced search option to create additional filters per category.
- Quick Create: The Quick Create button lets you instantly create specific bookkeeping items, including items, journal entries, estimates, invoices, customers, vendors, or expenses.
- Refer and Earn: This button links out to Zoho’s Refer and Earn program, which allows you to earn cash and cashback rewards per successful referral.
- Notifications: This tab shows you updates related to your business and bookkeeping activities.
- Settings: This page lets you configure preferences for different areas of the platform, including your organization, taxes and compliance, sales, purchases, items, online payments, customization, reminders and notifications, custom modules, developer and data, and integrations.
- Profile: This tab contains the buttons for editing account options and for signing out. It also provides links to software assistance, such as help documents, FAQs, forums, video tutorials, explore features, migration guides, the customer support email, webinar registration, accountant search, and customer service contact information.
- All Zoho Apps: This tab links out to all other platforms in the Zoho ecosystem, including finance apps like Zoho Expense, Zoho Billing, Zoho Inventory, Zoho Checkout.
Does Zoho Books Have a Mobile App?
Zoho Books is also available as an iOS or Android mobile app. This allows you to perform bookkeeping tasks on the move.
The app includes the following features:
- Estimate creation
- Invoice creation
- Bank feed viewing
- Receipt capture
- Business insights
- Time tracking
- Inventory tracking
- Mileage tracking
- Report generation
Feedback for the app is predominantly positive. Ratings averaged at around 4.9 stars on Google Play and 4.8 stars on the App Store. Users found the app comprehensive, easy to customize, and easy to use.
Key Features
Zoho Books offers all core bookkeeping features, including invoicing, expense tracking, and reporting. It also supports manual journal entries, bank reconciliation, project and time tracking, and business analytics across all plans, with feature limits that vary by subscription tier.
Manual Journal Entry
Zoho Books lets you manually create journal entries to record the transactions that don’t go through automated bookkeeping workflows, such as invoices, bills, and payments. This covers:
- Account balance adjustments
- Accruals, depreciation, and amortization
- Error correction
- Account transfers
Journal entries update reports like financial statements. With the manual journal entry feature, you ensure that your books and reports are accurate and up-to-date.
Invoices and Estimates
Zoho Books lets you create and send professional invoices, estimates, and quotes. All Zoho Books plans let you schedule items, track item statuses, and get paid faster. Higher-tier plans also get access to specialized invoices, such as progress invoices, retainer invoices, and invoices in foreign currencies.
| Free | Classic | Professional | Premium | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Invoices | 1,000 per year | 5,000 per year | 10,000 per year | 25,000 per year |
| Estimates / Quotes | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
| Recurring Invoices | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
| Progress Invoicing | ❌ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
| Retainer Invoices | ❌ | ❌ | ✅ | ✅ |
| Multi-Currency Invoicing | ❌ | ❌ | ✅ | ✅ |
Expense and Payables Tracking
Zoho Books lets you track expenses and bills with ease. Depending on your plan, you can manually record transactions through journal entries, sync with credit card or bank feeds, or upload receipts. You can also enter bills and mark them as paid.
Once the system records the transaction, it will automatically assign it to an appropriate expense account based on rules you set. This ensures expenses post correctly to the general ledger and financial reports.
Different plans offer different levels of expense tracking. Recording recurring bill payments, for example, is only available to subscribers of the Professional plan and above.
| Free | Classic | Professional | Premium | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Expenses and Bills | 1,000 expenses per year | 5,000 expenses per year | 10,000 combined bills and expenses per year | 25,000 combined bills and expenses per year |
| Mileage Expense Tracking | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
| Recurring Expenses | ❌ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
| Recurring Bills | ❌ | ❌ | ✅ | ✅ |
| Multi-Currency Transactions | ❌ | ❌ | ✅ | ✅ |
Bank Reconciliation
All Zoho Books plans come with free bank reconciliation. This allows you match your records with your bank statements, ensuring accuracy with ease.
Reporting
Zoho Books pulls from your software activity to generate business reports. A wide range of reports are available.
| Business Overview | Profit and Loss StatementCash Flow StatementBalance Sheet |
| Sales | Sales by CustomerSales by ItemSales by Salesperson |
| Inventory | Inventory SummaryInventory Valuation SummaryFIFO Cost Lot Tracking Product Sales Report |
| Receivables | Customer Balances AR Aging Summary AR Aging Details Invoice Details Retainer Invoice Details Sales Order Details Estimate Details |
| Payments Received | Payments ReceivedTime to Get PaidCredit Note DetailsRefund History |
| Recurring Invoices | Recurring Invoices |
| Payables | Vendor BalancesAccounts Payable (AP) Aging SummaryAP Aging DetailsBills DetailsVendor Credits DetailsPayments MadeRefund HistoryPurchase Order DetailsPurchase Orders by Vendor |
| Purchases and Expenses | Purchases by VendorPurchases by ITemExpense DetailsExpenses by CategoryExpenses by CustomerExpenses by ProjectExpenses by Employee |
| Projects and Timesheet | Timesheet DetailsProject SummaryProject Details |
| Accountant | Account TransactionsAccount Type SummaryGeneral LedgerDetailed General LedgerJournal ReportTrial Balance |
| Currency | Realized Gain or Loss |
| Activity | System MailsActivity Logs and Audit TrailException ReportPortal ActivitiesClient ReviewsAPI Usage |
Business Analytics
The Zoho Books dashboard provides visualizations that communicate business activity at a glance. Graphs include:
- Total receivables
- Total payables
- Cash flow over time
- Income vs expenses over time
- Top expenses
- Projects
These visualizations allow you to spot trends, patterns, and anomalies in seconds. They make it easier to assess business performance and make informed decisions.
Zoho Books Plans
| Free | Standard | Professional | Premium |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $15 per month | $30 per month | $40 per month |
| – 1 user and 1 accountant – 1,000 invoices per year – 1,000 expenses per year – Recurring invoices – Mileage expense tracking – Reports | – All Free features – 3 users – 5,000 invoices per year – 5,000 expenses per year – Phone support – Live chat support – Progress invoicing – Recurring expenses – Automatic bank and credit card fees | – All Standard features – 5 users – 10,000 invoices per year – 10,000 combined expenses and bills per year – Sales orders – Purchase orders – Retainer invoices – Multi-currency invoicing – Recurring bills – Multi-currency expenses | – All Professional Features – 10 users – 25,000 invoices per year – 25,000 combined expenses and bills per year – Cash flow forecasting reports |
Zoho Books offers plans for all business sizes, from solopreneurs to small businesses to large corporations. For the sake of brevity, we’ll only discuss the first four plans: Zoho Books Free, Zoho Books Standard, Zoho Books Professional, and Zoho Books Premium.
Free
The Zoho Books Free plan aims to serve self-employed individuals, freelancers, independent contractors, sole proprietors, and very small businesses. It comes with 1,000 invoices and 1,000 expenses per year, which averages at around 83 invoices and 83 expenses per month. It also allows recurring invoices, which streamlines payment acceptance for repeat clients.
These limitations may work for businesses with low transaction volumes. However, Zoho Books Free has a key drawback: it does not support automatic bank or credit card feed synchronization. As a result, users must import bank statements regularly to keep records current. If you find the process too time-consuming, consider upgrading to the $15 per month Zoho Books Standard plan.
Standard
The Zoho Books Standard plan provides everything available in the Free plan plus the convenience of automatic bank and credit card feed synchronization, sparing you from the burden of manually updating your books. It also offers progress invoicing, recurring expenses, and phone and live chat support. Annual limits for invoices and expenses increase to 5,000 each, or roughly 416 per month.
With a monthly fee of $15 per month, Zoho Books Standard is still significantly cheaper than its competitors. However, it still sacrifices one major feature: bill payments. While the system supports expense tracking, it does not let you enter recurring bills, mark them as paid, or manage bill payments. To access this feature, you need to upgrade to the $30 per month Zoho Professional plan.
Professional
Zoho Books Professional is the company’s most comprehensive small business bookkeeping package. It comes with all essential bookkeeping features, including invoicing, expense tracking, and bill management. It also provides additional conveniences, such as multi-currency support for invoices and expenses, retainer invoices, purchase orders, and sales orders. You can create up to 10,000 and up to 10,000 combined expenses and bills per year.
This plan is a serviceable option for most small businesses. At $30 per month, it is significantly cheaper than other solutions with bill payment support. QuickBooks, for example, only offers bill management with its $70 per month Essentials plan, while FreshBooks offers bills and bill payments with its $35 per month Plus plan. Only Xero offers bill payment support for a cheaper monthly fee of $25. However, it limits bills to 5 per month and invoices to 20 per month.
Premium
Finally, there’s Zoho Books’ highest tier small business bookkeeping plan, Zoho Books Premium. At $40 per month, it isn’t much of a jump from Zoho Books Professional. It only adds non-essential conveniences, including 10 user seats, 25,000 invoices, 25,000 combined bills and expenses, and cash flow forecasting reports.
Given the lack of significant improvements, Zoho Books Premium is only worth the price hike for businesses that need the increased allowances, such as businesses working with large teams or high transaction volumes. Otherwise, Zoho Books Professional can cover most bookkeeping needs.
How Helpful is Zoho Books Customer Support?
Zoho Books provides three customer tiers. Each tier determines the level of customer support access you receive.
| Basic | Classic | Premium |
|---|---|---|
| Available with Free plan | Available with all paid plans | Available with all paid plans |
| Free | Free | 49 USD per month, 490 USD per year, or 20% of the subscription fee (whichever is higher) |
| – Email support 8 hours a day, 5 days a week – Maximum response time of 24 hours | – Email support 8 hours a day, 5 days a week – Live chat support 8 hours a day, 5 days a week – Toll-free phone support 8 hours a day, 5 days a week – Remote assistance – Maximum response time of 8 hours | – Email support 24 hours a day, 5 days a week – Live chat support 24 hours a day, 5 days a week – Toll-free phone support 24 hours a day, 5 days a week – Remote assistance – Product onboarding – Configuration assistance – Maximum response time of 3 hours |
As shown, Zoho Books Free plans receive very limited customer support. Support is available only by email during business hours, and response times may take up to twenty-four hours.
Upgrading to a paid subscription grants free access to the Classic support plan, which provides additional phone support and live chat support options with shorter response times. It also includes remote assistance, which allows users to share their screen with Zoho support representatives for guided troubleshooting. Through remote assistance, Zoho support teams can:
- View account settings and data related to an issue
- Guide users through steps in real time
- Diagnose and resolve issues more efficiently
Zoho Books’ highest support tier is Premium. This plan costs 49 USD per month, 490 USD per year, or 20% of your monthly subscription fee, whichever is higher. Upgrading to the Premium plan makes you a priority client, which grants you faster response times, longer availability windows, product onboarding, and configuration assistance.
All Zoho Books subscribers get access to the website’s knowledge base and community forums. The knowledge base provides in-depth answers to FAQs about the different Zoho Books functions. Meanwhile, community forums let you participate in conversations with other Zoho Books users. Members provide support by sharing use cases, troubleshooting tips, and workflow solutions.
How Safe is My Data with Zoho Books?
Zoho Books protects user data extremely well. It uses multiple layers of security, including industry-standard encryption, customizable access controls, regulatory standards compliance, and regular backups.
Access Controls and Permissions
Zoho Books lets you assign roles and permissions to additional uses. This ensures that only authorized individuals can access or edit sensitive data. The platform also allows you to mark fields containing personally identifiable information or protected health information and restrict access or encryption accordingly.
Audit Trails and Logs
Zoho Books records activity logs that show who accessed or changed data and when. Not only does this increase accountability and transparency across bookkeeping teams, but it also helps you trace guilty culprits when suspicious activity occurs.
Compliance with Standards
Zoho adheres to major data protection standards. This includes GDPR for personal data privacy and PCI DSS for payment data security.
Data Centers
Zoho hosts data at secure data centers. They employ multiple physical and operational safeguards, such as surveillance, access controls, and environmental protections.
Backups and Redundancy
Zoho backs your data up regularly across multiple locations. This helps protect against data loss, enabling recovery in the event of an outage.
Data Ownership
Zoho grants you complete ownership of your data. It does not share it with third parties without your consent.
When to Choose an Alternative
While Zoho Books provides solutions for businesses of all sizes, there are still a few scenarios it cannot accommodate. Below, we discuss when Zoho Books is not a good fit and what to use as an alternative.
You work with a large team
Zoho Books’s most expensive package caps user seats at 15. Meanwhile, its lower-tier packages cap user seats at around 1 to 10. Businesses that offload financial management responsibilities may struggle with this inflexibility. If you want space for additional users, the best solution is Xero. All plans come with unlimited user seats and very customizable permissions per user, allowing you to distribute the manual load of bookkeeping while keeping your financial data safe.
You want flexibility in choosing accountants and bookkeepers
Zoho Books’ market share pales in comparison to the behemoth QuickBooks, as evidenced by each software’s review count on user rating platforms. As the more well-known name, QuickBooks is more popular among bookkeepers, accountants, and other financial management professionals. This means that businesses that outsource bookkeeping will have an easier time finding QuickBooks experts than Zoho Books experts.
You need advanced inventory tracking, job costing, or project management features
Zoho Books was designed for the general business. While it offers project tracking, it lacks advanced industry features, such as warehouse inventory tracking, job costing, or project management. If you need specialized bookkeeping solutions, it’s best to look at industry-specific solutions.
Our buyer’s guides can help you find software suitable for your unique business needs.
- Best Bookkeeping Software for Churches
- Best Bookkeeping Software for Construction Companies
- Best Farm Bookkeeping Software
- Best Bookkeeping Software for Nonprofits
- Best Property Management Bookkeeping Software
- Best Bookkeeping Software for Restaurants
Zoho Books vs Competitors
| Zoho Books | QuickBooks | Freshbooks | Xero | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Starting Price* | Free | $28 per month | $22 per month | $25 per month |
| G2 Rating | ★★★★ 4.4 out of 5 (based on 200+ reviews) | ★★★★ 4 out of 5 (based on 3,000+ reviews) | ★★★★ 4.5 out of 5 (based on 900+ reviews) | ★★★★ 4.4 out of 5 (based on 1,000+ reviews) |
| Additional Users | 1 user and 1 accountant | 1 billable user, 2 non-billable users | $13 per additional user | Unlimited |
What Users Are Saying
| Capterra Rating | G2 Rating | Trustpilot Rating |
|---|---|---|
| ★★★★ 4.4 out of 5 (based on 600+ reviews) | ★★★★ 4.4 out of 5 (based on 200+ reviews) | ★★★★ 4.1 out of 5 (based on 5,000+ reviews) |
| Visit Capterra | Visit G2 | Visit Trustpilot |
Reviews for Zoho Books are mostly positive. The platform earned 4.4 stars on the software-focused review platforms Capterra and G2, while the company earned 4.1 stars on the customer service-focused review platform Trustpilot. Positive reviews typically commend the platform for being affordable, feature-rich, and user-friendly. Users claimed that it helped them streamline bookkeeping tasks, particularly invoicing, expense tracking, and reporting.
Meanwhile, negative reviews typically center on customer service. Users found support unhelpful, unreliable, and difficult to reach. Many dealt with disjointed correspondence across multiple agents, delaying solutions. Some even said claimed that agents displayed limited technical understanding of Zoho’s products, and that the solutions they provided made problems worse.
Bottomline
- Free plan: Zoho Books is one of the only bookkeeping software providers to offer a free plan. Though the cost savings come at the sacrifice of automated bank and credit card feed synchronization, this plan still offers 1,000 invoices and 1,000 expenses per year, covering the needs of most very small businesses.
- Affordability: Other than the Free plan, Zoho Books packages are generally more affordable than competitors. It’s most expensive small business bookkeeping plan costs just $40 and already offers invoicing, expense tracking, bill payments, and in-depth reporting.
- Recurring invoices: All Zoho Books plans support recurring invoices. By letting you automate repeat client payments, it streamlines payment acceptance.
Its combination of a generous free plan, low-cost paid tiers, and broad feature coverage makes it a strong option for freelancers, small businesses, and growing teams. Businesses already using the Zoho ecosystem or seeking affordable bookkeeping software with scalable functionality will find Zoho Books a practical and competitive choice.
Start Your Bookkeeping Journey with EpicBooks
Getting started with a new bookkeeping software doesn’t have to be complicated. At EpicBooks, we make bookkeeping simple and stress-free. Backed by years of experience and a thorough knowledge of Canadian markets, we offer bookkeeping solutions designed for today’s digital landscape. Our service packages cover account reconciliation, asset management, journal entry processing, and comprehensive financial reporting.
FAQ
Can I learn Zoho Books by myself?
Yes, you can learn Zoho Books without hands-on support. The platform offers a range of self-paced resources, including help documents, video tutorials, migration guides, and FAQs. It also provides a community forum for guidance from other users. Additionally, tutorials created by users are available on personal websites and platforms like YouTube.
Can I use Zoho Books without an accountant?
While it is possible to use Zoho Books without an accountant, the platform was designed with accountants in mind. One section, called the accountant section, consists mostly of accountant tasks, such as manual journal management, bulk updates, tax payments, tax adjustments, currency adjustments, chart of accounts management, and transaction locking. All accounts, including the Free plan, also include free accountant access.
What size business is Zoho Books best for?
Zoho provides bookkeeping solutions for businesses of all sizes. However, small to mid-sized businesses get the most value for money from Zoho Books plans. The available small to midsized plans cost $15 to $40 and provide all necessary bookkeeping features, including invoicing, expense tracking, bank reconciliation, reporting, and bank feed syncing. It also comes with access to live customer support channels, such as chat and toll-free support lines.
