43: Moving your invoicing to the cloud
Receipts everywhere. Bank statements flying in to your post office box. Bills mounting. And you have no idea where your business stands until after tax time when the accountant gives you the all clear. There is a better way. This is Clickstarter, I’m Dante St James. This is episode 43, and Day 9 of my daily series, April Foolproof Your Business. Today… It’s time to move your invoicing to the cloud. The time of writing your invoices out with a carbon copy book is over. It was actually over 20 years ago. But we won’t squabble over that small detail. If your invoicing and payments for invoices are out of control, it’s probably because you’re still trying to do it all manually on paper, or in an Excel spreadsheet. As you’d suspect, accounting and bookkeeping has come a long way in the last 20 years. You’ll probably be familiar with programs like Quicken or MYOB. They’ve been around a long time and have tended to dominate the accounts landscape of most established businesses. But they really do feel clunky and over-the-top for the average small business to use. This is where the current crop of Cloud Accounts systems come in. The top of the pile in terms of popularity is Quickbooks. With over 12 million users worldwide and huge fan base of both businesses and bookkeepers it’s miles ahead of the others. And with a solid 4.5 out of 5 on most review sites, it’s performing well in terms of the opinion of the people who use it most. The biggest pros about it are that it has pretty much everything you’ll ever need in a bookkeeping or accounts system and plenty of pro accountants and bookkeepers know and use it. The cons are that it’s often described as being a little hard to navigate with a design that isn’t very intuitive to move around for those who are used to using the web instead of using software that has been converted to work on the web. Next on the popularity pile is Accounting by Wave, also known as Wave Apps. It’s simple, free and used mostly by sole traders and home business users. Probably because it’s free. I personally have an issue with using a free app to handle my money because it just feels like your money handling is the one thing you should probably not be skimping on when it comes to cost and quality. That said, it’s got close to 9 million worldwide users and does a stellar job of handling your invoices, receipts, and gives handy notifications when things are read, paid or completed. But it is limited. If you want to process payments or do payroll on it, you’ll need to pay. Then there is Xero. Spelt with an X. I get a bit funny about Xero because I am instantly suspicious about any system that higher level users rave about, but whom lower level users complain about not being able to get decent support with. The way that Xero grows is by Accountants and Bookkeepers selling it to their clients. So it’s a little like network marketing. Or affiliate marketing. No that there’s anything wrong with that. I’d be nastier about it, but honestly, it’s not bad at all. It’s easier to use than Quickbooks. It’s more fully-featured than Wave and has integrations with almost everything. It’s a seriously good accounting package, handles payroll, handles payment processing, and has around 1.2 million customers. But it seems to rate overall way less than Quickbooks. Average ratings run from 75 to 80 out of 100 on most review sites, where Quickbooks rates over 90% on just about all of them. And while Quickbooks users don’t usually have anything bad to say about Xero, Xero users seem to be quick to badmouth Quickbooks. I’ve looked at both, I’m all… meh… it does invoices. And they both do solid jobs. Price wise they are similar, so I’m not sure why the hate on either of them. They’re both great products. I’m just not a fan of having my accountant or bookkeeper selling me software. My favourite of the lot of them is Freshbooks. To me, it’s easy, has plenty of power and does the job. That said, I’m about to outgrow it as I move...