The REAL Pros/Cons of QuickBooks Online

hi folks i decided to make this video after i saw a video that my friend hannah smolinski a cpa colleague fellow youtuber educating the world in small business financial topics created this video talking about some of the pros and cons of quickbooks online and it occurred to me that after 500 plus videos i've created about quickbooks i do sprinkle here and there things i have issues with in the software and i point out what i think they should be improving but i've never done a video where i sort of break down all the things that are let's get let's say wrong or all the disadvantages of working with quickbooks in this video i'm going to break down what i think are the pros and cons of the quickbooks online platform as compared to any other sort of alternatives so before we jump into the the negative part of the cons or the disadvantages let me clarify some of the great amazing things that quickbooks online has done for the accounting industry as a whole and or how we can label quickbooks online a true revolution in accounting well number one quickbooks online is 100 cloud-based software they're they were not the first to do it um there's many other companies before quickbooks online went on before quickbooks went online many other companies had moved their apps to the cloud so i don't think quickbooks in particular were pioneers of it however today they are probably the ones and the only ones that really have brought cloud accounting into the mainstream there are millions and millions of quickbooks online users and something that a decade ago i would probably say 95 of small business owners would not even fathom the concept of having their accounting data on the cloud now there's millions and millions of people that lead with that that are totally okay with that and i think that even though um people have grown to to to trust the cloud and online banking and all that stuff i think quickbooks has facilitated the this revolution in accounting of moving things into the cloud so having more than 5 million users working with quickbooks online on the cloud 100 cloud-based software is certainly revolution in accounting the other really cool thing about having your data in the cloud particularly with quickbooks online is that you can use a mac pc tablet smartphone chromebook i mean you have a lot of flexibility on how you can access it yeah some of the disadvantages are if you don't have internet you can access it but honestly i live in the united states and within the context of the united states there's very small areas in the country where internet is an issue internet is very access to internet is very ubiquitous in the united states so from my perspective and in the small businesses that i serve it's it's a non-issue i do recognize there are places in the us and in the rest of the world where internet is spotty or not available and obviously quickbooks online is not even something that someone like that will consider the other part that i think quickbooks online has moved in terms of this revolution of accounting is the interconnectivity with third-party apps i mean there are hundreds if not thousands of companies that just exist to serve the quickbooks online user through their own niche app an app that solves a particular program problem that quickbooks is not necessarily designed to fix maybe because of the shortfalls of the of the software or because you know quickbooks cannot solve every single companies every single industry's problem you know there's app developers that develop an app to solve the issues and and operating um and management uh um challenges you know through their apps and their apps connect to quickbooks and they only really truly exist because they connect to quickbooks and because there are so many quickbooks users so quickbooks online has basically expanded the pie in terms of how other developers can enter into the small business solution world the other part that it's again part of this revolution of accounting is the amount of certified quickbooks advisors that are out there now granted that it's free in the united states to get certified as a quickbooks online pro advisor and obviously it being free you're going to have a huge volume and and i i fully believe that quality is more important than quantity however however if you search in google or in the pro advisor listing website if you search for help with quickbooks versus with any other software out there you're going to find the most amount of certified people that work with quickbooks again granted many certified people are complete bogus they don't know anything they're they're certified in paper only trust me i've been in this industry long enough where i can tell you there's really a handful of consultants that i believe to be truly truly good at using quickbooks but that's besides the point because sometimes small businesses just need a little bit of help not really big or complex help and a lot of these advisors the right majority can help with those matters so having possibly the biggest uh database of consultants accountants bookkeepers that support quickbooks online is probably one of the biggest assets and and and part again part of this revolution of accounting that um that intuit has built the other interesting piece is how inelastic uh pricing is with quickbooks online and if you remember economics courses there's this concept called price elasticity which basically says will the consumer buy less if the price goes up right and and logic dictates that if the price goes up for something less people are going to want to buy it quickbooks online has gone up in price maybe three or four times in the past five years that's probably that probably should be in the negative side and a circle back to that when i talk about the cons or the disadvantages uh but what what's interesting at least from quickbooks's perspective is i do not see that many people leaving the quickbooks online platform when the price goes up and maybe that's probably the reason why they keep jacking up the price because they don't see themselves losing customers yes i see every once in a while someone leave the quickbooks online platform go to quickbooks desktop or some of the competitors or whatever because of the price changes but for the most part from a from a statistically significant point of view it's really pretty priced in elastic or it has been in the last couple of years the other really interesting piece uh and i think quickbooks online has had a big um weight uh to to move this is getting the banks to open their apis so banks traditional brick and mortar banks have always been difficult to get data from them you have to log in into their portal and even their portals are limited in data you know banks are being protective of of their clients information but uh quickbooks and banks have gotten together they built these apis where banks can actually transfer data directly into quickbooks such as pdf bank statements we're seeing thousands and thousands of banks that when you connect to quickbooks it transfers the pdf bank statement so it saves the smart business owner the accountant the step of having to log in into the bank to download that that's huge and pretty soon we're gonna possibly start seeing check images and deposit images with details being transferred to those apis again from an accounting perspective that's a complete revolution because that's something that takes forever to try to you know find get from our clients and that sort of thing so that gives you a general idea of why quickbooks online has been so impactful in this world and the other piece more of a business model perspective intuit has built within quickbooks multiple service offerings quickbooks is a bank like quickbooks the company into the company is a bank inside the quickbooks product they offer and cross sale and again they're selling solutions to the small business world uh a a banking product called quickbooks cash it's basically a virtual bank account then it serves and it functions the same way a bank account works they also have quickbooks payments that have existed for a long time that's to process credit card payments so when your customers pay you there's quickbooks capital where they can sell you loans um and and and quickbooks the company is both i mean it's processing payments from your customers credit card payments from your customers it's serving as a bank and also as a lending platform so i mean all they really need in order for them to be a full full bank is to have a credit card which wouldn't it would not uh surprise me to see in the next couple years quickbooks announced some sort of quickbooks credit card that they start selling to their small business clients and the ability to wire transfers which is that's not available yet that's more of a traditional banking feature but you you might see where they do partnerships with other companies such as their partnership with melio emilio which is a company that allows you to pay third parties digitally and electronically so with the partnership with melio it's almost like quickbooks is doing the entire thing because the way the interface is with melio um it feels like it's all built in the product so you can also make payments to third parties so again quickbooks is a bank or is becoming a financial technology company is becoming a full-blown bank the other interesting piece and i as an accountant don't like it but it's the truth is quickbooks also offers bookkeeping services i mean they offer bookkeeping services through a program called bookkeepinglive you can have your opinion about it i'm pretty sure that most seasoned accountants like me are gonna see that as a negative thing uh just because they're competing with them so it feels like they're competing with accounting professionals and also i think most of my colleagues my close colleagues would agree that the quality of that work is not as good as if a true professional that does this for a living not the software and dabbles in bookkeeping services as well offering that so you know quick books again quickbooks again is a revolution in the accounting industry in many positive and negative ways the last one i think would be interesting to mention is quickbooks has total domination over the small business segment so any businesses from startup to maybe like 5 million in sales in annual sales and from 0 to 20 employees they have complete control domination of this market i don't know what the market share is i believe it's probably over 80 percent which is pretty dominant um but again i could be wrong but i'm i'm sure i'm not wrong by more than maybe five percent so 75 80 percent that's that is quickbooks is uh market domination on that segment on the larger side of the small businesses like over 5 million in sales or over 20 employees which they call mid market that quickbooks has a lot more competition um i mean people are these companies are willing to pay a lot more for software so competitors can get really creative on what they can offer and they don't have to you know have quickbooks online to be a really simple streamlined uh software versus this more robust type of systems so there's a lot more competition there and quickbooks is investing heavily in penetrating that market as well you're going to start seeing that with a lot of commercials on quickbooks enterprise which is a desktop product but they it's they offer a cloud-based version for that one is hosted and quickbooks online advanced so you're going to see a lot of a lot of commercials a lot of marketing money a lot of innovation money going into penetrating the larger businesses uh what they were calling this mid market so that's these are all the pros i would say maybe to the industry or to quickbooks themselves now i want to break down some of the cons and some of the disadvantages mostly from a consumer perspective on working with quickbooks online the first one is and probably the most obvious one is you do not have total control of your data because it's a cloud-based software you are abdicating the responsibility of of safeguarding that data to a third party now quickbooks has servers and backup systems and they're a huge multi-billion dollar company and i've been working with them for so long i got no reason to believe that they're an evil corporation trying to steal your data but i cannot predict the future so who the heck knows you know what risks are to have all your data being controlled by a third-party company so for that or because of that i recommend that you back up your data locally as often as possible because again you don't have control over that data now backing up online cloud-based data is not a simple process sometimes you have to use a third-party third-party company that backs up the data in a different cloud server just in case but then if quickbooks disappears you have nowhere to restore that data you can export excel spreadsheets of that data but again you have to then rebuild it in some other system you can export it to quickbooks desktop which we could talk about a little bit later on but again that's i would say the major disadvantage is that you kind of have to trust that intuit has everything put together in order to safeguard your data which today as of this video i trust that right now but again i cannot guarantee anything and we cannot predict the future the other interesting piece is cost okay so when you look at desktop desktop software at least from the last 10 years to 20 years which yes it has gone up in price but for the most part desktop software is something you you buy once and maybe upgrade every three to four years to just have the latest version if the software company keeps making new versions microsoft has done that for a year usually or traditionally buying desktop software it's a lot less expensive than cloud-based software because with desktop software normally you can access multiple databases you can have multiple copies of the database uh you can run multiple uh companies multiple entities and then with with quickbooks online and most cloud-based type apps is gonna be per company right per client per entity so the the cost comparison between the traditional desktop type software and the cloud-based software it's just really really wide cloud is going to be a lot more expensive now granted most software companies are developing cloud-based web apps not desktop apps and you can see the writing on the wall where at some point in the future computers are not going to have any software installed in them they're just going to have an operating system and everything's going to be cloud-based it might not be too long until until that happens a perfect example for that is dvr right so 10 years ago 15 years ago when you recorded something from from your tv um a soccer game or a or a telenovela or whatever you recorded something it was stored in a physical hard drive in your physical hardware that was in your house under your tv now you have this dvr machines that don't store anything in the hardware itself it is hosted at comcast xfinity a t directv whatever is hosted there so you're recording it but you're not really recording it you're just accessing stuff on demand so again if you don't have internet you don't have access to it you can't play it back and that's kind of the same concept of not having control over uh over your data and and the comparison between traditional desktop versus cloud the other piece uh when it comes to cost is if you were to compare quickbooks online to their competing solutions such as xero sage1 freshbooks wav zoho books all these companies are pretty much they're they exist to try to take some of the quickbooks market share uh quickbooks is amongst if not and i haven't done a full market comparison but it is amongst if not the most expensive compared to everyone else now i probably should have mentioned this on the pros and that sort of thing but the feature set in quickbooks online far surpasses every other cloud-based accounting software in its same cost category there's no other cloud accounting software for under 200 a month that can do as much as quickbooks online plus and quickbooks line advance can do period and if i'm wrong put it in the comments tell me hector check out this piece of this program and i'll gladly learn about it and make a video retracting that statement but i'm pretty confident that quickbooks online in a feature set compared to other cloud based accounting software surpasses everyone else when it comes to features but in the in the con part of the disadvantage is when you compare quickbooks online to its sister or brother quickbooks desktop quickbooks that stuff just blows quickbooks online out of the water in feature set you know you do need to understand quickbooks desktop has existed since the early 90s we're talking about 30 years of software making and improvements versus quickbooks online that has existed for more than 10 years but it hasn't been a serious contender for maybe for at least six or seven years so they're kind of behind the eight ball of development and the quickbooks online developers are not the same as a quickbooks desktop developer so they never try to make quickbooks online a replacement of quickbooks desktop they make quickbooks online an entirely different platform with different goals and purposes and they and they and they it seems like they truly try to avoid making quickbooks online a replacement of quickbooks desktop so it's they try to make it its own thing let's let's call it that so that's just a really interesting just way to kind of uh think about it you know with this you know cost and feature limitations especially when compared with um you know the the cloud competitors and their desktop counterparts um the other one that i think is really worth discussing is it's really hard to get out of quickbooks online and into a competing product yes you can do backups of quickbooks online into quickbooks desktop yes you can backup into an excel file and have a database backed up in there but it it's it's almost impossible for an average person to go to xero or to fresh books or to soho books or uru or whatever a competitor cloud-based accounting software and just like have a seamless transition of data it's going to require a lot of sort of techie data download and excel database cleanup and then import and then some of the data it's not going to download and and it's just not going to look the same just just migrating from quickbooks online to another competitor it's impossible or it's very very very very difficult so that's actually another one too to make sure you keep in mind um and if you do migrate to quickbooks desktop and quickbooks setup exists 10 years from now or whatever you also lose a little bit in that migration process i mean you get you get 95 of your data but you do lose some some in the process the last one i want to mention is support and i think that customer support technical support is quick boxes into its big achilles heel it has been for many many years and i'll give them the benefit of the doubt and i'll tell you from someone that has been supporting small business clients in accounting concepts and quickbooks concepts for a very long time that providing free technical support is very very hard and on top of that separating what's technical support of the software and technical support of accounting issues are two very difficult things to do it's a very gray area and it's very difficult to mark that difference between look this is support on the software versus these are accounting problems that you have and all those things get mixed and jumbled so often where customers always perceive their technical support to be bad because technical support cannot fix accounting bookkeeping problems and and it's hard to separate those two so granted it's very difficult to support but that being said um if you ask anyone if you go online and you ask about quickbooks support especially with quickbooks online i would say the great majority of customers great majority of accountants will agree that this is their big achilles heel so so as quickbooks tries to continue to grow this market and continue to dominate this market this is where they need to invest the most they need to invest in bringing support from other overseas to the united states tapping into the great database of quickbooks pro advisors are out there and bring them bring the talent in-house so the people that were out there independently helping people are now in-house giving them support i mean quickbooks needs to really really invest in support so my recommendation is if you're looking for accounting software and you're looking for the most powerful online based software again for under 200 a month and you can't afford the 25 50 80 180 whatever it costs for whatever version of quickbooks online that you have and you don't have heavy heavy needs for custom reports and custom forms and job costing and inventory which is the feature set issue i was telling you um where quickbooks online falls short versus desktop so if you don't have any of those specific needs and you are not buying the software uh with the premise that their 800 quickbooks number or whatever you'll be able to call and they'll be able to help you solve every accounting problem then obviously it's going to be an issue for you to buy quickbooks but but if you are a service based company and you try quickbooks for 30 days and it works well and you are gonna probably leverage an accountant like me a bookkeeper a professional that you're paying for professional services to help you support it and only use quickbooks technical support for truly technical issues that are beyond the control of a professional an accountant then your experience with quickbooks online will be incredible unfortunately the problem is expectations uh and and the marketing messaging from quickbooks for a very long time has been this is super easy you can do your own accounting accounting is something that anybody can do blah blah blah and then basically when people buy the software and they're buying best in class software because quickbooks online is best in class and they're paying their monthly fee they're also expecting things to happen magically and that's not the case right i build an entire livelihood around consulting on quickbooks desktop and quickbooks online because this is not easy stuff this is hard stuff but it's hardest doing the setup it's hardest during the learning process it's hardest doing the implementation and the connectivity once you get a pro to hook you up set you up teach you organize it and put it in such a way that it becomes very easy for you to um work from from that starting point then it becomes a really really easy uh process and a really wonderful experience so i wanted to give you the the lowdown of all the things that i think are great about the cloud-based platform and the advantages that intuit is really reaping right that all these benefits are reaping from being not just best in class but being truly revolutionaries in the accounting world and then all the shortcomings that again if quickbooks strategically speaking they watch this video and they get the feedback from their customers and they bridge all the gaps right and they find solutions to all these uh disadvantages or all these cons then they're gonna continue to dominate the market for a very long time i for once i'm a quickbooks reseller because i love the product i don't love the product because i love software because i don't know anything about software design or software coding i couldn't tell you whether quickbooks is a greatly designed or a greatly coded software i love the software because it's a means to an end i'm an accountant and a business consultant i care about financial clarity i care about people growing their businesses i care about the livelihood of families of the small business owners that have this passion to serve the world through their business and quickbooks happens to be the best in class software that can help me as a tool to achieve that purpose and achieve that goal and because of that i love quickbooks both quickbooks online and quickbooks desktop and have different clients for different purposes but to be honest with you in the day of tomorrow a better company where to make a better software that helps me uh achieve my goals to help my clients i will start loving that company as well i don't love quickbooks for the sake of loving quickbooks i love quickbooks because i think it's the best alternative is the best option from all the options that are out there so again quickbooks ain't no saint okay you know they increase their prices they're making a lot of money the company keeps increasing in value into a usage that made the the metadata of their customers to make their software better in many ways i think quickbooks uses their accountants or the accounting community that codes transactions and stuff like that to teach the software how to automate some of the work that we're doing accountants are doing and at some point bookkeeping an accounting work or a piece of it will be very relevant because our software will be able to do it with 95 accuracy i am very very clear minded that the intuit is uh utilizing all the resources to make their software better and to grow their piece of the pie even if it eats away from where some accountants and some of the accounting industry is eating from and i get it and and and even though i'm clear that i continue to be a partner of quickbooks because i personally innovate i personally look for ways to serve my clients beyond you know the stuff that quickbooks can do so i'm always looking for okay quickbooks solve this problem i no longer need to manually click here click there do that entry to solve this problem quickbooks can do it let me move into the next thing that i can do to help my clients look in the small business consulting work there's unlimited ways you can help people there's unlimited ways you can help individuals improve their livelihoods and make better decisions for their business i don't need to cling to the fact that i used to love the way i used to do data entry for my clients and i used to make a livelihood with like with that and now quickbooks online is sort of eating away my lunch on the data entry part of the business because the automatic categorizations or maybe because of the quickbooks live bookkeeping services that's aiming to replace some of that piece of the work i get it but i'm not threatened by it because i love the software purely as an objective tool right i use the tool to reach my goals and when a better tool comes along that will help me do that i will ditch quickbooks and go to that tool now is it likely well probably not there's just so much dominance in the marketplace from quickbooks and this is why it's got so much criticism and why people like me and people like like hannah as i mentioned earlier they need to make videos saying these are some of the good things and these are some of the bad things because many people even in this channel have criticized me for being a zealot of quickbooks or being a defender of quickbooks or being one that doesn't tell the truth about quickbooks because i benefit from quickbooks and that's true i do benefit from quickbooks i have clients that pay me top dollar so i can train them and teach them how to use quickbooks i have clients that buy quickbooks and i get paid from intuit when people buy quickbooks from my link and that's how this channel is supported that's true and i'm being transparent about that but i don't do it because i make money from quickbooks i do it because i help small businesses get better and right now as long as the best possible tool that's out there to help small businesses to get better is quickbooks i will keep pushing and promoting quickbooks online or desktop and i you go through my channel you see that i talk about all the nuances of each one and i compare them and i do videos on each one and i don't do any other competitors because just they just don't have them they just don't have the competitors in many ways that's great not having competitors is great but in many ways not so great i think that the blessing that intuit has had for not having competitors has allowed them to keep increase their prices that increase in price brings their stock up gives them more profit with that profit they invest back in innovation or a positive cycle but not having competitors doesn't keep them in check and unfortunately because there isn't a real threat to the quickbooks world into it sometimes can just chill and relax about the things that they should fix but they haven't fixed like support and so that that piece that i mentioned support is the part that really truly needs to be transformed as a matter of fact if someone from intel come to me and say hector come come work with quickbooks you know come become an employee and i i start working at quickbooks and they say okay fix things what would you fix first thing i would do is i would just completely reimagine support i improve support create more videos branded by quickbooks explaining how to fix things the stuff that i do in my channel okay um training their people better uh paying their people more possibly to keep that talent bringing talented people from the outside world to work in the support team i think that this achilles heel of support has basically exists because there's no competitors because quickbooks doesn't see a massive attrition and and customers leaving the quickbooks platform because of support because unfortunately for them and fortunate for intuit their product is so good and it's best in class and connects to some of some so many other systems that connects to banks and there's so many accountants supporting and so many accountants getting used to it because that exists people overlook their big deficiencies with support and embrace everything else and somehow i think most people make the conscious decision that says hey i could go to another accounting software i might have a little bit better support but i'm going to be i'm going to be short in so many other features and that sort of thing so again that trying to again i'm trying to be as transparent as possible with you guys there's some stuff that i might have left out i mean the idea was to have one definitive video where i just kind of dump all the things that i think uh quickbooks is is missing and if you're interested you're specifically particularly interested on the details on where i think quickbooks falls short check out a link in the description where i basically listed what i call my wish list which i let every single person an intuit know i let every one of my colleagues know this is what i think is wrong with quickbooks you got to fix this particular items and if you agree with them put them in the comments if you disagree with them put them in the comments if you think i should add more things to that wishlist contact me and and add it in the comments it's like it's a it's a google doc it should be very easy to work with and and once you read that document you know that i'm serious i'm that serious that i really need i really think that quickbooks needs especially online needs to improve their product dramatically quickbooks desktop does need to be improved but i mean compared to the improvements opportunities that quickbooks online has i mean it's dwarfed so so i'm very serious about wanting to make quickbooks better continuously make quickbooks better and you're going to make it better both with innovation and with support in many ways the reason why my quickbook my youtube channel is so popular and the reason why i've been able to build a livelihood off the backs of my supporting uh small business owners and accountants that watch the youtube channel and buy my training products and hire my company for consulting and i've been able to do so well you know with that is because i created the alternative to quickbook support like my youtube channel is the answer or the antidote to the problems and shortfalls that quickbooks support has in such a way that people call me and say hey i was speaking to quickbooks support and the lady or the guy told me check out your videos because the answers might be there so it actually it just makes no flipping sense to me that a such a huge company would basically not have a strong enough database of answers where the employees have to refer to some third party like myself now this is a mutually benefiting relationship quickbooks benefits from me giving free advice and free support to the world and i get the benefit because their support sucks so i'm able to leverage their sucky support to create content for people to realize that you can get better support from a professional versus a software company in itself and in many ways i also help my colleagues because people realize that people that are third party to the software itself could be better understand it better find solutions better than the the software company in itself can all because of the shortfalls of support so i'm very proud that they gave me the opportunity to do that obviously not on purpose and i've i've been able to uh let's say leverage that and i'll be able to exploit that through this youtube channel but those are my sort of my final words quickbooks is to invest in making the product better so they can continue to control and innovate but they really do need to invest in support anyway i hope you liked this video hit like subscribe to the channel check out the links in the description below and add comments we'd love to know what you think thanks

Channel: Hector Garcia CPA

Views: 15,079

Keywords: quickbooks online, quickbooks, qbo, quickbooks desktop, quickbooks online vs xero, quickbooks online vs desktop pros and cons, quickbooks online vs desktop 2021, quickbooks online vs freshbooks, qbo vs xero, quickbooks vs xero, quickbooks vs wave, quickbooks vs freshbooks vs xero, quickbooks vs square, quickbooks online cons, quickbooks online disadvanages

Id: jiu8MSCsalc

Length: 34min 57sec (2097 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 12 2021