QuickBooks Online vs. TaxJar

It seems Intuit is more interested in generating revenue than taking care of their customers. After only 28 (working) days using it, I've had to call for Help 23 times, and, in my experience, only spoken to 2 people who had an understanding of basic accounting practices and the ramifications of some of their suggested fixes on the General Ledger.

Incentivized

If you aren't a tax professional, this is a must. Trying to manually calculate which county/city/state sales tax is owed will break your brain. Actually, even if you were a tax professional, why would you want to manually do it when you could just have a tool like this to calculate it for you. I wish it was also affordable to have it file for you and there are some crunchy bits, but its pros definitely outweigh the cons.

Incentivized

• It enables me to do a P&L for each specific program as requested by the county for the grant money that they give us.
• It enables me to do [an] organizational budget as well as a budget for each specific program
• It enables the accountant and the auditor access at any time for transparency

Incentivized

• The CSV upload for clients that do not have or want to connect directly is very good. It allows us to get a lot of the information done quickly.
• The cost is very competitive.
• According to our clients, the integration is relatively easy.
• For the most part, the reports are accurate.

Incentivized

• The budgets feature leaves a lot be desired - difficult and clunky to populate and maintain.
• Reporting for Budget vs Actual is available but the ability to reforecast based on updated data is not.
• The rules function to default common types of expenses isn't perfect and will get confused if like amounts or a number of similar items present.

Incentivized

• Continually increase its native integration features with BigCommerce, which recently just opened up more Checkout APIs and Sales Tax APIs.
• The Amazon integration is confusing only because Amazon (sometimes?) calculates and collects sales tax on your behalf. It's not clear what's best-- to let Amazon do it for you or for TaxJar to handle it.
• Onboarding could be a bit easier and guided.

Incentivized

It like the product 'right out of the box' and I trust Intuit will continually improve it over the years based on my experience with their desktop products. The large providers of Apps makes customizing the entire package relatively easy and seamless for a wide variety of business types.

Incentivized

While QuickBooks Online is generally easy to navigate, there are some features and functions that often require a Google search in order to find out where they are actually hidden. Additionally, there are some simple customization features that are surprisingly not available for an otherwise advanced program (e.g. only having a pool of 4 fonts to choose from, only having 4 very limited templates for invoicing, not color selection, etc). While I would say that about 75% of users shouldn't have a problem finding their way around with basic functions, there is a learning curve if you want to be able to dive into some of the more useful features, almost to the point that you need to have a dedicated account manager in order to use QuickBooks Online most effectively.

Incentivized

We have rarely had outages in the last 10 years. I can only recall 2 times in the last 10 years where we were not able to access our client files.

Incentivized

There are tab issues. When I tab the field doesn't highlight and I have to backspace or delete what is in the field. Happens on the memo field and sometimes other fields. Very time consuming.

Incentivized

Support is great, all incidents been resolved. Quickbooks Online forum is very well organized and helpful. I like the fact that they let the community contribute in resolving issues. Most or many of your answers can be found online. You can also get help on YouTube, but the easiest way to get assistance is through their chat system.

We had a few questions about integrations & onboarding, and support answered quickly and in-depth. They understood our questions - which were a bit technical in nature - and were able to provide an explanation in a timely and specific manner that allowed us to get the system up and running quickly.

Incentivized

The person in charge of QB needs to be very accurate with record keeping and is recommended to stay on top of tasks. The biggest issue we have is reconciliation, and those issues occur only when too much time has occurred between reconciliations

Incentivized

I have used Wave Accounting for another business. I selected QuickBooks Online over Wave because of the features available from QuickBooks. Wave is great since it is free, but I feel that paying for QuickBooks Online is worth it for the features. In addition there is such a robust support network and training available for QuickBooks.

Incentivized

TaxJar is less expensive, simpler to integrate and their billing is straightforward so that you don't have to worry about huge surprises at the end of a month or quarter. They spend a lot less time on sales/marketing but their support is excellent and overall we have had a much better experience with TaxJar.

Incentivized

As we have grown along our professional path, we have also expanded our use of QB. The scalability is easy and features seem to be waiting for you until you need them. We have increased profits by over 10x from our first year in business to the current and have yet to find a reason to look elsewhere

Incentivized

• It has created a lot of cost and in-efficiency whenever we need to talk to support.
• I spent a lot of time setting up their automatic reminders for past due invoices and it worked for a couple of months and then it stopped. It's currently being worked on by their tech team but it has been months and it is still not working. It would have saved me a lot of time.
• Their multi-currency saves time in sending invoices abroad but it's limiting when a customer wants an invoice in USD instead of a foreign currency so I have to set up different customer accounts for different currencies.

• With regards to ROI, it definitely saves time. And time, as they say, is money. It may be hard to put a particular dollar sign on this, but it definitely has provided a positive return.
• It keeps me aware of where I have sales tax nexus that I might not know about otherwise. This is important. Even if I have to check it manually, at least I am made aware of where I need to file.
• It allows me to track how much in sales tax we've paid year over year, which is a good indication of how our sales are doing.

Incentivized