Listen to this blog post
|
We were with Freshbooks for many years. It was a great fit for the invoicing side of our business. Doing recurring hosting invoices and quickly sending invoices for website builds and one-off work, super simple. But it was severely lacking as an accounting platform. So we’re mid-switch to Quickbooks Online.
I’m writing this for catharsis but also in hopes that Quickbooks solves these and I can start striking out items as remedied.
Recurring Invoicing is Passable but Greatly Lacking
This is tough as a large part of our business is monthly retainers and hosting. I’m trying to have a good attitude and also hope they fix these weak spots.
1. You can’t send a recurring invoice to specific emails
The only option for where ALL recurring invoices for a client go is to whatever the general email you’ve set for the client. You can add multiple emails there separated by commas but this is then applies to all recurring invoices you set for the client. I often need to send an invoice to Accounts Payable and CC various people. If I have multiple recurring invoices for the client, they can’t have granularity in where they send too.
2. There is no way to dynamically personalize the recurring invoices by date
In Freshbooks there is a super handy feature where in the line item descriptions you can use these dynamic merge codes like ::month:: and ::year:: – They call these Dynamic Variables and you can even do simple math with them.
I’m not sure Quickbooks is even likely to add this as their response here years ago is pretty unsympathetic.
This is a big deal for a business that sends out many automatic invoices per month and it would be incredibly inefficient to intercept and fix the descriptions on all of them. So our solution is sadly that each line item is pretty much date agnostic. So I guess we hope the client assumes the invoice is for that month’s retainer? What if the cadence is mid-month? It’s just not ideal.
3. You can’t start a recurring invoice the day-of
If you create a new recurring profile the earliest start day for it is the next day.
This is particularly annoying if you are trying to create an invoice for past work and have that sent around the same time as one for work going forward. You can’t (as far as I know) easily create a one-off invoice and have it sent on a future day.
4. Management of the recurring invoices
In general there is no place to view all your recurring profiles and see what are next up by date. You have to navigate to a client and then a tab for that client and that would of course only show the recurring profiles for that client.
It is clear with the entire system that recurring invoices just aren’t a priority feature for Quickbooks Online.
It’s not all bad with Quickbooks
I do like…
- Clients already using the Quickbooks ecosystem can more quickly connect our accounts and pay us.
- There are quite a few services and APIs that integrate with Quickbooks – as you’d expect from one of the big players.
- Our accountant loves it because it actually has very robust accounting features.
Leave a Reply