These comparison points (accrual accounting, journal entries, chart of accounts, and reconciliation) are what I use to differentiate between what I’ll call fully functional accounting software and partially functional accounting software.
If any one of those items is lacking, then the software can’t do the full range of tasks needed by an accounting professional (
Accrual Accounting
Accrual is the standard method for accounting. The difference between accrual and cash is the time when a transaction is recorded.
Some accounting software only lets you practice one method or the other. In my opinion, the best way is to practice accrual accounting when doing data entry, but also enable cash based reports. I say this because you can always take accrual accounting transactions and easily create cash based reports from them, but you can’t take cash based accounting transactions and create accrual based reports from them. Accrual based accounting contains more data (because it requires two entries for transactions that take place over 2 dates), whereas cash accounting only requires a single entry, meaning there is some missing information.
The software to implement both accrual and cashed based accounting the best is
Kashoo, Wave, and FreeAgent don’t offer cash based accounting, but here’s two workarounds that you could use:
- Change the way you enter data, namely by only entering transactions that have an effect on cash balances. In practical terms, you’d never enter a customer invoice or vendor bill as unpaid.
- Deduct the total Accounts Receivable and Accounts Payable from your Profit & Loss, Balance Sheet, and Trial Balance Reports.
Those are not entirely “clean” ways to do cash based accounting, but they are at least able to get you the information you need.
FreshBooks uses a mix of accrual and cash based accounting. For example, you can create customer invoices and then receive payment for them at a later date. However, all vendor bills can only be entered if paid for. You can switch the reporting in FreshBooks from accrual to cash based, but as I’ll talk about later on, FreshBooks doesn’t provide the full gamut of basic reports. However, considering you can’t enter all transactions using accrual based accounting, FreshBooks is not deemed to have the capability to do accrual based accounting.
Journal Entries
The ability to enter a journal entry is a crucial capability, as some transactions can only be done via a journal entry.
Any software that has fields for date, memo, account (to be chosen from the chart of accounts), debits, and credits, get a Y for being able to do journal entries. Other things that are offered, such as recurring transactions, calculating taxes, memos on a per line item basis, assigning categories or names to a transaction, and the ability to reverse a transaction are nice bonuses that a bookkeeper or accountant will appreciate, but probably won’t matter to the average small business owner.
Out of them all, Xero has the the most robust / customizable journal entry window. QuickBooks Online follows closely behind.
FreeAgent has a “simplified” version, where you can only enter journal entries one account at a time. This means a basic debit and credit transaction requires 2 entries. You also can’t post to bank or credit card accounts.
Chart of Accounts
Your chart of accounts is simply a listing of all your accounts (income, expense, asset, liability, and equity).
The most feature-rich chart of accounts can be found with Xero, although the differences in comparison to say QuickBooks or Kashoo is marginal. The big surprise is that other accounting software don’t have basic usable chart of accounts (the ability to add, edit, and delete accounts).
QuickBooks Online US
One thing I didn’t like was that QuickBooks Online forces you to choose from predefined QuickBooks account types (for the benefit of anonymously benchmarking your business against others). Also, the import of accounts into QuickBooks is not a big time saver, since you need to choose a type for each imported account as well as delete any default QuickBooks accounts that you don’t want to use.
Wave
The ability to edit accounts in Wave is limited, since you can’t change the type of account if you originally mis-categorized it. You can’t add descriptions to the chart of accounts. You are forced to choose from their existing account types / categories, which proved cumbersome during set up.
FreeAgent
Underneath the hood, FreeAgent has a large set of accounts, but it’s both hard to access, and for certain accounts, impossible to edit. There is no official chart of accounts window you can go to if you want to view and edit all of your chart of accounts on one page. Instead, it is fragmented across various windows, such as: Banking, Journal Entries and Settings. The only types of accounts you are allowed to create and edit are income and expense accounts. You are allowed to add and edit bank and credit card accounts (which are types of asset and liability accounts), but you can’t create or edit any other asset, liability, or equity accounts.
FreshBooks
There is no official chart of accounts in FreshBooks, although it does use accounts behind the scenes. You can add revenue and expense accounts, but there is no way to set up asset, liability, or equity accounts. You’re forced to live with a default set of expense accounts that you can’t delete, although you do have the ability to add expense accounts.
Reconciliation
Reconciliation, in it’s pure essence, is straightforward. Your goal is to match transactions from an account’s statement (such as your bank statement) to those entered into your accounting software. So the first thing to assess is whether the accounting software has a function to do this. After that, there’s a few differentiating features to look for, such as: Entering transactions from the reconciliation page, allowing for split transactions, assigning taxes, automatically matching transactions, and the interface.
Reconciliation is hard to nail down in a simple y/n feature list as each software has it’s own unique take on how to perform a reconciliation. So, I’ll describe how the reconciliation works with each software.
Xero
Xero’s reconciliation window is composed of two columns, transactions from your bank statement are shown on the left and transactions you’ve entered into Xero are shown on the right. If there’s a match, the transaction on the right is highlighted in green and you can hit OK to accept. If there’s no transaction entered into Xero to match the bank statement to, Xero will either suggest a match or it gives you the ability to create the matching transaction on the spot.
If you’re dealing with similar transactions from month to month (and most companies are), Xero has the ability to automatically suggest transactions based on previous transactions you’ve entered. And if Xero isn’t smart enough to suggest a transaction for you, you are given the power to create your own rules (literally, with the “Create Rule” feature).
For those unique transactions that can’t be aided with the help of automation, Xero’s ability to create new transactions from within the reconciliation page is equally as powerful as its automation feature. This includes doing things like creating transaction with split accounts, receiving payments for customer invoices, paying off vendor bills, assigning taxes, and even parsing out bank transaction fees (such as a PayPal fee) that gets deducted from a customer’s payment.
My only complaint? Xero’s reconciliation page only shows 10 transactions a time, which can mean navigating through multiple pages while doing a reconciliation.
QuickBooks Online US
QuickBooks has a dedicated reconciliation window (found under Banking > Reconcile, however you start the process by going using the “Downloaded Transactions” window (Banking > Downloaded Transactions).
Having two separate windows is initially confusing because when you are using Downloaded Transactions, you are entering or accepting transactions based on bank information. This in itself is a kind of reconciliation process. If you use the “Downloaded Transactions” window correctly, the “Reconciliation” window should be a rubber stamp type of verification process.
Downloaded transactions is where you can automatically import transactions from your bank and either get them categorized by QuickBooks or categorize the transactions yourself. The downloaded transactions feature is quite robust, since it can remember past transactions and suggest entries for you. It’ll also suggests matches for transactions you’ve already entered. Using the window you can also receive payments for invoices or bills. Lastly, in the downloaded transactions window you can enter in split transactions. However, this is a bit limited, as you can’t mix income and expenses in a split account (like if you’re trying to receive a deposit from a customer and you also need to enter in a fee that the bank has deducted from the deposit).
Kashoo
In Kashoo’s reconciliation, it will show you transactions from your bank statement on the top and transactions entered into Kashoo on the bottom. Kashoo will suggest matches for already entered transactions and allow you to enter transactions where no match is found. You can assign taxes while entering transactions through the reconciliation page as well. Splitting transactions can’t officially be done, but you can always enter a transaction, and then click on it to edit it and add more line items to that transaction.
Wave
There is no reconciliation available in Wave.
FreeAgent
The reconciliation in FreeAgent more akin to entering transactions than reconciling transactions. This is because the whole process is designed around you getting a bank feed of transactions or uploading a statement, then “explaining” (i.e. Entering) those transactions. If you’ve already entered transactions before you went to reconcile, FreeAgent won’t suggest matches between the bank statement and transactions entered into your accounting software, you have to painstakingly do the matching yourself. In terms of automation, FreeAgent has the ability to remember past transactions that are similar and start explaining (entering) transactions for you. You’re able to easily add taxes to transactions, which is nice. You are also able to split transactions, although through a two-step process that ends up creating two transactions instead of one transaction that’s simply split. One last thing to mention, is that there is no opening or closing balance showing from the banking page, making it hard to verify transactions entered into FreeAgent against your bank account balance.
FreshBooks
There is no reconciliation available in FreshBooks.
Which Cloud Accounting Software Has The Best Reconciliation Process?
Xero is the winner when it comes to reconciliation. It feels as if there’s nothing you can’t do from Xero’s reconciliation page (there are some things of course, but it’s fairly comprehensive). The only downside I can think of is that it does take some effort to fully understand how Xero’s reconciliation works and how to make the most of it. I don’t think it’s really an issue with Xero, but more of an issue of the multitude of things you can do within the reconciliation page, and the inherent complexity of handling reconciliations.
QuickBooks Online has the 2nd best reconciliation. In certain instances, it seems better / simpler than Xero, but running into certain scenarios (like trying to attribute taxes to income entered, which can’t be done), makes it not as capable as Xero.
The big differentiator between QuickBooks and Xero is Xero’s ability to create rules. While Xero does analyze your reconciliations and create internal rules on it’s own, it also lets you create your own rules, which can really notch up the automation and decrease the time you spend doing things manually.
In comparison to Xero, QuickBooks doesn’t handle the manual import of transactions gracefully. It can be done, but it’s a bit of a convoluted process. QuickBooks reconciliation process works nice enough in most cases, but when it comes to needing some flexibility, QuickBooks tends to break whereas Xero shines.
Kashoo comes up 3rd in the reconciliation category. Like Xero and QuickBooks, the whole reconciliation process requires a bit of
FreeAgent’s reconciliation, again, is more about entering transactions then reconciling. There’s no balance or transaction summary, so the reconciliation in FreeAgent requires some workarounds to verify the data entered into FreeAgent against your bank statement.
If you receive payments from customers via PayPal, Xero gives you the best ability to automate the entry of these payments. The two reasons for this is that it separates out the PayPal fees from the payment, plus it has the ability to create rules. What this means is that if the products you sell via PayPal are standard (as in the sales taxes, shipping costs, item costs are predictable), then a rule can be created to have these transactions entered for you. It should be noted that FreeAgent and Wave can also separate out the PayPal fee, but they have no ability to create rules.
The Reconciliation Paradigm Shift
In traditional bookkeeping, a reconciliation would be performed after all you transactions have been entered into your books. With the ability to import data from your banks directly into your accounting software, this process has been somewhat combined. You can now enter transactions using the data imported from a bank, combining the two separate steps of entering your records and verifying them into one.
A decent number of applications calling themselves accounting software have seemed to forget that a reconciliation is the act of verifying your records, and thus doesn’t provide any mechanism to do so. There’s the argument that a reconciliation is no longer needed, since transactions are entered into your accounting software based on data received directly from your bank. This in theory makes sense, but in practice, there still needs to be a verification of data (a reconciliation). The reconciliation will catch errors such as duplicate transactions, missing transactions, and transactions that a user deletes or modifies.
Does The Software Have The Basics To Be Fully Functional?
The simple answer is that Xero, QuickBooks, and Kashoo have all the fundamental accounting basics to be called fully functional accounting software.
What does this means for Wave, FreeAgent, and FreshBooks? Does this mean you shouldn’t use them?
No, it doesn’t, but it does mean that it’s missing some (or many) of the functionality that a bookkeeper or accountant would need to do their job within the accounting software. This doesn’t prevent them from taking the data produced from the transactions entered into these software and use that to file taxes on your behalf. What it does mean, is that you’ll either find it difficult or impossible to produce accurate records of your company’s complete financial standing (and thus it’s ability to file and pay your income taxes).