ZipBooks Review: Features, Pricing & Alternatives

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Here are a couple of articles where we provide an in-depth analysis of ZipBooks versus other popular accounting software.

• ZipBooks vs Wave
• ZipBooks vs QuickBooks

Users love ZipBooks as it beats both QuickBooks Online and Wave in user reviews. Wave and ZipBooks Sophisticated scored pretty similarly across most categories, despite Wave being a completely free program.

However, ZipBooks is better than Wave at project accounting, reporting, and ease of setup. The ease of setup is particularly important when bringing an existing company into new software. ZipBooks allows you to import most of your important lists, such as accounts, customers, and vendors, whereas they’ll need to be manually entered in Wave.

ZipBooks is also better than QuickBooks Essentials for Project accounting. However, QuickBooks users who upgrade to QuickBooks Plus for $90 per month will have project accounting superior to ZipBooks.

Not surprisingly for a more expensive plan, QuickBooks Essentials dominated ZipBooks across almost every category. Wave also beat ZipBooks in a couple of categories—for ease of use because of its useful dashboard and the ability to create any transaction from a central location and for the mobile app, albeit with limited features.

The A/P module is under the Transaction tab. Creating vendors in ZipBooks is straightforward, and there’s an option where you can designate the vendor as a 1099 Contractor. When creating bills, you can include items and assign which expense account is debited.

However, I find it inefficient that users can’t tag bills for custom grouping during bill creation. It would be a time saver if we could tag departments or projects all together while creating a bill. Instead, you can only tag bills in the Expense tab:

Creating a Bill for Inventory Purchase

In the image above, I created a bill for the purchase of widgets. Ideally, the software should ask me to input the quantity of the goods purchased. But in the case of ZipBooks, it only asks for the total cost of the widgets. This makes it impossible for the software to track inventory unit costs and COGS. If you have inventory, then ZipBooks isn’t the right software for you—try QuickBooks Online, which has great inventory accounting.

ZipBooks A/P Video

The basic invoicing function in ZipBooks is pretty good, but it’s not the best I’ve seen. You can upload your logo and choose a customer color for the invoice, but you can’t change the basic layout of the template. However, you can also create a personalized message below the invoice:

Creating an Invoice

What I like about ZipBooks invoicing is that users can add unbilled expenses and time to customer invoices, which is a feature usually reserved for higher-priced plans like QuickBooks Online Plus. But in ZipBooks Sophisticated, priced at $35 monthly, this feature is a competitive advantage over similarly priced software.

Partial payment of invoices is allowed in ZipBooks. When a customer partially pays an invoice, ZipBooks will mark the invoice as “Partial,” and it’ll show the amount paid side-by-side with the total invoice amount on the invoice screen.

However, ZipBooks is missing a couple of important A/R features that I find in other software. Particularly troublesome is you can’t issue credit memos to customers when a refund is given, although you can go in and manually input a negative item on the original invoice. ZipBooks also can’t issue a receipt for cash sales—you must first issue an invoice and then mark it as paid.

ZipBooks A/R Video

Reconciling your checking account is also easy—just don’t forget to turn on “Reconciliation” in the account settings. The way ZipBooks presents bank reconciliation is different from what I usually see in other accounting software. ZipBooks doesn’t show the typical line items in bank reconciliation, like deposits in transit and outstanding checks. Instead, it’ll only show the difference between the book and the bank balance.

To reconcile the balances, just uncheck the items presented by ZipBooks or create an adjustment entry for charges found in the bank statement that haven’t yet made their way to the books.

Balancing a Checking Account

The downsides to ZipBooks’ banking features are that it cannot produce a reconciliation report and print checks. If you issue checks regularly for vendor payments, I don’t recommend ZipBooks, as it would be inefficient to manually write checks. Instead, check out QuickBooks Online for check printing and outstanding bank reconciliation features.

ZipBooks Banking & Cash Management Video

Project accounting in ZipBooks is commendable and convenient because it has a built-in time tracker. You can create projects, assign a contractor for the project, and tag income and expenses to the project. Billable expenses can be converted into invoices during invoice creation. If your clients need estimates, you can create these in the Invoice tab, and the interface of the estimates form is similar to invoicing

Creating an Estimate

Unfortunately, you can’t compare estimates to actual project costs in ZipBooks. Xero is our best alternative if you need project accounting features that include a comparison of estimated and actual project costs. To learn more about the platform, read our review of Xero.

ZipBooks Project Accounting Video

You can create a sales tax item to track sales taxes collected by jurisdiction. However, the program doesn’t provide a very detailed report of your sales tax liability. ZipBooks is also missing any features to help pay your sales tax or file your sales tax return. There is no separate video for this area since it was already discussed in the A/R and A/P video.

Unfortunately, ZipBooks doesn’t have inventory tracking features. There’s no way to keep track of inventory units ordered and sold, and the software doesn’t record COGS and determine the cost of ending inventory automatically. I recommend choosing QuickBooks Online for its outstanding inventory stock and cost tracking features. Since inventory was discussed in the A/R and A/P video, there’s no dedicated video.

Reporting is one of ZipBooks’ strong points. It can generate the reports that I believe should be available in small business accounting software. Here’s the summary of reports:

ZipBooks is generally easy to use, especially the Sophisticated plan. I find the Free and Starter options to be hard to use because of the ease with which you can accidentally upgrade to the Sophisticated tier by accident. If you click a feature only in the Sophisticated plan, you’re automatically updated without asking you to confirm the change. I had to navigate to my subscription and downgrade back to the Free plan several times during my evaluation.

Another factor lowering the Ease of Use score is the dashboard. I’d like to see a feature where you can customize your dashboard to see exactly what you want as soon as you open the program. I’d also like to see a single button you can click from the dashboard to start a new transaction of any kind.

The ease of setup is one area that I find many inexpensive software to do poorly—but not ZipBooks. It provides most of the tools needed to automatically transfer your data from your prior software. Here are the items I would like to see software be able to import from a spreadsheet or comma-separated values (CSV) and how ZipBooks fared:

ZipBooks also scored high here for the onboarding support and new company wizard to help with your setup.

ZipBooks’ customer service isn’t as accessible as that of other accounting software providers. It doesn’t offer customer service through phone calls, though you can use the chatbot or chat with a live representative.

The live chat feature can be found at the bottom right corner of the screen, and ZipBooks provides an estimate of how long it’ll take to accommodate your inquiries. While waiting for a reply, you can browse through its Help Center to look for a quick fix for your problem.

ZipBooks doesn’t have a mobile app. If you need one, I recommend Zoho Books because it has an outstanding and full-featured mobile app that can send invoices, receive payments, assign expenses, enter bill payments, categorize bank expenses, record time, and view reports.

ZipBooks integrates with Gusto to provide payroll processing. You can automatically sync the hours tracked in ZipBooks with Gusto so that the hours you pay your employees for match the hours you’ve tracked for accounting. ZipBooks also integrates with Square and PayPal to accept electronic payments from your customers.

The only missing integration I’d like to see in ZipBooks is an integration to pay your bill electronically. An integration with BILL would be a great addition so that users can send an electronic payment directly from an unpaid bill in ZipBooks.

No, ZipBooks has no payroll features, but you can track time on ZipBooks and sync it with Gusto, a payroll provider.

Yes, it uses 256-bit TLS encryption, which is similar to the encryption used by banks and entities handling sensitive information.

Yes. ZipBooks is made in Utah. Aside from accounting software, it also offers bookkeeping and tax assistance for a separate fee. It competes with QuickBooks in providing accounting software services to service-based businesses.