Going Beyond: 9 QuickBooks Add Ons to Consider
When a business first invests in QuickBooks, they might think they’ve found an all-in-one package that will solve all of their accounting and enterprise resource planning challenges. After all, QuickBooks is a powerful and highly-effective solution for small, mid-range, and even the occasional large company, allowing them to handle payroll and more.
That said, businesses can also quickly learn that they might need to go beyond QuickBooks to solve specialized issues, as they arise.
Whether it’s making a payment to a vendor, scheduling a job with a client, managing inventory, or much more, businesses are sometimes better-suited locating a software applications that can integrate into QuickBooks. Here are nine QuickBooks add ons to consider and what each app is primarily used for.
1. Price Quotes: Quotient
QuickBooks rating: 4.7 stars
QuickBooks add ons function: When a sales representative makes a price quote, it’s important to get it into QuickBooks as soon as possible. Not tracking price quotes can lead to a lack of cohesion for sales teams and the chance for the occasional rep to go rogue.
One easy add-on for this is Quotient, which works intuitively and allows for the inclusion of QuickBooks Customers and QuickBooks products data. It can also integrate with QuickBooks data, allowing accepted quotes to, as Quotient notes on its website, automatically turn into invoices.
Customers also get more options with Quotient, as sales teams can prepare multiple pricing options for them in the software. Reviewers have praised Quotient’s customizability, which can be superior to QuickBooks, more of a base-level solution.
2. Payments and AP Automation: Stampli
QuickBooks rating: 4.7 stars
QuickBooks add ons functions: Stampli integrates seamlessly with QuickBooks (or pretty much any other enterprise resource planning software a company might be using), with the ability to automatically sync invoices, purchase orders, and receipt reports.
Leveraging AI and machine learning, Stampli helps the procurement-to-payment cycle move far more efficiently, cutting approval times and costs down dramatically. The software also allows approvers to pay bills in whichever manner they prefer, as Stampli Direct Pay is payment agnostic.
Stampli is an easy-to-use, all-in-one payment solution that can help businesses that use QuickBooks get the most of their investment.
3. Project Management: Mavenlink
QuickBooks ratings: 3.8 stars
QuickBooks add ons functions: Project management software is the proverbial dime a dozen these days and it can be hard to know which are riding the wave of the trend and which can actually work well in business. It can also be hard to directly tie project benchmarks in with accounting software. One tried and solution in how it interacts with QuickBooks, though, is Mavenlink.
The tool, as it notes on its website, allows direct integration with QuickBooks of projects and accounting. Project time can either be synced or billed directly from Mavenlink. Personnel management on projects also goes smoother, with Mavenlink offering built-in resources that show availability of your team for projects.
4. Customer Relationship Management: Insightly CRM
QuickBooks rating: 4.4 stars
QuickBooks add ons functions: Similar to project management, a ton of different CRM tools have hit the market over the past couple of decades. Insightly CRM shines in what it can do for small business accounting, earning rave reviews over the years.
“We need to provide receipts with our customer’s information on them for insurance and income tax purposes,” a five-star reviewer in March 2021 noted on its QuickBooks page. “Without the integration I would need to manual transfer the Name and Address of each renter. The integration is both a time saver and money saver.”
5. Ecommerce: Ecommerce Sync by Webgility
QuickBooks rating: 4.7 stars
QuickBooks add ons functions: With over two billion people making purchases online totaling in excess of $4.2 trillion in 2020, the last thing any ecommerce merchant needs is a solution that won’t provide clear records of all of the transactions.
Ecommerce Sync by Webgility, works with QuickBooks and a variety of ecommerce platforms to provide an assortment of useful data. This includes daily transaction and refund summaries, ecommerce fee recording, and sales tax compliance across jurisdictions.
6. Funding: Fundbox
QuickBooks rating: 4.5 stars
QuickBooks add ons functions: For one reason or another, not every business will be able to access traditional lines of financing.
Some lack credit or institutional history. Others weren’t able, during early parts of the COVID-19 pandemic, to navigate U.S. Small Business Administration hurdles to access Paycheck Protection Program loans. While 70% of small businesses applied for the first round of PPP funding, just 72% of those applicants were accepted, according to the NFIB Research Center.
Enter unconventional lenders such B2B credit and payments network Fundbox, whose CEO Prashant Fuloria told PYMNTS.com in August 2020, “One of the things that many businesses sort of felt unhappy about was their existing financial institution — the big bank that they worked with — just wasn’t quite there at their time of need,” Fuloria said. “So, I do think there’s a very, very big opportunity here.”
The well-reviewed QuickBooks app allows credit decisions to be rendered within minutes, with the application process taking just two steps for businesses. Pricing to advance invoices starts at 4.66% of invoice value, repayment generally spread over 1-2 years.
7. Scheduling: Acuity Scheduling
QuickBooks rating: 4.5 stars
QuickBooks add ons functions: Scheduling software doesn’t always do a lot aside from placing an entry in Google Calendar. Acuity Scheduling does much more, though, describing itself on its website as a personal assistant of sorts.
On the client end, they can view availability, book appointments themselves, and pay for them. Appointment reminders are automated and should a client cancel, that’s automatically handled as well. As for businesses, they can check their schedule wherever they might be and sync Acuity with other calendars they might use.
“The price is great and it’s efficient,” a reviewer noted in April 2021. “It’s like having someone do everything for you minus the (hassle) of trying to get things done on your own.”
8. Data Storage: SmartVault
QuickBooks rating: 4.8 stars
QuickBooks add ons functions: Businesses never know when the next audit is coming. And when an auditor catches them unprepared, it can make the process take exponentially longer, with a sharp rise in cost. Solutions like SmartVault help alleviate this problem, though, by making it so that companies can digitize as many of their records — both financial and otherwise — as they’d like and store them in the cloud, allowing them to be ready for an auditor almost instantaneously.
It’s fairly low cost, though companies have different options depending on their pricepoints. SmartVault’s cheapest option is $20 a month for one user, with 250 gigabytes of storage and unlimited guest users. Team plans, which are for five users at $12 a month, provide 1 terabyte of storage while Pro plans at $20 a month for five users offer unlimited storage.
It’s drawn strong reviews thus far, with one person noting in June 2019, “This app has been great for me (as a solo business owner to) keep track of all my client files and share with their key contacts (eg tax pro, insurance auditors etc). It creates the same file structure automatically each year for the client.”
9. Inventory: SOS Inventory
QuickBooks rating: 4.6 stars
QuickBooks add ons functions: Inventory management might not be any business’s favorite task. SOS Inventory helps take the pain out of it, though, with a solution that allows businesses to not only track inventory, but order management and manufacturing.
It’s especially useful for businesses that manufacture their own goods, with SOS Inventory’s website noting how it “fills in the gaps missing from QuickBooks Online such as managing backorders, calculated average cost, negative stock-on-hand, inability to close the books when inventory is negative, and no custom field options for inventory.”
All in all, it’s just one more out of many apps and add-ons that can help businesses to have a far better time using QuickBooks.
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