The 5 Top QuickBooks Apps of 2017

There are so many amazing apps that sync with QuickBooks—it’s difficult to choose just five. But after careful deliberation and reflection on my own experience with these apps, I think we’ve come to the right conclusions.

Below you’ll find the five must-have apps that will make your life easier when you use them in conjunction with QuickBooks.

1. Bilbeez

To pull a quote right from their website, “Billbeez provides the perfect financial ecosystem, offering an online solution that makes it easy to manage business finances.” In the beginning, you’re going to find yourself wanting to compare this to Bill.com, but it’s not. You also might want to compare this to Hubdoc or Receipt Bank, but again, wrong answer.

After having Billbeez set up, linked to QBO, and after training my client to send every bill, and every receipt into Billbeez, via the e-mail address for his account, Billbeez went to work, indexing all of his bills. Here’s what happened next. He got an email, which he promptly forwarded to me, using an expletive to describe how “…. cool” it was. Here’s the message that was sent to him:

Hi ______,

The attached invoice from The Surplus Company already exists on our system but the amount is different.

The amount has been updated to $71,400 (the previous amount was $68,000).

In case the above amount is incorrect, please write us back with the right amount.

Both files can be found on your Billbeez account.

This is AI. This is intelligence. And this underscores what Billbeez really does. It gives business owners a platform to work in that they can understand and really use. It’s constant monitoring of your income and expenses to make sure you have a handle on your business. It gives business owners the ability to track expenses, based on labels (separate from the accounting categories), so that you can quite literally track things in terms that make sense to you.

2. Transaction Pro Importer

This tool was a lifesaver to me when I was working in QuickBooks Desktop, and the QuickBooks Online version just recently saved my life again. I was setting up a brand-new client, and my process for getting started had been badly delayed. The client was getting anxious.

Once I got started, I was able to use Transaction Pro to import five months’ worth of invoices, and then payments on those invoices. These would have taken weeks to enter manually. I had it all imported in a few hours.

If you are setting up a QBO company and coming from an accounting system that can’t be migrated, you have nothing to worry about. Export everything from your old system into spreadsheets. Your lists, and your invoices, and then your payments. Each transaction type should be in a separate Excel file. Transaction Pro Importer makes it ridiculously easy to get a ton of transactions imported into QuickBooks Online, very quickly.

A few days after I finally got started, my client emailed to thank me for the progress and commented that she felt good and was going to be able to report good progress to her board of directors.

3. Bill.com

When I was a kid, I remember thinking that Billy Joel’s greatest hits should just come with any radio/music player ever sold. It was such a staple (even my parents liked his music!).

Bill.com is the QuickBooks apps version of Billy Joel—a staple. In fact,  It was recently announced that Intuit is building Bill.com right into the app. Meanwhile, get it. Use it. It will make your life simple.

Here’s a tip—using Billbeez (mentioned above) you can forward your bills to Billbeez. That will sync over to QuickBooks Online, and then in time, QuickBooks Online will sync the bill to Bill.com. All you need to do is pull up your Bill.com mobile app, and tap to pay the bill when you’re ready to. Bill.com syncs that payment back to QuickBooks Online. You never have to enter a thing. You now have an automated process for your accounts payable.

Congratulations, you’re at the cutting edge of what you can do with the right QuickBooks apps.

4. Webgility

If you have an ecommerce business, then you simply must have Webgility. And here’s a tip: Don’t map your sales receipts to undeposited funds. Set up a separate clearing account for each sales channel and map accordingly. Webgility will sync your online sales to the respective clearing account. When the money comes into your bank account, you will book it as a transfer from clearing to bank account. The activity will practically reconcile itself.

Now your revenue cycle is mostly, if not completely, automated.

5. Tax Planner Pro

Chris Ragain’s Tax Planner Pro practically does your whole tax return. In all seriousness, this app grabs your data from QBO and gives you accurate, projected tax information, so there are no more surprises at year-end. You can watch Raigan give an hour demo of his product here: Chris Ragain—Tax Planner Pro.

Tax Planner Pro is the QuickBooks app that helps you plan what you need to set aside. Most CPAs do the projections in November, but all too often, by then it’s too late to set aside what you need or pay the additional payroll. With Tax Planner Pro, you see it all year long. Warning! With Tax Planner Pro, you have no one to blame but yourself, for not setting aside the money.

So many QuickBooks apps exist, and innovations are happening all the time. For now, these are my favorites, but it’s important to stay up to date on what’s out there!

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from Fundera Ledger https://www.fundera.com/blog/quickbooks-apps