QuickBooksOnline

QuickBooksOnline is a cloud accounting software for small and mid-sized businesses and comes in a variety of package options:

Simple Start, Essentials and Plus. The latter comes with built-in inventory management for almost $40/month.

QuickBooksOnline is a feature-rich accounting SaaS, that follows the good old accounting school tradition, and comes with conscise and standard accounting terminologies, that rids a user off a second guess efforts. Yet, the online version of the quickbooks enjoys the kudos of the desktop version as it proved unreliable in inventory management section, which we cover later in the post

Getting Started

Sign up process in QuickBooks Online is swift. After the registration, users can scan the navigation and easily grasb the functions available within the system, which is very important.

Similar to the desktop version, QuickBooksOnline has a workflow diagram. Personally, I never utilized, but believe it is a handy tool for the newbie.

QuickBooksOnline also provides dynamic content to help a user tune up the system, by personalizing invoice templates via cosmetic changes (company logo, address and company name).  Furtheron, users are offered to follow the todo list: Import bank transactions, customers, suppliers, chart of accounts and products.

Contacts

Importing contacts is quite easy via CSV file. Even though you may have named CSV file headers differently, QuickBooksOnline tries to match your column names and their variations, which saves time and efforts. Yet, quite little of customer/supplier data can be uploaded via the form. There is no way to import billing and shipping addresses of customers in the bulk transaction.
What we also like is the ability to add customers/suppliers with beginning balances. Believe it or not, but the online accounting applications we have cracked so far did not have this simple, yet quite vital feature.

Products / Inventory
QuickBooksOnline offers Inventory management on First-In-First-Out method with one warehouse. For those who are not quite familiar with FIFO method, I could only tell it is the most used inventory costing method, and makes sense for certain industries.

QuickBooksOnline, though does quite well when buying and selling items, it's inventory quantity adjustment function is not quite ingenious (FYI, there is no value adjustment). Foremost of our disappointment is due to erroneous calculations after stock quantity adjustment. To be frank, hardly would any business notice it, since tracking the quantities and different costs is less probable for most of businesses. Unless you are a real nerd.

Invoicing
QuickBooksOnline users can create Sales Estimates with Pending, Accepted, Closed and Rejected statuses and convert estimates into Sales Invoices.

When emailing an invoice, a user may attach additional documents along with invoice PDF.
QuickBooksOnline offers a very handy tool for remembering sales invoices as templates, reminders or as scheduled/recurring transactions.

Expenses

Users can register their expenses via Checks and Bills. There was also a beta version of IntuitPayment network system which would allow to write off funds from a related bank account directly for $0.50 per check.

Reports 

One of the advantages of QuickBooksOnline is its comprehensive list of reports' library and the ability to share them via email directly from a report page. Users can also toggle between Cash and Accrual basis of reporting which grants extra flexibility in reporting.