Quickbooks Online is the category Leader for small business accounting software and part of the the second largest software company in the world.

It is priced by tiers depending on what services you need and is billed monthly. Prices range from $35 to $235 per month. Learning this software is so challanging they have an army of fee based experts and a full library of free videos designed to make the software more usable/understandable.

Importantly, Quickbooks Online is 100% online. Your data resides on their computers and restoring the data in case of a malfunction is a privilage reserved for the highest tiers of the service. Further it is subject to the vageries of internet service hiccups.

Our opinion is that, depending on your business, this software can be the equivilant of “squirrel hunting with an elephant gun”. The “total “cost of using this software can easily outweigh the benefits. Nevertheless, if you are using this software currently you have already invested a lot in learning it so you should probably stay with it.

A good souce of advice on this would be your tax accountant.

Tiller is a spreadsheet (Google Sheets) based program. Like Quickbooks, all of your data is collected from your bank/credit card accounts automatically.

If you are not intimidated by spreadsheets (you don’t need to be a spreadsheet expert) this program can do 95% of what Quickbooks can do at the lowest QBO online tiers. Yet the cost is only $79/year and the data all stay on your Google Drive and you can even make entries off line to not slow the data entry entry process.

It’s biggest weakness is it works best for service businesses and small retail organizations. It is not geared for manufacturing operations (frankly, In our opinion, QBO is also somewhat limited in this regard) .

Finally, reporting on Tiller is not as broadly developed as QBO, but it has greater flexibily to create whatever report templates you might need with a modicum of spreadsheet skill. Something we can probably do for you at Timemaker, depending on the request.

Finally, Tiller can be used on your mobile devices but its not especially engineered for Mobile applications. The screens can be small for working with spreadsheets. Again, special tabs on the workbook can be designed for information retrieval via mobile access.