QuickBooks Online (QBO) - Pros and Cons

Best practices

Aug 11

2 min read | Written by Jeanette Tan

I am not a huge fan of QuickBooks Online, however for some situations, it is a good choice. Here is my list of the Pros and Cons to QBO for a winery.

I find that the best use for QBO is the small, startup winery where the owner is doing the bookkeeping, because you want to take advantage of as many automatic integrations as possible

Pros

Great bank feed integration
Good integration with Square (there is still an extra step, but it's easy)
Up to 5 people can use it simultaneously
PC and Mac users can both access
The WGit by Wine Glass Marketing has an integration with some POS programs, but I have not tested it

Cons

No Custom Summary report (only in the Accountant version)
Cannot do the 2-step bottling method
No Inventory value adjustment, only quantity (workaround is to do a JE check)
Hard to have multiple windows open
Bank reconciliation is clunky
The bank reconciliation report does not update after you make changes (for example, if you delete a duplicate transaction, it will still show up on the report)
No sales by rep report
Chart of Accounts and Item list will only show up alphabetically (workaround is to use numbers and a dash)
Payroll is funky and it cannot do job costing, so my usual procedure which is super simple in Desktop does not work. This is not a problem for a super small winery, but once you have staff it becomes a big problem.

I find that the best use for QBO is the small, startup winery where the owner is doing the bookkeeping, because you want to take advantage of as many automatic integrations as possible. You will need some method of processing credit card charges, and Square integrates nicely. However, Square is a short term solution, and as soon as you can justify a true winery program that will handle a Wine Club, you want to get that going so that you can start to capture details about your customers.

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