Best SaaS Accounting Software

Best SaaS Accounting Software

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Best SaaS Accounting Software

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I always say Quickbooks was kind of like the sun in the solar system. Everything rotates around QuickBooks. But there's other really good accounting software so, a competitor to QuickBooks is Xero, which is super popular in Asia, Australia, New Zealand, because it's a New Zealand founded company. In Europe it's very popular, not as popular in the United States, but Xero is really kind of the first scalable cloud accounting software. And I think they kind of put the fear of God into QuickBooks and made QuickBooks invest a lot of money and expertise into QuickBooks Online and make it, get it to parity.

But Xero is a perfectly fine software for early stage companies. We don't really recommend starting with it because we're gonna probably transition you to QuickBooks anyways, but if you're a three or four person company, Xero's perfectly fine.

NetSuite is the typical migration path for a company on QuickBooks. As the company gets to 10 or $15 million in revenue or starts consulting international entities like an international subsidiary, it makes the accounting a lot easier for that. NetSuite is very robust, you can be a public company on NetSuite. Does tons of different modules, does a lot of different stuff for you. NetSuite typically competes directly with Intact.

And probably, I'd say most famously is Brex and we've been a partner of Brex for probably four years, since Michael Tannenbaum walked into our office and said, we've got to work together, shout out to Michael. And what Brex does very well is integrate into QuickBooks and automate again, some of that categorization and labeling. It also has no personal guarantee. They will do some pretty aggressive, effectively letting you borrow money on a Brex credit card. But we like it because it's really easy to use, integrates well, no personal guarantee. And they are building a bill pay system inside of Brex because what typically we were seeing was a company would sign up with Brex and then they'd also go to Bill.com. Bill.com is very good for paying invoices, paying vendors, through wires or ACH or electronic payments. Not as much a credit card company, until they bought Divvy a couple of weeks ago, as I'm recording this, which is kind of like a Brex competitor.

Additional Brex competitors would be Ramp who's like a credit card based system that tries to manage your spend control, having a lot of success, building up their customer base. And then Airbase is a super interesting company in that category because Airbase came at this less as a credit card company, and more as a spend management company. Kind of think like they're the enterprise software solution to this marketplace. They do offer cards and make provisioning and controlling expense levels on cards very easy, but that's not the foundation of their business, like Brex, Divvy, Ramp, right? But all of these categories are converging. And what I think is gonna happen, and we've been saying this for years and talking to all of our partners about this, is this all gonna be in one system? So like a startup will just be on Brex or they'll be on the Bill.com Divvy Combo. Or they'll be on Ramp, or they'll be on Airbase.

And now Expensify is coming out with a bunch of different stuff. So they're in that exact market, too. So there's kind of like five big competitors who are well-funded. All have actually really upped their game in the software stack and we have relationships with all of them. We do a lot of business with all of them. It's a little bit of fragmented market right now, so it's hard to tell exactly who's gonna win. For me, I love the ease of just setting up a Brex credit card and getting that going. If you're looking for the pure big spend management tool, I would go with Airbase out of the box. They're moving down market. They've had a lot of success with the series C, series D companies.

And then again, Ramp and Divvy, Bill.com are also excellent tools. So you're not really gonna go wrong with some of the players in this market. We talked about the pure play credit card market players. I expect the Amex's and Chase's of the world will either buy companies, like Chase put a really large investment into FreshBooks, which is an accounting platform I should have probably mentioned in the earlier segment, as kind of their place holder.

And frankly, riding the cost curves down of these tools, is really exciting, especially if you're on a fixed fee because you just get more and more efficient over time and everybody wins. So those are my favorite SaaS accounting tools. I hope that helps, if you have any other questions, hit us up at kruzeconsulting.com. I've probably done videos on almost all those.