GoDaddy Bookkeeping Premium

GoDaddy Bookkeeping Premium

Editor Rating: Excellent (4.0)
GoDaddy Bookkeeping Premium - GoDaddy Bookkeeping Premium
US Street Price$10.00
  • Pros

    Inexpensive. Good invoicing tools. Calculates estimates for quarterly taxes. Direct integration with Amazon, eBay, and Etsy.
  • Cons

    No project management. Can't assign from list of tasks in time entry. Few reports and payment gateways. U.S. dollar-based transactions only.
  • Bottom Line

    GoDaddy Bookkeeping's direct integration with Amazon, eBay, and Etsy make it a terrific tool for entrepreneurs who sell there, but its overall bookkeeping depth and flexibility can't match that of FreshBooks.

A few years ago, a couple of young entrepreneurs had an idea. They wanted to build a simple website that would help self-employed individuals—primarily freelancers and contractors—calculate what they would owe in estimated taxes every quarter. That idea led them to create Outright, a service that was eventually purchased by popular Web hosting service GoDaddy and evolved into GoDaddy Bookkeeping ($9.99 per month). The cloud-based accounting service remains true to its simple Outright beginnings, but it has improved depth and flexibility throughout, particularly in its new invoicing capabilities.

The site was initially envisioned as a home base that connected to external applications like FreshBooks to become a more comprehensive small business accounting site. These days, GoDaddy Bookkeeping is directly competing with FreshBooks. And it has an edge on FreshBooks in one major way: It has built-in integration with eBay, Etsy, and Amazon, making it easy for small and part-time merchants and sole proprietors to link their sales on those sites to their bookkeeping engine.

Simple Setup
Small business accounting software and websites—especially those that use the double-entry method—try to get you up and running quickly, but there's usually some startup work that has to be done. GoDaddy Bookkeeping, like its competitors, requires very little. It displays a Get Started Checklist on its home page that includes suggestions like "Customize your reporting categories" and "Add a manual transaction," but the best way to start is by doing the first thing on the list: "Link a bank or credit card."

Enter your login credentials for your financial institution's site, and GoDaddy will make a connection and download your most recent transactions there (most banks allow only 90 days' worth, but you may be able to get more). All cloud-based accounting websites operate this way.

You can import an existing contact file in .CSV format, but you won't be able to bring in much information for each contact, as GoDaddy Bookkeeping's record formats only have fields for name, address, email address, phone, and business type. FreshBooks offers more.

Double-entry accounting requires a Chart of Accounts, a list of names and numbers for the myriad accounts required for bookkeeping. GoDaddy Bookkeeping, like its small-scale competitors, has income and expense categories instead. You can modify these and add more, but it's not advisable. The site's categories were created to match the income and expense categories found on the IRS Schedule C, and are used to calculate estimated amounts for your quarterly tax payments.

Easy Operations
GoDaddy Bookkeeping was clearly designed with the self-employed population in mind. It uses simple language and understandable procedures. Its home page dashboard (or Overview) displays enough information that a quick glance tells you whether you had work to do—and GoDaddy Bookkeeping takes you to the relevant pages. You'll see charts illustrating your annual profit and loss to date, the current month's expenses, and open invoices. Account balances are listed, as are your current estimated and sales tax due, and your mileage deductions.

Both GoDaddy Bookkeeping and FreshBooks employ a standard user interface structure that's used by most competitors. The site is broken down into several areas represented by tabs running horizontally across the top, like Expenses, Invoices, Time, and Taxes. When you click on one, the activities managed there appear as sub-tabs. Invoices, for example, has smaller tabs for Clients, Payments, Estimates, Items, and Recurring Schedules. Once you're in a working area, you'll work with standard Windows conventions like drop-down lists, buttons and icons, search boxes, and fill-in-the-blank fields.

I'd call GoDaddy Bookkeeping a little easier to use than FreshBooks, but that's just because FreshBooks is a more mature, robust application. And GoDaddy has two major attributes that FreshBooks lacks. First, its direct integration with Etsy, eBay, and Amazon. That's huge in this age of small and part-time entrepreneurs displaying products on those sites. And second, its ability to estimate quarterly taxes and create a Schedule C worksheet. It's also less expensive.

Invoice Settings
Invoicing settings are thorough, and the invoice management they allow rivals FreshBooks's. Beyond the standard defaults that you can establish, like the number of days before payment is expected and the text of the customer message, GoDaddy Bookkeeping gives you the option to track your invoices through their entire "lives." You can, for example, ask to be notified when an invoice is viewed by the customer, as well as when it's paid online. You can set up automated notifications when an invoice is past due, and you can choose to send a message to customers when payment is received.

GoDaddy Bookkeeping supports recurring invoices. You can set up profiles, specifying client, frequency, etc., and you can choose to have them sent automatically or just have a draft created for you to send yourself. You'll be notified either way. Notifications are also available for estimates. You can ask to be notified when a client views or accepts one, or when one is about to expire. And there are multiple templates available for both invoices and estimates, so you can choose your color, style, and so on.

Customers often remit payments faster if they can do so online, and with a credit or debit card or a direct transfer from a bank account. GoDaddy Bookkeeping offers a choice of three different payment gateways to accommodate this: PayPal, Stripe, and Dwolla. FreshBooks offers more than twice that many.

Invoice forms themselves contain an acceptable number of fields, but FreshBooks' forms—and their processing options—are more robust. GoDaddy does not distinguish between service billings and items, for one thing, where FreshBooks does; FreshBooks has separate data entry grids for each. Both contain standard customer information, invoice number and date, and balance and date due. Line-item fields for the actual products or services purchased are similar, though GoDaddy Bookkeeping includes a link for a related expense, and it lets you include an attachment. But it doesn't offer the option to pay to have the invoice dispatched through the U.S. Mail, as FreshBooks does. Both let you preview your invoices and either print them or send through email.

Additional Bookkeeping Features
Like FreshBooks, GoDaddy Bookkeeping provides tools for time-tracking. Both let you create individual time entries and view them in a table or on a calendar. You can specify entries as billable and create invoices automatically. But FreshBooks includes a timer, and it supports simple project management and team timesheets, as well as a database of tasks. It also allows contractor access for time-tracking within projects.

Both websites offer multiple predefined report templates. Where GoDaddy Bookkeeping only has a few very basic ones (top vendors and customers, invoice status and payments, etc.), FreshBooks has many. GoDaddy Bookkeeping, though, lets you view them as charts or tables. The number of reports and their customization options seem well-matched to the depth and features on each site.

GoDaddy Bookkeeping's history as Outright gives it one big advantage over FreshBooks. It was built to keep a running tally of estimated taxes due, and to create a Schedule C worksheet with tax-line assignments. You can certainly crate separate income and expense reports in FreshBooks, and export them as part of your tax data, but GoDaddy Bookkeeping makes tax preparation easier. So, too, does QuickBooks Self-Employed: You can download an Excel spreadsheet that contains all of the business-related categories and your data.

Almost Takes the Cake
GoDaddy Bookkeeping is missing a lot of the flexibility that makes FreshBooks superior, like support for multiple currencies, basic project-tracking, both item and task management, and contractor access. They share a similar framework and offer tools to complete the same kinds of tasks; FreshBooks just fleshes those tools out more in every area of the site. Neither offers true double-entry accounting, but FreshBooks comes closer—and it does so in a way that non-accountants can understand and master quickly. For those reasons and more, FreshBooks is the PCMag Editors' Choice for cloud-based accounting services for very small businesses.