FrontAccounting vs Zoho Books

FrontAccounting is free, self-hosted web accounting software for small companies, covering accounting tasks across a broader ERP chain. It includes purchasing, sales, accounts payable and receivable, inventory, manufacturing, fixed assets, and a general ledger with budget. Sales tools include quotations, orders, delivery notes, invoices, credit notes, batch invoicing, point-of-sale definitions, and payment allocation. Purchasing includes purchase orders, goods receival notes, supplier price lists and payments, and transaction attachments. Inventory supports stock items, locations, transfers, reorder levels, average material cost, and barcode scanner entry; manufacturing includes bills of materials and work orders. It supports multiple companies and users with different privileges, along with backup, restore, and simple audit trails. Reports can be printed, emailed, converted to PDF, or exported to Excel or OpenOffice Calc. Multi-currency and GST/VAT support are listed. Installation requires a web server, PHP, and MySQL with InnoDB enabled; other database systems are unsupported. The software is web-only, and support requests are directed to its forum. The listed plan is free.

Zoho Books is an accounting service for invoices, bills, banking, inventory, expenses, projects, reporting, and online payments. It includes bank feeds, automated reconciliation, receipt capture, and accountant access, with dedicated iOS and Android apps. Inventory tools cover stock tracking, reorder alerts, warehouses, serial numbers, batch tracking, and bin locations. It supports foreign transactions with exchange rates applied in real time, and changes sync across devices with automatic cloud backup. Transactions use two-factor authentication and SSL encryption; Zoho Books does not store credit card information. The free plan includes one user and one accountant, allows five scheduled reports, and remains available indefinitely while annual revenue is at or below $50K. Standard costs $15 a month with annual billing. A 14-day free trial is available. Subscriptions are pay-as-you-go without a contract commitment and can be cancelled. Support hours are Monday to Friday, 9 am to 9 pm ET, with channels varying by plan.