G2

Verified User in Internet

Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.)

10/22/2026

"Zoho Books Streamlines Client Billing and Expense Tracking for Our Agency"

4/5

What do you like best about Zoho Books?

Honestly, what I like best about Zoho Books is how neatly it ties together our invoicing, contractor expense tracking, and basic bookkeeping without forcing our whole team into an overly complicated finance system. I’m Moritz Ecinu, Business Systems & Digital Operations Specialist at Santa Fe Digital Labs, our 51–200 person digital agency out in Santa Fe. We juggle dozens of active client campaigns at once, work with lots of freelance designers, developers and ad vendors, and I spend a ton of time rolling out tools, testing integrations, and cleaning up messy financial workflows for sales, delivery, marketing and finance. Before we landed on Zoho Books, our finance lead was cobbling everything together with spreadsheets paired with a separate invoicing tool, and we had a really messy incident that still sticks with me.

Last year, we were wrapping up a large social media campaign for a regional tourism client. Our project manager submitted three separate contractor expense reimbursements and milestone invoices in different files, and our finance person manually keyed each line item into their old invoicing system. They accidentally attached one freelance developer’s expense receipt to the wrong client invoice. The tourism client got a bill that included another vendor’s charges, and they reached out confused and frustrated. It took multiple calls, corrected invoices, and an apology from our account lead to smooth things over. That mistake didn’t just create stress; it made our agency look unorganized, which is the last thing we want with a high-value ongoing client. That’s the kind of breakdown Zoho Books helps us avoid now.

I really value the way it lets me set up separate customer profiles, assign projects, and tag every invoice and expense directly to the correct client campaign. When our delivery team submits a vendor bill or contractor expense, they tag it to the matching project inside Zoho Books. Our finance team can instantly see what charges belong to which client before anything gets invoiced out. I also love the permission controls. I can lock our project managers down so they can submit expenses and view their own project financials, but they can’t alter tax settings, bank feeds, or finalized invoices. That keeps inexperienced team members from accidentally changing core accounting settings, something I’ve had to fix in other finance platforms before.

The automated recurring invoicing and payment reminder workflows are another huge win for our retainer clients. We have a lot of month-to-month SEO and content retainers, and previously someone had to manually create and send each invoice on the first of every month. Once, our finance lead got swamped with quarter-end close work and forgot three retainer invoices, delaying our incoming cash flow. Now I set those recurring templates up in Zoho Books once, and the system sends them out automatically, with gentle follow-up reminders if payment is late.

I also appreciate how it plays reasonably well with the rest of our Zoho stack. We use Zoho CRM to manage our sales pipeline, and the native link pushes newly won client deals straight into Zoho Books as customer records. I don’t have to run tedious CSV imports every time we close a new account. It’s not perfect for super advanced ERP-style resource planning, and we still use a separate backup tool to archive finalized financial statements and contracts. But for our agency’s day-to-day billing, contractor expense management, and client-facing invoicing, Zoho Books hits the sweet spot. It cuts down manual data entry, reduces cross-client billing mix-ups, and gives our finance team reliable visibility so those embarrassing invoice errors we dealt with before don’t keep happening. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Zoho Books?

The biggest pain point for me is its flaky webhook behavior and narrow API payload structure, which I ran headfirst into during a recent client onboarding overhaul. We connect Zoho CRM to Zoho Books natively, and I was building a flow so that when we mark a deal as “won” in CRM, it automatically creates the customer record, project folder, and initial retainer invoice draft inside Zoho Books. During testing for a batch of eight new client wins, three of the webhook triggers silently failed. No alert, no error log pushed to our monitoring tool, nothing. We didn’t catch it until two weeks later when our finance lead noticed those clients never had draft invoices generated. We had to chase down the account managers, reconstruct the SOW details manually, and rush out the invoices, which pushed back our expected revenue collection timeline. I dug through the Zoho Books logs and found the API doesn’t surface granular failure reasons very well; it just says “request unsuccessful” without telling me if it was a field mismatch, permission issue, or rate limit hit. That makes debugging integration issues really slow and guesswork-heavy.

I also find the CSV import validation pretty unforgiving, especially when importing contractor bills and expense lines. A few weeks ago, I was uploading a batch of 42 vendor invoices from our ad platform vendors for a large paid media campaign. I double-checked all my columns: vendor name, project tag, amount, tax code, due date. But Zoho Books threw a generic import error and rejected the whole file, rather than flagging just the bad rows. It turned out one single line had an invisible stray special character in the vendor name column. There was no preview to show which row broke everything. I had to split the CSV into tiny chunks and test them one by one to isolate the bad entry. That ate up more than two hours of my afternoon, time I should’ve spent fixing our project delivery automations instead. Most other accounting tools I’ve worked with will skip bad rows and give you a detailed error report, but Zoho Books just fails the entire job. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is Zoho Books solving and how is that benefiting you?

Before Zoho Books, our agency’s financial workflow was disjointed and error-prone, and we learned the hard way that messy billing and expense tracking can erode trust with our digital clients. I’m Moritz Ecinu, Business Systems & Digital Operations Specialist at Santa Fe Digital Labs, a 51–200 person digital agency in Santa Fe. We were previously using FreshBooks for invoicing, paired with Google Sheets to log contractor bills and ad vendor spend, and that combination failed us badly on a tourism marketing retainer. Our finance lead mixed up expense line items between two active client accounts inside the spreadsheets, then manually copied those lines over into FreshBooks and sent out an invoice that included another client’s developer charges. The client questioned the bill immediately, we had to issue a correction and apologize, and our account team spent hours repairing that relationship. That incident pushed us to find a system that could tie clients, projects, invoices, and vendor expenses together in one shared space, instead of stitching FreshBooks and spreadsheets together.

Zoho Books’ core job for us is to eliminate that siloed financial data. Thanks to its native connection with Zoho CRM, once our sales team marks a deal as won, the client record syncs over automatically. We no longer manually retype client names, contact details, or retainer terms between separate platforms like we did when moving CRM data over to FreshBooks. Every invoice, contractor bill, ad vendor expense, and received payment can be tagged directly to a specific project. That means our finance team can instantly see which costs are billable to a client and which are internal overhead before anything goes on an invoice. This has all but eliminated the cross-client charge mix-ups that burned us on that tourism campaign.

It also solves our struggle with recurring retainer invoicing. We run dozens of ongoing SEO, content, and paid media retainers, and our old FreshBooks workflow required someone to manually generate and send each invoice month after month. One quarter, our finance person got buried in closeout tasks and missed sending three retainer invoices inside FreshBooks. Payments arrived late, which messed up our cash flow forecast and created extra follow-up work for our account managers. Now I set up recurring invoice templates in Zoho Books tied to each retainer project. The system sends invoices automatically and triggers gentle payment reminders, so we don’t depend on a single team member’s memory to keep billing on schedule.

We also use it to give controlled access to our delivery and project leads. With FreshBooks, permission settings were really limited; we either gave people nearly full access or they couldn’t submit expenses at all. Now I set limited roles so project managers can submit vendor bills, review their project’s burn rate, and check outstanding invoices, without touching bank feeds, tax settings, or finalized financial records. This takes routine expense work off the finance team’s plate and speeds up how quickly we can approve contractor invoices for our development and design vendors.

Zoho Books isn’t a full ERP, and we still deal with its rough edges around webhook reliability, rigid CSV imports, and limited custom reporting. I still have to build extra checks for sync failures and combine exports in spreadsheets for our agency profitability analysis. But compared to our old FreshBooks plus Google Sheets setup, the biggest benefit is stability. It gives us one single source of truth for project finances, cuts repetitive manual data entry, and reduces the human error that led to embarrassing billing mistakes and cash flow hiccups. That frees finance to focus on forecasting instead of fixing broken invoices, and lets me spend my time building out other automations across our marketing and delivery stack. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.