ClearBooks Review

COMPLETE REVIEW

ClearBooks is a SaaS accounting program developed by the British company with the same name. The company was founded in 2008.

The product is HMRC (Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs) approved, it is accredited by the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales and by the Institute of Certified Bookkeepers.

As claimed on their website, ClearBooks is perfect for small businesses. Due to the fact that the company is UK based, potential customers from US may be annoyed by some differences such as time and date format, or the fact that they use the term VAT instead of sales tax, but those are not deal breakers and are compensated by their extremely affordable prices and nice set of features.

Both plans include unlimited users, instant online bank feeds, invoicing and quotes, project management tools, fixed assets and more. The Large plan also includes sales tax, construction industry scheme and multi-currency.

The fact that ClearBooks offers features like fixed assets and unlimited users is really praiseworthy, given that these benefits are omitted by quite a few major competitors.

While the interface is not the most intuitive one we’ve tested, the setup process is barely inexistent. All you have to do is sign up, fill up some basic info and that's it.

Everything is very simple, maybe even too minimalist. The tabs you are going to see after signing up are Home, Money, Sales, Purchases, Reports, Tools, Settings. The Settings tab is quite important, because it allows you to enable features like tracking and expenses and other, so you have to mess around with it for a bit, when you first get started.

Another annoyance might be the time and date format we mentioned above, which are UK based and unfortunately, they can’t be changed, so that’s something American users have to get used to.

In terms of invoicing options, invoices do come in several templates, but in order to see them, you have to download a draft of the template which is in PDF format. Another way to go is to create your own template, if you are any good with CSS. Other than that, ClearBooks can generate recurring invoices and has automatic payment reminders. The software also allows you to track expenses and billable hours.

Estimates can be generated and converted to invoices without any hassle and they can also be tagged as ‘hand-delivered’, ‘mailed’ or ‘e-mailed’.

What we noticed about ClearBooks is that while it does offer a taste of everything, it also has a lot of limitations for a lot of features. For instance: you can create purchase orders, but you won’t see the available quantity of a product on the invoice. Employees can add their time for you to approve and bill, but you can’t record the start and the end time, only the total. These are just a few examples.

There is also bank reconciliation, but the program can’t detect duplicate transactions.

We did however like the reports generated by ClearBooks. The software includes more than 20 reports and you can download almost all of them in PDF or CSV.

There is also a multi-currency feature, but you only have access to it if you sign up for their Large plan.

ClearBooks has a mobile app, too, and it is compatible with both iOS and Android devices. Unfortunately, the app doesn’t receive too many updates and can also be quite slow at times.