Liquid Accounts Reviews

As its name clearly shows, Liquid Online Accounts is an entirely cloud-based accounting solution so you don’t have to download any software to use the company’s services. Furthermore, after a free registration, which only requires an email address and choosing a password, you get a 30-day trial during which you can switch between the three available Liquid products and try out all the necessary features.

After a rather slow processing, which you have to get used to, you are greeted by a dashboard that looks anything but appealing. It only shows those who owe you, whom do you owe, the profit and loss, turnover and bank balance. On top of the screen are quick buttons of your company, the nominal, sales, purchases, banking, VAT, payroll, which is turned off unless you have subscribed thereto, audit and reports. Under Sales you can find your customers, create invoices, make batch transactions, and receive payments. The Purchases section is for your expenses with the list of suppliers, and their invoices (bills). And in Banking you can see your transactions, set up multi-currency, and check your bank feed.

However, if you need further features like time tracking, quotes, projects and a product list, you can only use them by either paying a ₤5 (ca. $7) monthly fee per feature or by choosing the Accounts Premium plan for a much bigger price that will still lack certain functions like payroll and CRM integration.

Invoicing

Creating an invoice is anything but fun with Liquid. First, you have to select your customer by his/her unique customer code before you start drafting your invoice. Then you can click on New Invoice and provide the necessary data: invoice date, delivery date, settle date, the currency, the name of your product which has to be typed in every single time, quantity, and the price. After clicking on Save & Calculate Totals you are directed to a page which resembles that of the invoice drafting but here you can send, print or delete your invoice. To make a payment, you have to click on Go to Invoices, then Receive Payment, and click on the invoice you want to be marked as paid.

Bills

Bills, which is called (purchase) invoices, requires the same slow and tedious process you need when creating your invoices: pre-selecting your supplier, typing in the necessary data, saving the bill and then amending, copying, deleting or paying it. If you want to create a receipt just attach a photo of the receipt and continue the process above.

Batch transactions

With this feature you can add multiple transactions at the same time to a batch. You can also set up the transaction group, frequency, type, and date, and manually add the net and the VAT amount.

And how about a mobile browser version? Forget about it: Liquid doesn’t adapt to mobile screens at all and seeing the slow processing of the desktop version we recommend to avoid using Liquid on a mobile device.

On its website Liquid Accounts proudly says that it paid extra attention to select and offer the best third party applications and services. Well, this pre-selection was so successful that virtually no add-ons are available for the Liquid products, aside from three apps. Furthermore, the company (seemingly) doesn’t offer and support an API so this number won’t change in the future.

One application, Capsule CRM, is available for a monthly fee only, while Receipt Bank is part of a mobile application that doesn’t exist, so two applications are already crossed off the list of software that could be integrated into Liquid. The third app is HMRC, developed by British non-governmental department, Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs that engages in taxation activities in the UK and which you have probably never heard of if you’re not conducting business in the UK.

As other third party applications and services are not supported by Liquid Accounts, here are some more details about those apps that have relevancy in the U.S. and could/should be part of your Liquid product as default:

Due to its modular design, Liquid works as a pay-as-you-go service, which means that you can subscribe to one of the three products and if you need an additional feature, you pay ₤5 (ca. $7) per month for that. The only feature you have to pay for in addition to the monthly subscription fee is the integration with third party app Capsule CRM, which costs ₤2 (ca. $2.80) per month.

The cheapest and most basic product of the company is Liquid Online Bookkeeper, which costs ₤7.95 ($11.13) per month + VAT, or ₤6.50 (ca. $9) per month for a year and ₤5.50 ($7.70) per month for two years. For this price you get everything you need, except certain features such as time tracking, product listing, quotes, salesman functions, multi-currency etc. are not included in this subscription, but instead can be added to your product if you pay a fee. The additional cost is ₤5 per month for each additional feature.

Liquid Online Accounts is ₤15.95 (ca. $22.33) + VAT per month, or ₤14 ($19.60) per month for one year and ₤12 ($16.80) per month for two years. This product includes all features of Bookkeeper plus budget, forecasting, tax estimate, VAT functions, multi-currency, fast data entry, journals, and connection to HMRC. However, stocks, projects, time tracking, and the salesman function still have to be paid for: each one costs ₤5 per month per feature.

The top product is called Liquid Online Accounts Premium and it includes all you need, plus 1GB storage space instead of 100MB. The cost is ₤39.95 (ca. $56) + VAT per month, or ₤35 ($49) per month for one year or ₤31 (ca. $43.40) per month for two years.

To add the Liquid Payroll to your subscription, you have to pay ₤5 per month per each employee. But if you have more than 5 employees this monthly price gradually increases from ₤7 to ₤80.

We are going to be brutally honest with you: Liquid Online Accounts is not a good product. And there are many good reasons why we think that: the first and most important is the surprisingly time consuming processing that is unacceptable, even for the smallest businesses. Another huge problem is that Liquid isn’t ready for mobile use, as neither a native app nor a decent mobile browser version of Liquid Accounts exists. Furthermore, you can integrate the three third party software either by paying for them or they are not relevant to U.S. users. And last, but not least, the overall layout of the software is illogical. It’s a shame, because Liquid’s unique modular, pay for what you use pricing and its capability to function as an average accounting solution could have made it an outstanding software instead of the one we had the misfortune of testing.