The founders of small business accounting software GoDaddy Bookkeeping 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. GoDaddy is, of course, better known for its excellent web hosting service, long a staple of the industry, but its bookkeeping service is definitely worth watching, too. The site has grown over the years to include good invoicing tools, as well as integration with eBay, Etsy, and Amazon, making it easy for small and part-time merchants to link their sales on those sites to its bookkeeping engine.
All that said, GoDaddy Bookkeeping hasn’t made significant changes since we last reviewed it in 2019. Although we still recommend the service, it lacks some of the advanced features found on our Editors’ Choice winner, FreshBooks, like multiple transaction types, inventory management, project-tracking, and bill pay.
How Much Does GoDaddy Bookkeeping Cost?
The site is available at three different pricing levels. The Get Paid plan, at $4.99 per month, is the simplest. With this plan, you can send invoices and estimates, track time and mileage, accept payments on your mobile devices, and run reports for the current business year. The Essentials plan, for $9.99 per month, adds connections to online banks and credit card accounts, Schedule C and sales tax support, unlimited reports, and data integration with the aforementioned sales sites. The $14.99-per-month Premium plan gives you all of those features as well as the ability to schedule and send recurring invoices.
GoDaddy Bookkeeping Premium is just a penny shy of being the most expensive site for freelancers, since QuickBooks Self-Employed costs $15 per month. FreshBooks’ entry-level plan is $13.50, and both Sunrise and Wave are free.
Simple Setup
Small business accounting websites try to get you up and running quickly, but there’s always some startup work that needs to be done first. GoDaddy makes it simple to get going and requires very little work up front. It displays a Get Started Checklist on its home page that includes suggestions like Customize Your Reporting Categories and Start Accepting Payments. But the best way to start is by doing the first thing on the list: Link a Bank or Credit Card (assuming you opted for at least the Essentials plan).
After you enter your login credentials for your financial institutions, GoDaddy makes a connection and downloads your most recent transactions. Most banks allow only 90 days’ worth, but you may be able to get more. It pulls transactions on a daily basis, so your accounts stay current. All cloud-based accounting websites operate this way, and it saves countless hours that small businesspeople used to have to spend entering transactions manually. That said, if you wish to manually enter at least some of your data, GoDaddy gives you that option, too.
You have to assign income and expense categories to every transaction if you want to take advantage of GoDaddy Bookkeeping’s unusual ability to estimate quarterly income taxes (it automatically does as much of this categorization as possible). The site also creates a Schedule C worksheet with tax-line assignments, something no one else in this group of websites does. This is why it’s so important that you keep up with categorization in GoDaddy Bookkeeping: You’ll be reporting this information to the IRS and state agencies when you file your taxes. Careful categorization also makes reports more meaningful and useful.
Easy Operations
GoDaddy Bookkeeping was clearly designed with the self-employed worker in mind. It uses simple language and understandable procedures. Its home page displays enough information that a quick glance tells you whether you have work to do—and it takes you to the relevant pages. You can also 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 taxes due and your mileage deductions.
There’s a total for billable hours tracked during the current month, along with links to what’s new this week (like uncategorized expenses and new sales). Most items on this page, in fact, contain links to underlying data. You can, for example, add invoices and accounts, see the transactions behind the charts, and track time. This interactivity makes the dashboard very effective and timely—one of the best I’ve seen.
GoDaddy Bookkeeping employs a standard user interface structure. The site is broken down into several areas represented by tabs running horizontally across the top, such as Overview, Income, Expenses, and Taxes. When you click on one, the activities managed there appear as sub-tabs. Click on Invoices, and tabs appear that open screens containing data about clients, payments, estimates, items, and recurring schedules. Once you’re in one of the screens, you use standard Windows conventions like drop-down lists, buttons and icons, search boxes, and fill-in-the-blank fields.
Client, Item Records
Every accounting website includes record templates for storing information about customers (and often, vendors) that can be used in transactions and reports. GoDaddy Bookkeeping’s client records don’t allow for as much detail as some competitors like Zoho Books allow. You can provide company names and billing addresses, along with an hourly rate, multiple contacts, and a shipping address. The site also contains generic contact templates that you can use for anyone. These contain fields for a name and physical/mailing address, email address, phone number, and business type.
Once you’ve created a client record, its information will appear on a home page of sorts, along with a list of open invoices and a link for creating invoices. Boxes at the top of the page display the client’s hourly rate, uninvoiced amount, and billable hours for the month and year.
Item records (under the Invoices tab) are exceptionally simple, containing fields for only an item description and price/rate, plus a checkbox for tax status. You can use these in invoices, but they’re not available from the time entry screen, oddly enough.
Invoice Settings in GoDaddy Bookkeeping
GoDaddy’s invoice forms themselves contain a standard set of fields, including customer information, invoice number and date, and balance and date due. Line item fields for the actual products or services purchased are similar to competitors’, as you can either create these on the fly or choose from the very basic records created elsewhere on the site. There are two fields that we wouldn’t have expected to see on this site, considering it caters to such small businesses: purchase order number and discount. As with all the other services PCMag has reviewed that provide invoicing, you can preview your invoices—FreshBooks actually has you work on the form that customers will see—and either print them or send through email. Estimates work similarly, though they, of course, contain extra fields for estimate, delivery, and expiration dates.
GoDaddy’s invoicing settings are impressive and its invoice management rivals that of the competition—surpassing it in the case of Intuit QuickBooks Self-Employed. Beyond the standard defaults that you can establish, such as 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 and when it’s paid online. You can set up automated notifications when an invoice is due and when payment is received. Wave offers tools similar to these, and, like GoDaddy Bookkeeping, supports estimates, too.
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—a common feature for accounting websites, though GoDaddy Bookkeeping supports more flexibility than some.
GoDaddy Bookkeeping’s Premium level lets you schedule invoices to repeat automatically, a trait not commonly found in entry-level accounting websites. You can set up profiles, specifying the client, frequency, and so on, and you can also choose to have them sent automatically or just have a draft created for you to send yourself. You’ll be notified either way.
Customers often remit payments faster if they can do so online, with a credit or debit card, or a direct transfer from a bank account. GoDaddy offers a choice of two different payment gateways to accommodate this: PayPal or Stripe.
Additional Bookkeeping Features
GoDaddy Bookkeeping provides separate tools for time tracking instead of designating services as different types of items, like Wave does. It lets you create individual time entries and view them on calendars. You can specify entries as billable and create invoices from the time entry screen. But there’s no drop-down list for the client name; you have to start typing until the correct one comes up. And you can’t choose from a list of the time entries you’ve created as items—you can only enter notes describing the entry and provide the rate each time. Editors’ Choice FreshBooks includes a timer, and it also allows contractor access for time tracking within projects, as well as other team collaboration tools.
GoDaddy Bookkeeping offers a handful of reports, including Invoice Status, Your Spending, and Top Items—in some cases, as charts or tables. The number of reports and their customization options are well-matched to the depth and features found on the site, though GoDaddy Bookkeeping doesn’t offer all of the advanced financial reports that Sunrise does because it’s not based on double-entry accounting rules. It does, however, include a Schedule C Worksheet, which is unique in this group.
Finally, GoDaddy Bookkeeping has a feature that no other small business accounting website does. The ability to connect directly to Amazon, eBay, and Etsy, and exchange sales data with those sites is a big advantage if they provide a good percentage of your income.
GoDaddy Bookkeeping’s Mobile Apps
Thanks to its Android app and iOS app, GoDaddy Bookkeeping also lets you stay on top of your money when you’re out of the office. Both versions offer a dashboard that lists balances for your accounts and other key numbers, like profit or loss, income and expenses, estimates, and time. Click on one, and the underlying data appears. They both support a lot of the functionality found on the browser-based version. For example, you can create and view customer records, review and use categories, and connect to payment processors. Invoices you’ve already created are available for viewing; you can check their status and create new ones. The same goes for estimates and time items.
Their user interfaces, though, are very different. The iPhone version displays icons along the bottom of the screen that take you to Income, Expenses, and Invoices. Click on the big plus sign, and you can add transactions. A button in the upper right opens links to your settings (categories and clients, your invoice settings, and payment processors) when you’re viewing the dashboard and to charts on some of the other screens.
When you’re in the dashboard on the Android version, the plus sign in the upper right opens links to adding only expenses, income, and mileage. Once you’re in other areas of the app (like Invoices and Expenses), the plus sign opens a blank data entry screen. Another link in the upper right accessible from any page opens your settings. In both versions, though, clicking on the profit or loss entry opens a beautiful multi-period chart. These two versions are equally intuitive, just different.
Should You Go GoDaddy?
If you’re a merchant using Amazon, eBay, or Etsy, and you don’t need bill pay or sophisticated time tracking, we recommend you check out GoDaddy Bookkeeping. It boasts strong invoicing tools, as well as affordability and usability. But the Editors’ Choice for freelance and sole proprietor accounting software goes to FreshBooks. It provides the most effective combination of invoicing and time tracking tools, expense management and client records, and basic reporting available today. Its exceptional user experience helps take some of the sting out of tracking finances, and its price is reasonable, given what it offers. If you need double-entry accounting, more robust bookkeeping tools, and payroll, though, we recommend you go with our Editors’ Choice winner for small business accounting, QuickBooks Online.
While you’re thinking about managing money, you should also check out our roundups of the best payroll services and the best tax prep software.
