In 2011, small business accounting website Billy launched in the Danish market. Five years later, a version debuted in the US market. Earlier last year, US-based Lendio, a company that helps small businesses research and procure loans, bought and relaunched Billy as Sunrise, a free accounting site. Housed in a double-entry accounting framework, Sunrise supports contact and product records; quotes and estimates; invoices, recurring invoices, expenses, and data import from financial institutions (including recently with Plaid). It works with Square, Stripe, and PayPal Business Payments for payment processing, too. Other additions since our last review include integration with Gusto and Zapier, plus some retooling of invoices.
Although Sunrise lacks many tools that Editors’ Choice FreshBooks offers, like time tracking, a robust group of reports, and full-featured mobile apps, it is a competent choice for budget-conscious freelancers and sole proprietors.
How Much Does Sunrise Cost?
When Lendio acquired Billy, it slashed the monthly subscription price to zero. You can use all of Sunrise’s features at no charge. Fees come in if you want to use Sunrise’s professional bookkeeping services. All three levels offer help with reconciliations, bookkeeper support (text and email), and a monthly closing of your books. For $149 per month, your pro will provide up to 120 reconciliations. Pay $299 per month, and you’ll get phone access to your bookkeeper and up to 200 reconciliations. And $499 per month gets you up to 500 reconciliations.
Wave is totally free, too, (except when you need to accept payments electronically or process payroll),), but it offers more features and flexibility than Sunrise. You’ll pay more for FreshBooks’ excellence, anywhere from $13.50 per month for the Lite version (five billable clients) to $45 per month for Premium.
Sunrise Setup
Sunrise provides minimal setup assistance, which is typical for accounting applications geared to sole proprietors. When you start Sunrise for the first time, it encourages you to customize your invoices, link your bank account(s), and invite your coworkers and accountant. These are tasks that you should complete early on, though you can revisit them later. Help is available via chat and email. There’s also an online help center that may be able to answer your questions.
You can finish laying the groundwork for your financial data by working your way through the Settings menu, which is located in the lower-left corner. Here, you select options and enter data so that Sunrise knows, for example, your sales tax rate(s), default sales and payment accounts, accounting method, and opening balances. A link from this section also lets you create simple product and service records. You can invite users, but Sunrise only allows two types: Accountant/Bookkeeper and Coworker. FreshBooks breaks user permissions down into more granular choices.
Getting Around the Sunrise Interface
Sunrise is one of the more attractive accounting sites I’ve reviewed and its layout doesn’t cause any serious navigation confusion. It uses common data entry conventions, such as drop-down lists, toggle buttons, and blank fields. Everything is big and colorful, so operations usually go quickly. The site opens to your home page dashboard; it works fine, but it’s not as effective as the dashboard in GoDaddy Bookkeeping. The screen displays a revenue and expense overview, a section with links to invoice and expense pages (along with the status of existing transactions), and graphs highlighting your top vendors and customers. A new section related to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic takes you to PPP Loan Forgiveness pages.
The site relies on a left vertical toolbar for navigating its primary task areas: Dashboard, Contacts, Bank Accounts, Documents (new), Invoices, Recurring Invoices, Quotes, Payments, Expenses, and Settings. There’s a chat box for help in the lower right and a Search Box in the lower left. A new link here comes courtesy of Sunrise’s new parent company, Lendio, which helps you explore small business loans from 75+ lenders by completing one application.
A word here on a new navigation link labeled More. Clicking it opens a menu that contains links to advanced accounting tools typically used by accountants. You can view your sales tax rates here and settle periods. You’ll find the Chart of Accounts and Journal here, along with sections for Profit and Loss Statement, Balance Sheet, Trial Balance. You can also access standard financial reports, a master list of transactions, and a data export page from this menu item. There aren’t any additional accounting reports here that competitors offer, like aging, but you can get a lot of this information from other screens on the site.
Building Records in Sunrise
Sunrise’s contact record templates have a couple of unusual attributes. You can create records for customers and vendors, both companies and individuals, and assign extra contacts to organizations, along with email, phone, and street address. Sunrise has a built-in database of US cities, so as you enter the first few letters of a city’s name, a list of possible matches drops down. As you continue to type, the list continues to display suggestions until your desired location appears. I haven’t seen this elsewhere.
Sunrise also has an unusual way of dealing with custom fields in contact records. It offers seven, and they’re predefined, not freeform. Optional fields include Payment Terms, Currency, and Email Attachment Delivery Mode. Once you’ve created a record and opened it, most of the page displays information about invoice status (like draft and overdue). A vertical pane on the right displays contact information and a timeline of your activity with that customer. You can create invoices and expenses from this page and perform housekeeping tasks like entering prepayments, editing, and archiving the contact.
Overall, Sunrise’s contact records, as well as its product records, are appropriate for the depth of the site as a whole, but they don’t track some of the details you find in competitors’ records. For example, you can’t indicate that you buy and sell specific items, as you can with Wave. The Create product window simply contains fields for a name and description, revenue category, sales tax, price, and SKU/product code. You can upload item images, too.
Sales tax can be complicated, especially if you’re involved in interstate commerce. Most accounting services just allow you to enter sales tax rates for use with product and service records, as well as sales forms (where applicable). Sunrise does something I haven’t seen to accommodate companies that sell in multiple states, municipalities, and counties. You can create rulesets and apply them when you’re building records and getting invoices ready, so you can deal with the differences in state sales tax regulations. The site makes this complex topic more understandable (as long as you consult the help resources), but you may still want to visit with a professional if you’re a national or global business.
Easy Invoicing and Expenses
Sunrise supports four types of sales forms: quotes, estimates, invoices, and recurring invoices. Estimate forms look very similar to quotes in Sunrise, but there’s a difference. While estimates are simply, well, estimates of what a product or service will cost, quotes are considered contracts, so they must be signed (when you’re in the customer portal). Sunrise can automatically convert estimates into invoices or quotes; it can also convert quotes into invoices or estimates.
Sunrise’s customizable sales form templates should serve very small businesses just fine unless you have to deal with things like multiple units of measure. The site provides a default template that you can rename and use for any kind of sales form; you can also add templates. A vertical pane to the right toggles between two types of customization. You can change attributes for design elements like fonts, margins, and headers, and add a logo and background color. Click on the Language tab to modify the text in the emails that are sent with sales forms.
You can include discounts, sales tax, and specify a currency (in addition to the standard fields) and select the correct contact person if there’s more than one in a company. You can also attach files to line items. Once you’ve completed an invoice, you can save it as a draft copy; approve it immediately; email or print it; or mark it as sent. You can print packing slips, create credit notes, and set up recurring invoices that send automatically. These capabilities are not typically found in freelancer accounting applications. When you send reminders for past-due invoices, you can also add late fees individually, which is another unusual option.
You have multiple options when it comes to entering expenses. You can enter the data in the fields provided, snap a photo of a receipt using the Sunrise mobile app, email it to a special address created for you, or select a file from your computer. Sunrise is compliant with double-entry accounting rules, so categorization is very important here for report and income tax purposes. The Expenses home page works similarly to the Invoices screen. It presents a list of expenses you’ve created and displays dollar totals at the top to illustrate their status (such as past-due, unpaid, paid). You can also create credit notes for expenses from this page. Both expenses and invoices display timelines on their respective screens, so you can see each transaction’s history.
Dealing With Transactions
If you’ve connected Sunrise to your bank(s) online (I recommend you do so since it will save you an enormous amount of time), you can match downloaded transactions to their corresponding invoices and expenses, which appear in a vertical pane on the right side of the screen. You can drag an invoice or expense listing over to the correct entry in the account register. If the amounts don’t match, you get a message asking you to explain the difference by selecting from a list of options. You can also record and match income/expense items or transfer a transaction to another account from the register itself.
While this “proactive reconciliation” (as Sunrise calls it) helps you account for every transaction and identify some problems, it’s not the same kind of standard reconciliation that sites geared to larger businesses offer. Many of these automate the typical reconciliation process in which you compare bank statements to your online transactions and clear them until the balances match. Both methods allow you to match transactions on a daily or weekly basis rather than waiting for the end of the month, since cleared transactions are imported daily, but Sunrise does not provide the usual monthly reconciliation tools. The only way you know if an account has problems is if you have old transactions that have not been matched, recorded, or transferred.
Powerful Integrations
Sunrise has added integrations with two services since my last review that extend the site’s capabilities tremendously. If your company pays employees or contractors, you can now manage your payroll using Gusto, one of PCMag’s Editors’ Choice award winners. This recent addition to Sunrise starts at $39 per month (base price) and $6 per employee per month. If you only pay contractors, the base price is waived, so you only pay $6 per month for each contractor.
Sunrise also integrates with Zapier now, too. Zapier is an innovative service that connects online applications and shares information between them automatically. So you could set up automated workflows between Sunrise and functions supported by 2,000+ other productivity solutions, like Gmail, Google Sheets, Dropbox, Slack, and Microsoft Outlook 365.
Improved Mobile Apps
Sunrise has upped its game over the last year in terms of mobile access. When I checked out the android app and iPhone app situation last year, the company only offered one app, called Receipt Capture. This allowed you to take a picture of a receipt, but you had to return to the website to create the expense. That was it. The new apps allow you to view, create, and edit invoices and see their status. You can also snap a photo of a receipt and enter its details right on the apps. They don’t read the receipts and transfer some of their data to forms, like Wave does, but the apps are much better this year. They employ a simple, elegant user interface that lets you switch back and forth easily between invoices and expenses. Still, they’re not nearly as comprehensive yet as FreshBooks’ apps.
A Promising Start
Sunrise provides a great user experience and supports much of the functionality that a freelancer or sole proprietor might need: product/service and contact records; quotes and estimates; invoices and recurring invoices; payment processing and bank connections; and expense tracking.
Still, it lacks many key features offered by FreshBooks, our Editors’ Choice pick for accounting for sole proprietors and freelancers, like dedicated time and project tracking, team collaboration, reports, and a comprehensive mobile app. FreshBooks is a pleasure to use and its long history of excellence makes it a dependable business partner.
If your business is larger or more complex, though, then you’re going to need more than FreshBooks offers, such as comprehensive accounts receivable and payable features, inventory tracking, and payroll. In this case, we recommend the far more powerful—and our Editors’ Choice winner for small business accounting—QuickBooks Online, our Editors’ Choice winner for small business accounting.
While you’re thinking about your money, you should also take a look at our stories on the best personal finance services and the best tax prep software.
