Kick

‍If you’re just starting a business, we strongly encourage you to consider Kick instead of QuickBooks Online as its much more user friendly. It’s built for business owners while QuickBooks was built for accountants (which is why it’s so overwhelming to use). Kick's UI is minimal and intuitive to use, the team put a lot of thought into "how can we save the business owner time with this tool?"

If you're an established business, we understand this is a big leap but take from someone who transitioned super slowly, I wish I did it sooner.

As the CEO of a small company, I ended up being the one handling our accounting, mostly because I was the only one who understood how everything was set up. We talked about handing it off, but it never really made sense.

Realistically, it was just for the one day each month and it felt too exhausting to try to actually train somebody on our setup, so hiring outside help didn't feel worth it. And even if we did, I kept wondering if I would just end up having to correct it anyway.

So it just stayed on me. That's where a lot of the frustration came from. It wasn't just that accounting took time, but more than that, it was this recurring responsibility that I couldn't really escape. Every month, I knew I'd have to go back in and deal with it... until Kick came along. Now I'm pretty much in and out within an hour a month?

"Multipreneurs," aka those running multiple businesses, love Kick. This is because with Kick you can use one account to manage multiple businesses (and even connect your personal account). Want to do that in QuickBooks Online? Sorry, you can’t — you’ll need a subscription for each business 😅

Kick auto-categorizes approximately 95% of transactions, reducing manual bookkeeping. It's an area where AI feels useful for admin work, which is why we included Kick in our guide to the best AI tools.

With tools like QuickBooks, there are always going to be small things to stay on top of. When we were still using QBO, I still needed to approve transactions, create rules, or go back and fix how something was categorized. It never felt like it was fully handling things, so I was always checking it.

With Kick, most of that just happens in the background. It pulls in transactions from the bank, Stripe, and everything else, and categorizes them in a way that's usually pretty spot-on. If something new shows up, I'll set a rule once, and from that point on it's handled.

If I want to change how something is categorized, I can update it and have that apply across everything, instead of going back and fixing transactions one by one.

At this point, there are really just a few new things to deal with each month instead of reworking everything from scratch.

Kick uses AI to auto-generate clean vendor names, fixing messy bank descriptions, which is super helpful. It also allows you to bulk edit transaction names.

Currently, Kick prioritizes giving business owners a simple cash flow review. While you can also get your Profit & Loss statement, one thing we wish to see is a breakdown of each category of business revenue (you can see this on the Cash Flow Report, but we are more accustomed to checking this on our P&L).

One of the biggest reasons QuickBooks kept breaking down for us was because of how everything connected.

We had Stripe, PayPal, Harvest, and a few other systems feeding data in different ways. Some things pushed automatically, some had to be manually synced, and if you didn't do it in the right order, things got messy pretty quickly (duplicates would pop up, or things just didn't match.) I ended up spending more time trying to validate that everything synced correctly than actually understanding what was going on in the business.

Kick built proper integrations and it's just pulling everything in directly, which is why you don't run into the same edge cases.

Reconciling used to mean sitting down at the end of the month and going line by line. Even when it worked, it still felt like a process I had to go through every time.

With Kick, it's just happening in the background. For the accounts it supports, it's pulling everything in and reconciling it against what's already there. So instead of blocking off time to match transactions, I can open it and assume it's already been handled, with maybe a couple edge cases to clean up.

It just removes that end-of-month step entirely.

One of the bigger differences for me is just how quickly Kick lets me understand what's going on in the business without having to dig for it.

QuickBooks has so many menus, and reports, and tabs. Tracking down what I was looking for became a game of constantly clicking into something, opening a new view, and then trying to get back to where you were. It honestly felt like stepping into a cockpit about to fly a plane 😅

Kick is SO much more straightforward. When I open it, I just have a much better idea of where our money is coming in and where it's going. It gives me a better pulse on what's actually happening in the business without needing to dig through reports.

Everything is very glanceable. If I see a number that looks off or just bigger than expected, I can click into it and immediately see where it came from, what the transactions were, and how it all ties together. Bonus: You never really lose your place either. You can click into something, check it, and go right back to where you were.

Because I'm not jumping between tabs or trying to piece things together, I just have a much better pulse on the business without needing to dig for it.

We have Efficient App, Efficient VC, and a holding company, and guess what? We can use Kick for all of it 🙌 So if you run multiple businesses, Kick is for you. You get to manage all the businesses under one subscription and login. Oh and you can also add your personal accounts too.

What's cool is you can even take a single account inside your bank and treat it as its own entity in Kick. It has its own transactions, its own reporting, and its own view of what's going on, even if it's not technically a standalone company.

When it comes to tax time then, you don't need to untangle everything after the fact since it's already segmented properly from the start.

Working with an accountant usually turns into a lot of back-and-forth, especially around tax time. You're sending receipts, answering questions, figuring out what a transaction was months later..it's all reactive.

With Kick, most of that context is already there. Transactions, documents, and notes all live in the same place, so instead of trying to track things down later, it's already attached to what it belongs to. I can also see what's been reconciled and what hasn't, so I know exactly where things stand without needing to ask.

It doesn't replace an accountant, but it removes a lot of the friction in working with one. Instead of re-auditing everything or answering the same questions over and over, it's already organized in a way that makes sense. I actually trust the accountant more in here because it's harder for things to go wrong in the first place.

This is something we don't use heavily, but it's worth mentioning because it becomes important as things get more complex.

If you want to break things down further, like by product, service, project, or anything else, you can layer that into Kick without changing how everything else works.

What I like is that it doesn't force you into that structure from the beginning. You can keep things simple while you're small, and then add more detail later if you actually need it.

That's a better way to grow into it instead of overbuilding your setup upfront and then spending time maintaining something you don't really use.