2013 Review of Monchilla

Monchilla
802-445-5288
www.Monchilla.com

From the March 2013 Review of SaaS Small Business Accounting systems.

Monchilla is a new SaaS accounting software platform which launched in October 2012. Monchilla has three major components to its small business management suite: Money (e.g. accounting/general ledger), Time (time tracking), and Payments (electronic payments to customer and suppliers).

This review will focus on the Money module, and will not evaluate Time and Payments, except to the extent that they are services which integrate with Monchilla Money, the product under review. The company is based in Seattle, and is led by Jack Couch, a former Microsoft Security Expert and serial entrepreneur, and runs on hosted servers in the United States. Users can download transactions from banks and credit card companies who support integration with Yodlee financial information network. Yodlee is used by Monchilla, and is also integrated into other online accounting systems.

Basic System Function: 4.5 Stars

Unlike some products, which pursue simplicity to the exclusion of debits and credits and others which require a deep understanding of accounting, Monchilla seems to have taken a middle road. While there are forms for ease of data entry by end users, it is also much easier on this platform than on many others to see the actual accounts involved in a transaction.

The menus and dashboard are not customizable, but the reporting has a number of visual filters which can be used to create custom, memorized reports. The product includes a customizable trial balance template and the ability to import data from other sources. Monchilla does not provide pre-canned charts of accounts for specific industries, but the default chart of accounts can be modified by adding or removing accounts. The founder told me this is because Monchilla wants to encourage end users to consult a CPA as part of setup.

The product is compatible with all major web browsers, including Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, and Safari, and can be accessed over the mobile versions of Safari and Chrome on iOS and Android tablets.

Core Accounting Capabilities: 4 Stars

Monchilla offers a traditional general ledger, accounts payable, and accounts receivable modules. It is easy to see when a payment or invoice is due, but it doesn’t provide a report that groups and totals payables and receivables by customers. The product creates a tree-structure based subaccount for each vendor and customer, which also requires some adjustment to use effectively. Additional reports or context sensitive help are needed to make it easier to obtain desired information from within the application.

One area where Monchilla has taken a different approach than most of the other products in this review is in its integration of time tracking (through the Monchilla Time service) and the availability of a full payroll module within the product. Almost every other product in the review offers a simplified payroll service as an optional add-on to their product instead of creating a traditional calculation engine. Although this makes the setup of Monchilla Payroll more complex than the setup of some of these other tools, it also makes it possible for Monchilla to more completely integrate time tracking and reporting into billings and job reporting. The cost of tax tables is included at no additional charge.

There is not currently a user-facing audit trail report, but this report is available from technical support upon request. This report is scheduled to be added to the list of available user-run reports in the near future.

Monchilla supports only one currency, and does not support currency translation adjustments. The product is only available in an English version for the U.S., although this product also supports value-added tax calculations, and could be used for other English-speaking countries such as Canada.