Check out the updated numbers for 2017. ZipBooks is still the quickest around.

Being named “ZipBooks” means owning the fact that we’re expected to be faster than any of our competitors. With our recent upgrade to PHP 7, we can now say without reservation that we are the fastest Cloud accounting solution around. We didn’t expect anyone to take our word for it, so we published our findings below. We’ll let the numbers speak for themselves.

How fast can you make an invoice?

To keep things simple, we compared the load time of new invoice creation pages of different online accounting programs. We narrowed the test to ZipBooks and four other top accounting platforms that also do invoicing.

How did we run the benchmark test?

We ran all of our benchmark tests on Chrome version 48 (to be really specific, it was Chrome 48.0.2564.103 m). We used the network performance tab in Chrome’s Developer Tools. Anyone can access the Developer Tools in Chrome by right clicking and selecting “inspect” in the menu that appears.

The network performance tab gives you two summary metrics. The blue line indicates when the main document loaded; the red line indicates when the page fully loaded.

ZipBooks is faster than other accounting software programs

The blue bar in the graph corresponds with the blue bar in Chrome’s network performance tab. Once the main document is loaded, the page is usable. The red bar shows the additional amount of time that it took for the page to fully load (before the page is fully loaded, the page may seem a little slow to respond to inputs or seem a little glitchy). If you add up the two colors, you get the total load time for each page.

Even though ZipBooks is the fastest app to load a new invoice creation page the first time, that isn’t necessarily representative of the average user’s experience. You might very well send a couple dozen invoices every month without ever clearing your browser’s cache, which is used to store items like images in your computer’s memory so that pages load faster. For that reason, we attempted to run our tests in a real-world environment where a browser’s cache would be used. We loaded the new invoice creation page several times in every app so that anything that could be saved was saved without losing time.

After caching, ZipBooks’ new invoice creation page still loaded about 1 second faster than the closest competitor. QuickBooks Online was on par in terms of loading the main document. The difference in load times between ZipBooks and QuickBooks Online would be imperceptible to the human eye (~100 ms).

We’re pretty excited to share the results and look forward to publishing future results as we continue to push the envelope on what is possible in an online accounting software program.

Did we leave out a program you think is faster? Do you have questions or feedback about our results? Feel free to reach out to us at help@zipbooks.com.