Tabby Reviews

For years, I have been trying to ditch QuickBooks. I dislike Intuit's business practices and QBO's interface intensely. But QBD (which I have) is desktop dependent so it is limiting in its own way even though it has better functionality than QBO.

Every time I think I might be able to get rid of them, the replacement software has a flaw that is insurmountable and I am back to square one again.

In Tabby.ai's case, the fatal flaw was that I cannot create subcategories of expenses. So as a result, I have one catch-all category for a type of expense but cannot get more granular than that.

Take the example of advertising & marketing. Everything gets dumped into this one category - but if I am advertising via social media, other websites, or other means, I will have no way to how much is spent in each subcategory as it would all be just grouped under advertising.

Once this limitation was discovered, I bailed. There is no use for AI category automation if the categories are too general to help me in my business forecasting to figure out where my spending is going.

Ugh. I thought I'd be able to divorce QBD once and for all. Back on the hunt for another solution.

I initially had a positive experience with Tabby. After investing time upfront, my books were fully reconciled and I was caught up for the year, with only December remaining. At that point, the product appeared to be working as intended.

The issues began with how historical transaction data was handled. Tabby initially synced only approximately 90 days of bank transactions. Based on guidance in their onboarding and welcome emails, I manually uploaded the remaining months to complete the year. After reviewing, categorizing, and reconciling the full dataset, the system later re-synced extended history again, duplicating transactions.

At that point, there was no way to distinguish manually uploaded transactions from automated ones. No filters, identifiers, or deduplication tools were available to isolate or resolve the issue cleanly.

Support offered only two resolution paths:

Manually delete duplicate transactions one by one without any way to identify which entries were manual vs automated,

or

Fully reset all transactions and re-categorize everything from scratch.
Neither option meaningfully addressed the problem, as both required extensive manual effort and discarded completed work.

Over the course of roughly a month, I continued working with support. During that time, explanations shifted between 90-day bank limitations, one-time extended history pulls, deduplication logic audits, cut-off date settings, and system fixes. Despite multiple assurances that changes had been applied, the duplication issue was never resolved and historical data was not reliably restored.

Throughout the process, the burden of resolving fundamental data integrity issues was consistently placed on me through manual deletions, re-uploads, or alternative workflows, rather than the platform handling transaction history reliably.

Tabby shows promise conceptually, but in my case it failed on a core requirement: reliable transaction handling without creating additional work. The time spent correcting and troubleshooting data issues and ultimately failing to resolve the issues significantly outweighed the value provided.

Quickbooks raised the price on their Essentials plan to $75 a month, so I started looking for an alternative. Lucky for me, Tabby came on Appsumo, so I picked up a tier 3.

It was just as easy to connect my accounts as it was with Quickbooks, and the app started gathering transactions within a few minutes.

One of my favorite features is the AI categorization help. If I'm not sure how to categorize an expense, I can just ask AI about it and it will recommend the best category.

P&L reports are easy, and the suite is pretty easy to navigate.

All I really need for my business is to track income and expenses and get a report to my accountant at tax time. That means I wasn't using most of the features I was paying for in QBO anyway.

I am definitely dumping Quickbooks and sticking with Tabby.

5 tacos!

It does not report the correct yearly report. It does not calculate all transactions.

I bought the system with really high hopes and it looked promising. However, after signing up, I got to know that I need to get two different tier 3 plans for two of my companies. So I thought it was worth it and I ended up getting another tier 3 plan but there is no way to see or record your transactions revenue or expenses and separate the tax from it.
I wanted to record the transactions so that the expenses have taxes separated from them and wanted to have this as a really good bookkeeping solution, but this isn't meant for it. I was told that I will have to go in each one of those transactions create a manual separate entry, then calculate the tax amount manually on my calculator and then punch the numbers in for each transaction. So it wasn't worth it for me and I have returned both my plans.