Pricing for QuickBooks Desktop vs QuickBooks Online

Christine is a non-practicing attorney, freelance writer, and author. She has written legal and marketing content and communications for a wide range of law firms for more than 15 years. She has also written extensively on parenting and current events for the website Scary Mommy. From University of Wisconsin–Madison, and she lives in the Chicago area with her family. No, it is relatively easy to use, though corrections can be more challenging. To get the best possible experience please use the latest version of Chrome, Firefox, Safari, or Microsoft Edge to view this website.

Ditch the shoebox of receipts and let QuickBooks track potential tax deductions for you. QuickBooks matches receipt photos to transactions and sorts them into tax categories automatically. Avoid year-end surprises with our automatic quarterly tax calculations that helps you know how much money to set aside.

Essentials

Automatically sorts business expenses and receipts into tax categories, view Sales Tax Liability reports, and automatically calculate quarterly taxes. Access to the latest product and feature updates cost $299.95 for annual repurchase or are included in select products. QuickBooks Time is an app you and your employees can use to track time. You can view employee time data from any device, which is convenient if you have remote workers. If some features aren’t essential, you can always change your plan at any time.

Accept credit card payments where you do business – in the back office, in your retail store, on your website, or on your mobile device. When you add sales tax to an invoice in QuickBooks, the calculations are automatically taken care of. QuickBooks calculates the sales tax rate based on date, location, type of product or service, and customer. Recording merchant fees in QuickBooks is essential if you are working with payment processors, and QuickBooks Pro, the desktop version, makes the process just as simple as QuickBooks Online does.

Sales tax

Between the QuickBooks Online monthly fee, monthly payroll cost, bookkeeping support, payment processing fees, and other integrations, the cost of QuickBooks Online can start to add up fast. Here are our top tips for how to save money on QuickBooks Online. Although it has the lowest starting price, at $12 per month, it can be a little more difficult to navigate than QuickBooks or FreshBooks. Because there is an unlimited number of users that can use the program, you can maximize its use if you have a team of professionals who need access to your accounting software. The number of invoices that users can send each month is capped at 20, so it is also best for individuals who have a relatively small number of clients or customers. Although you can track expenses, QuickBooks Simple Start doesn’t enable users to pay bills.

You can drill down to a list of your outstanding invoices instead of only the total outstanding. The advantage of QuickBooks Essentials vs Simple Start is the ability to assign hours worked to specific customers. Unfortunately, you can’t assign billable expenses to customers unless you upgrade to Plus.

Pros and cons of QuickBooks online

He brings his expertise to Fit Small Business’s accounting content. Run payroll on any device with taxes, compliance & reporting built-in. If you want to give QuickBooks a try before buying, you can sign up for a free 30-day trial or use the company’s interactive test drive that’s door hangers are set up with a sample company. The good news is that the QuickBooks Online plans are incredibly scalable, so you can start small and upgrade to a larger plan whenever you’re ready. Here’s a complete breakdown of what’s included with each QuickBooks Online pricing plan.

Read our complete QuickBooks Online Payroll review for all of the details, and be sure to visit the QBO website to see if Intuit is running a QuickBooks payroll discount before buying. QuickBooks Online Plus (not to be confused with QuickBooks Desktop Pro Plus) includes five users and advanced features. The first step is to shop around for the best payment processing service for your business. Different payment processing services have different fees, so make sure you compare different services to find the one that offers the lowest fees for your business. What merchants like about QuickBooks Payments is their instant or next-day deposits. This helps business owners have more control over their cash flow and gives them peace of mind knowing they can access funds quickly.

Working With Existing Data

QuickBooks Online’s product records are some of the best you’ll find in small business accounting applications. They offer individual templates for both inventory and non-inventory parts, services, and bundles (assemblies). Inventory record templates include fields for both item sales and purchase information, with corresponding costs and accounts. If you want to track inventory, you can enter a starting quantity on hand within the record, and the system will continue to track it, so you know when to reorder or stop stocking particular items.

• You can quickly create and send invoices from the QuickBooks browser version and mobile app.
• Alternatively, it’s possible to jump in and start manually adding transactions, in which case you have to enter customer information, item records, and so on.
• Here’s an overview of fees and plans for QuickBooks Payments so you can make the best decision for your business.
• If you use QuickBooks Payments, keep in mind there’s always a processing fee.
• Processors like Square and PayPal charge a percentage of the transaction amount as a merchant fee.
• You can get a historical view of the total cash that has flowed in and out of your accounts.

Income transactions can be categorized and assigned to a project or customer. QuickBooks Online is an accounting software package designed to manage bookkeeping, inventory, taxes, bank account reconciliation, budgeting, expenses, and other business and financial functions. Although it’s technically possible to upgrade, the process requires you to download your data first and then reimport it into QuickBooks after the update. This is much more complexity than we would like from the market-leading accounting software provider.

I initially did this research for a real estate brokerage company who collects deposits from new tenants. The tenants are on a payment plan for the first month, last month, security and broker fees. If there are roommates, I estimated $1,000 per room with each person paying into their own portion of the rent. So that’s a thousand transactions times an average of $1,000 per transaction, which equals $1 million.

This extra expense is unnecessary and I’ve found a way to reduce it. Receiving checks in the mail is an antiquated way of doing business. The checks have to be marked as paid, recorded and then cashed. This won’t work if you want to run your business more efficiently. For a number of reasons, data integrity and ease of use among them, we highly recommend that associations use QuickBooks Payments as their credit card processor.

Slow Servers and Processing

You can invite your accountant to QuickBooks Online via email using the My Accountant tab or the Manage Users page. Once they accept the invitation, they will have access to all of the features of your account at no additional cost to you. Similar to how the system syncs your income transactions, it also syncs your expenses.

Once you’ve recorded your billable time, you can add them to your invoice and then send it to your client. This feature is ideal for service-based businesses that charge work by the hour, such as lawyers and independent contractors. QBO often offers promotional “Buy Now” pricing to offset the high monthly cost. Discounts can be up to 50% off for the first three to six months only, after which, the short-term pricing stops and customers are billed for the full amount. At a glance, QuickBooks Online pricing seems more reasonable than the Desktop version (starting at $299).