QuickBooks for Small Business: Which Version Do You Need?

With a range of features and flexible pricing plans, QBO offers businesses a user-friendly cloud accounting solution. QuickBooks Online’s project tracking capabilities are roughly comparable to FreshBooks Premium’s. You simply assign transactions (invoices, payments, expenses, estimates, time, purchase orders, and bills) to specific projects. QuickBooks Online creates a page for each project, showing you at a glance its current income and expenses by category. Besides this overview, you can see lists of related transactions and time activities, as well as project reports.

QuickBooks accounting software overview

QuickBooks is a comprehensive accounting software suite designed by Intuit to help businesses of all sizes manage their finances efficiently and accurately. Before deciding on a QuickBooks version, you should first consider your business size and industry specific bookkeeping requirements. Each version caters to different types of companies, such as small businesses, non-profits, or enterprises. Merchant Maverick’s ratings are editorial in nature, and are not aggregated from user reviews. Each staff reviewer at Merchant Maverick is a subject matter expert with experience researching, testing, and evaluating small business software and services.

• In this guide, we’ll break down QuickBooks Online pricing, including plans, key features, and alternative platform costs so you can decide which option is best for you.
• QuickBooks Online costs more than just about any competing applications for small business accounting, though it depends on how many users you have.
• The claim that QuickBooks is the leading product with professionals is a product of client usage, and, once again, marketing.
• To manage payroll through QuickBooks Payroll, you’ll need to pay a fee for this add-on service, with plans ranging from $45 to $125 per month, plus an additional $5 to $10 per employee per month.
• Prior to joining the team at Forbes Advisor, Cassie was a content operations manager and copywriting manager.
• Access your account via the cloud for up to 25 users with the Online version, and pay an additional fee per user, up to 40 users, for cloud access with Desktop.
• Each customer’s home page has contact information as well as more unusual fields, like the customer’s preferred language and Price Rules.

Clients suited for QuickBooks Ledger

Larger businesses will be looking at QuickBooks Premier, QuickBooks Enterprise, or the new QuickBooks Online Advanced plan, depending on the number of users they need. If you are a small business owner, it will come back to the decision between cloud-based and locally-installed software to determine which software is right for you. Deciding which type of software works best for your business model can make your QuickBooks choice a whole lot easier. If you want cloud-based software, there’s QuickBooks Online and QuickBooks Self-Employed.

Patriot Software Accounting

If it is, QuickBooks learns to assign similar transactions the same way going forward. The potent reporting provides a 360° view of sales, by customer, product, project, or location. Ensuring your clients have the data they need to build strong and profitable businesses. To ensure all costs are covered you can even track the labour costs for everyone working on a project. When signing up for QuickBooks Online, it only gives options for paying monthly.

• If you’re searching for accounting software that’s user-friendly, full of smart features, and scales with your business, Quickbooks is a great option.
• Two key options are QuickBooks Online (QBO) and QuickBooks Self-Employed (QBSE).
• Apart from being expensive, the other thing with QuickBooks Enterprise is that it really isn’t an enterprise solution — it’s best for large businesses.
• If you’re new to accounting software, it’s important that you have the time to commit to learning the software.
• The third-party vendor or separate payroll software can provide detailed reports and file tax documents.

Plus, QuickBooks isn’t the only accounting solution in the world—far from it. Plenty of QuickBooks alternatives can meet all sorts of business needs, including your business’s needs. QuickBooks’ other cloud-based product, QuickBooks Self-Employed, focuses on freelancers and contractors who want to maximize end-of-year tax-write offs.

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• If you want to use your software anywhere you have an internet connection, you’ll likely want to focus on QuickBooks Online or pay more to add remote access through hosting to QuickBooks Enterprise.
• Consider these factors when determining which version of QuickBooks is best for your small business.
• Their practice is often fixed and to maintain project profits it’s vital to factor this into your cost projections.
• We believe everyone should be able to make financial decisions with confidence.

They don’t replicate all the browser-based version’s capabilities, but they provide most of the tools you need to get a lot of your accounting work done remotely. QuickBooks Online’s item records are detailed enough to satisfy a broad swath of small businesses. You can, for example, track both sales and purchase information and accounts, quantity on hand, quantity on purchase orders, and reorder inventory.

What’s the difference between QuickBooks Online and QuickBooks Online Accountant?

For example, news users can now get help with setup by phone free of charge. Online help also seems to be improved over what we saw in previous years. QuickBooks Online has enhanced its automated transaction categorization tool, which can be especially helpful to new users who have dozens or hundreds of transactions to categorize. The QuickBooks Online plan that’s best for you largely depends on the number of users who will be using the program, the size of your business and your particular needs. If you are self-employed and report income on Schedule C of your personal income tax return, the QuickBooks Self-Employed plan will likely make the most sense. An accountant is an individual who keeps track of business transactions and financial records to help determine how well a company is performing at a financial level.

It’s a PCMag Editors’ Choice award winner again this year thanks to its depth of features, customizability, and understandable user interface. A well-integrated payroll app and hundreds of add-ons extend its usefulness to an even broader audience. Feature enhancements over the last year help users save time and get the assistance they need. If your small business is extra small, quickbooks accounting however, we recommend FreshBooks, which is the best accounting app for freelancers and independent contractors. QuickBooks Online is a cloud-based accounting platform while QuickBooks is a desktop program that provides additional inventory management features. Quickly access financial data and accounting reports in an instant with QuickBooks online software for accountants.

Intuit and other accounting software companies make plenty of products just for enterprise users that suit your needs better. In addition to accounting products, QuickBooks offers payroll and POS software, along with payment processing services. A popular add-on is the payroll feature where you can run payroll and access benefits in one convenient place. It does cost more to access this, which is approximately $22.50 more per month plus $6 per employee, per month. When subscribing to this service, you’ll get a 1099 e-file of forms and a next-day direct deposit. First, just because an accounting software package offers multiple modules, you can still take a different path, using better modules from other sources!