QuickBooks Online Review: Features & Pricing

In investigating a number of accounting software platforms, we uncovered QuickBooks Online is a little pricier than its peers. The most popular plan, which includes inventory tracking, clocks in at $90 monthly. We were impressed by QuickBooks Online’s automation tools, which stand above some competing platforms we reviewed. QuickBooks can automate payment reminders, recurring invoices and bill payments. It automatically backs up your data to the cloud, saving you the time it would take to do it https://www.bookstime.com/ manually.

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While your QuickBooks Online plan includes most of the features you’d expect from accounting software, there are a few additional add-ons available. QuickBooks Payroll is one of the most popular, with prices ranging from $50/month + $6/employee – $130/month + $11/employee. The Plus plan and Advanced plan also include features for inventory tracking, which can be most useful to businesses that sell physical goods as opposed to most service-based businesses. Running a business without good accounting software is like taking a road trip without a map app — technically possible, but likely to end in frustration and confusion. Intuit’s QuickBooks® Online comes with a lot of name recognition, but does the cloud-based software also have the features to keep your small business on track for success?

• Bookkeepers maintain step-by-step task lists here, too, so you always know what’s been done and what’s still left to do.
• Its well-organized dashboard includes a client portal business owners can use to collaborate with their customers on generating quotes, approving estimates, creating invoices and accepting payments.
• QuickBooks Online Plus has this capability built in, but it’s not required, so many businesses don’t do it.
• Unlike most less expensive software, I can print checks directly from the program—including the option to save checks and batch print them all simultaneously.
• It’s not cheap, but the peace of mind it provides will be well worth the cost for many business owners.

QuickBooks Online plans and pricing

But if you’re a larger business and you process a lot of transactions and need your financial books to be as clean and organized and comprehensive as possible, QuickBooks Live may make sense for you. Certainly, if you’re planning to get a loan or take on investors or make other major business changes sometime in the future, you need a pristine accounting file. You may know what it’s like to try and correct accounting discrepancies. Subscribing to QuickBooks Live would be a good way to avoid that nightmare.

• Our partners cannot pay us to guarantee favorable reviews of their products or services.
• But that’s poor consolation for small-business owners who, in our opinion, shouldn’t have to dedicate a big chunk of their monthly finances to managing said finances.
• You can track projects and related transactions, and the site will keep a running tally of each project’s profitability.
• He then taught tax and accounting to undergraduate and graduate students as an assistant professor at both the University of Nebraska-Omaha and Mississippi State University.
• Pricing increases throughout the years also make QuickBooks Online an expensive choice for some businesses.

QuickBooks Online’s pros

Because you’re assigned to a primary bookkeeper and his or her team, you know that they’re up to contra asset account speed on your financial situation. We were able to do a test drive of QuickBooks Live to see firsthand how it worked and were pleased by three of its key attributes. First, it’s very structured, thanks to the QuickBooks Live Hub, which is available 24/7.

Check out the QuickBooks App Store to see what plug-ins and apps are available to you. Expensify’s SmartScan technology pulls information, such as the merchant’s name, dates, and expense amounts, and imports them into QuickBooks for fast and easy approval. Expensify can handle your administrative work, track expenses, and create a receipt bank so you can get your cash flow moving. At $270 per month, even QuickBooks Live’s low-volume option would probably not be a cost-effective accounting service for freelancers or other independent contractors.

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• The software offers an impressive number of integrations and also has a few unique features you won’t find elsewhere, such as QuickBooks Live Bookkeeping service and QuickBooks Capital built-in lending.
• Two additional pages in the dashboard provide more cash flow details and a big chart that toggles between a customizable view of your cash balance and money flow.
• Low-Volume Bookkeeping is designed for businesses with up to $25,000 in monthly expenses.
• At the very least, we looked for software that could create multiple projects and separately assign income and expenses to those projects.
• Its Premium version ($60 per month) offers some of the same functionality as QuickBooks Online Plus, along with some unique features.
• But if you work in a highly specialized industry—say, the nonprofit sector—a QuickBooks Desktop plan that caters to your unique business could be worth the investment.

Our review can help you decide if QuickBooks is right for you, or if your business needs a cheaper QuickBooks alternative instead. As of October 2024, QuickBooks Desktop Mac, Pro, and Premier are no longer available to new customers—the only remaining desktop program is the expensive Enterprise qbo login edition. For this reason, the vast majority of small businesses will be better off buying QuickBooks Online.

QuickBooks Online offers good basic inventory features but is missing a few of the advanced features that competitors like Zoho Books and Xero offer. QuickBooks provides a perpetual inventory system by constantly updating the cost and quantity of inventory on hand every time I enter an inventory transaction. I can see everything I need from within the software without running reports. I can easily view vendors, unpaid bills, unpaid bills summarized by vendor, and a list of transactions by vendor. It’s also easy to short-pay a bill, create vendor credits, and then apply them to an outstanding bill from that vendor.