QuickBooks Solopreneur’s features are designed specifically for freelancers to address needs such as estimating quarterly taxes, filing Schedule Cs, and tracking deductions. You can easily separate personal and business expenses, which is ideal for freelancers who don’t have separate business bank accounts. Note that each plan is the original subscription price as QuickBooks offers a 50% discount for the first three months. All plans include receipt capture, expert support and app integration. QuickBooks is the ideal business accounting software for small to mid-sized businesses. More than 4.5 million companies use QuickBooks, making it by far the most widely used accounting system in the world.

Ease of use gets the highest weight in this case study because we want to give more credit to easy accounting software. For this section, we considered customer service, support network, and a subjective expert opinion score. Users must have easy access to customer service channels in case of problems, questions, or assistance. This takes into account customer management, revenue recognition, invoice management, and collections. The main differences between the two QuickBooks plans are the ability to track inventory costs and calculate P&L by project. Other helpful features in Plus are budgets, classes, customer types, locations, and unlimited report-only users.

QuickBooks Online Plans Comparison: Pricing & Features

QuickBooks Online is one of the company’s most popular accounting software choices for small-business owners. QuickBooks Online pricing is based on a monthly subscription model, and each plan includes a specific number of users. First-time QuickBooks Online users can typically receive a free 30-day trial or a discount for the first few months of service.

1. We went to user review websites to read first-hand reviews from actual software users.
2. QBO offers up to 25 full-fledged users total and an unlimited number of time-tracking-only users.
3. You can easily separate personal and business expenses, which is ideal for freelancers who don’t have separate business bank accounts.
4. If your work is project-based or you often work remotely, it’s also a good solution.
5. On the surface, QuickBooks Pro and QuickBooks Premier are very similar.
6. Automatically sort business expenses into the right tax categories to keep more of what you earn at tax time.

When To Choose QuickBooks Premier

If you don’t know much about accounting, you’ll probably want to shy away from QuickBooks Pro, Premier, or Enterprise, unless you’re willing to put in the time to learn. QuickBooks Online and QuickBooks Solopreneur are much easier options. Mac users that want a locally-installed accounting solution will find that QuickBooks Mac Plus offers a pretty good set of features and is optimized for use on Mac.

QuickBooks Online Essentials – $60/mo

However, there are a couple of limitations with QuickBooks Simple Start. First, it doesn’t have full inventory management features, so if you sell products you’ll need to manually track inventory levels and costs. Also, it doesn’t handle more complex liabilities like how does listed property affect your business taxes deferred revenue or long-term debt with specific payment schedules.

All Platinum features, plus Assisted Payroll to handle federal and state payroll taxes filings for $1/employee each pay period. Users can also add a Salesforce CRM connector for $150/month and QuickBooks Time Elite for $5/employee each month. All Gold features, plus advanced inventory, advanced pricing rules and workflow approvals. All Essentials features, plus project tracking and inventory tracking. Protect sensitive data with user-level access to specific features and share reports with up to 5 log-ins.

Lastly, our expert opinion score is our subjective rating based on our experience in trying the software. Businesses with inventory items should choose accounting software that can track inventory costs, manage cost of goods sold (COGS), and monitor inventory units. Advanced users receive better customer support through its Priority Circle membership. As a Priority Circle member, you get access to a dedicated customer success manager who can assist you with any questions or issues you have with your software.

Based on the depreciation method you choose, Advanced automatically calculates the depreciation for the fixed asset and creates a depreciation schedule. Batch expensing allows you to record and categorize multiple expenses at once instead of entering them individually. This is especially useful if you have many expenses to record, such as business travel expenses, office supplies, and equipment purchases.

We are committed to providing you with an unbiased, thorough, and comprehensive evaluation to help you find the right accounting software for your business. We meticulously and objectively assess each software based on a fixed set of criteria—including pricing, features, ease of use, and customer support—in our internal case study. If you’re shopping for QuickBooks as a small-business accounting solution, first decide whether you’d like online, cloud-based software or a desktop product that locally stores your information.