Live Expert Assisted also doesn’t include any financial advisory services, tax advice, facilitating the filing of income or sales tax returns, creating or sending 1099s, or management of payroll. 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.
Stay on top of business 
performance with Essentials
Plus includes inventory accounting that allows you to monitor stock items and quantity—a necessity if you’re selling products. It also lets you update inventory costs and quantities, separate taxable from nontaxable items, and set up alerts if you’re running out of stock. Most importantly, Plus will separate the cost of your ending inventory from COGS using first-in, first-out (FIFO). You’ll need to make this tedious calculation in a spreadsheet if you choose a lower-tier plan. 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.
How We Evaluated QuickBooks Online Plans
However, QuickBooks syncs with hundreds of third-party apps, many of which offer better inventory tracking than QuickBooks does. So if you sell goods, you don’t necessarily need to exclude Simple Start. Intuit has always been good at acknowledging how different small businesses can be. The company provides multiple levels of its applications, each containing a common set of features and progressing in complexity as you move up the product hierarchy. Today’s leading accounting platforms offer standard security features such as data encryption, secure credential tokenization and more.
Is accounting software secure?
- We excluded QuickBooks Solopreneur because it’s not a double-entry accounting system.
- QuickBooks Plus is the first tier that includes inventory tracking and project profitability features.
- Having an independent software expert perform the bookkeeping is good for overall ease of use.
- Once your bookkeeper receives all the necessary documentation, they’ll typically complete your cleanup within 30 days.
- The software must also have a mobile app to enable users to perform accounting tasks even when away from their laptops or desktops.
- Two of the midrange plans available are QuickBooks Essentials and QuickBooks Plus.
Read our comprehensive QuickBooks Online review to decide if this popular accounting software is the best choice for your needs and budget. If your business is service-based without any inventory, then Essentials should provide everything you need while saving you $34 per month compared to Plus. If you’re scaling from five to 25 users and need advanced features like fixed asset accounting, then go with Advanced. The right QuickBooks Online plan depends on the size of your business and the features you need.
QuickBooks Online’s key features
The software must have features that allow users to set sales tax rates, apply them to invoices, and enable users to nta abbreviation american english definition and synonyms pay sales tax liability. 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 deferred revenue or long-term debt with specific payment schedules. QuickBooks Simple Start is a double-entry accounting system, which is an advantage over QuickBooks Solopreneur. You can create basic asset and liability accounts in the chart of accounts (or use the existing ones) to track things like bank accounts, cash on hand, A/R and A/P, credit card balances, and loans.
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. It has only basic bookkeeping features (including minimal reporting), doesn’t help with more complex business taxes, and accommodates just one user. If you aren’t a freelancer, Self-Employed honestly won’t work for you. If you’re used to thinking in terms of desktop QuickBooks, it’s most comparable feature-wise to QuickBooks Pro. You can have up to five users working in the application at once, and the monthly fee is $39.95. Intuit reports that 94% of accounting professionals feel QuickBooks Online saves them time and thus saves their clients’ money.
Meanwhile, Simple Start is a good starting point for most small businesses, especially those that don’t need to enter bills, track billable hours, and manage projects and inventory. It includes payroll processing, which allows you to calculate and track payroll taxes, and it lets you track assets and liabilities and use automated sales tax on invoices. Additionally, it enables you to record and track payments made to 1099 contractors.
Businesses with inventory will likely get the most benefit from QuickBooks Plus. Large businesses that need access for up to 25 users will probably want to go with QuickBooks Advanced. Although QuickBooks Online is a great cloud-based accounting platform, it isn’t the only one. Since both are a part of QuickBooks Online, you’ll get the use of free mobile apps that can help you manage your business on the go. Each plan also has automatic data backup, automated workflows and reports tailored to your business.
It’s worth taking a closer look at the included reports list to see if there’s anything you’d be missing out on if you chose Essentials over Plus. There is no need to download QuickBooks Online because it is connected to the cloud, which means you can access online accounting from any device with an internet connection. You can download the QuickBooks Online mobile app from the Google Play Store or Apple App Store. At Business.org, our research is meant to offer general product and service recommendations. We don’t guarantee that our suggestions will work best for each individual or business, so consider your unique needs when choosing products and services.
