Accountants often find QuickBooks Pro and Premier to be more traditional, but you don’t have to be an accountant or professional bookkeeper to learn QuickBooks Online. The online version of QuickBooks is much easier to use than the desktop version. With QuickBooks Online, you can add QuickBooks Online Payroll starting at $50/month. While QuickBooks Online and QuickBooks Desktop offer contact management, only QuickBooks Desktop allows you to manage and track leads as well as 8 best free accounting software for small business in 2021 contacts. Both QuickBooks Online and QuickBooks Desktop offer a large number of features. While they share many of the same features, QuickBooks Desktop’s features are often more developed, except when it comes to invoicing.
The Ascent is a Motley Fool service that rates and reviews essential products for your everyday money matters. QuickBooks Online and QuickBooks Desktop have very different pricing structures, with QuickBooks Online available by a monthly subscription, while QuickBooks Desktop has an annual cost. While the features are similar, QuickBooks Desktop offers more functionality, such as the ability to run checks to pay bills and more in-depth customer and vendor management capability. QuickBooks Desktop features are better developed than comparable features found on QuickBooks Online.
QuickBooks Enterprise: Best For Large Businesses
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 Solopreneur.
Choose QuickBooks Desktop If…
The QuickBooks Desktop Premier Plus plan is particularly useful for business that want industry-specific features. Most notably, Premier Plus has 150+ customizable reports for nonprofits, general contractors, and retailers. 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.
For example, we commend QuickBooks Enterprise’s multicompany reporting feature. This tool allows you to create consolidated financial reports across multiple company files—making it ideal for businesses that operate multiple entities and subsidiaries. Meanwhile, QuickBooks Desktop has two payroll options with prices that start at $50 per month plus $6 per employee. If you can file taxes confidently on your own, Enhanced Payroll might be suitable. If you want QuickBooks to file your taxes for you, then you must upgrade to QuickBooks Desktop Assisted Payroll. Check out our QuickBooks Desktop Payroll Enhanced vs Assisted comparison for more information.
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- Here are a few pre-made workflows to show you what’s possible, but you can use Zapier to connect QuickBooks to almost any app you use.
- While both QuickBooks Online and Desktop are supported by a large network of independent ProAdvisors, it’s much easier to share your books with your ProAdvisor using QuickBooks Online.
- For example, we commend QuickBooks Enterprise’s multicompany reporting feature.
- It’s fair to point out that multiple people can use QuickBooks Desktop over the local network at the office.
- Advanced Inventory is included in the Platinum and Diamond subscriptions only.
The software supports up to three users, although additional users incur an extra fee. These include the ability to track raw materials and finished products and automate order management, among other functions. It also has barcode scanning capabilities — business owners can download the QuickBooks Desktop mobile app and use their mobile device as a scanner. QuickBooks Online and QuickBooks Desktop are two solid accounting products from Intuit.
For instance, if you choose the Simple Start plan, you’re the only person who can use the software—apart from your accountant, with whom you can share your business’s account at no additional cost. We also don’t recommend QuickBooks Desktop to Mac users, since there’s just one desktop-based plan for Mac users. This plan, QuickBooks Desktop for Mac, has the same features as QuickBooks Desktop Pro Plus, the most basic desktop-based plan. In other words, Mac users can’t scale up their software from one plan to the next as they add software users.
This QuickBooks comparison explains the differences between each version. QuickBooks Premier is best for small to medium business with five users or fewer that need strong accounting and industry-specific accounting features. The downside of QuickBooks Online is that customer support is a bit lacking, how to calculate estimated taxes and the subscription fee can be a bit expensive for smaller businesses in need of advanced features.
QuickBooks Online’s month-to-month subscription service starts at $30 a month (totaling $360 a year). Or, to save money, you can try QuickBooks’ typical offer of 50% off for three months (though choosing the discount waives your free trial). For those customers that choose to stay on Desktop Plus subscriptions, we’ll continue to focus on product maintenance and security. Send invoices, run download tax software back editions and updates reports, and get mobile alerts for key events—all on your smartphone.
You also have the option to import products and services into the application to avoid having to re-enter the data. QuickBooks Online and QuickBooks Solopreneur are the best for businesses wanting cloud-based software with mobile apps. QuickBooks Solopreneur is specifically for freelancers, while QuickBooks Online is a good fit for nearly any size business. Businesses with multiple users or that need more advanced features won’t find what they’re looking for here. QuickBooks Solopreneur is more tax software than accounting software, lacking many of the features you’d find with full-fledged cloud-based accounting software like QuickBooks Online.