QuickBooks Online Review 2024: Features, Pros & Cons

The right QuickBooks Online plan depends on the size of your business and the features you need. For example, Self-Employed is best for freelancers or solopreneurs, while Simple Start is ideal for small businesses wanting to track assets and liabilities. Essentials is preferable if you need to track unpaid bills, while Plus is great if you require inventory and project management. This takes into account customer management, revenue recognition, invoice management, and collections. 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.

After you sign up for QuickBooks Online, you’ll be able to log in to your account and access the main dashboard view. If you’re moving to QuickBooks from another accounting https://quickbooks-payroll.org/ software, you can import your existing files to your new account. Support network refers to a community of software users that can extend professional help to businesses.

This software is best suited for freelancers, allowing them to track income and expenses, track mileage, estimate quarterly taxes, and run basic reports. Between the QuickBooks Online monthly fee, monthly payroll cost, bookkeeping support, payment processing fees, and other integrations, the cost of QuickBooks Online can add up quickly. This service uses your existing QuickBooks Online accounting information to determine your eligibility for a loan. If you choose this funding option, there are no origination fees and no prepayment fees, but you will be expected to make weekly payments plus APR. Payments vary based on your loan amount, credit score, and term length.

1. This helps you identify potential problems and make adjustments once you determine that your projects are not profitable.
2. It’s more expensive, but it comes with far more features than the rather bare-bones QuickBooks Self-Employed.
3. Payroll is an integral and time-consuming task for small business owners.
4. Essentials is preferable if you need to track unpaid bills, while Plus is great if you require inventory and project management.

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 competition based pricing 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.

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 is the #1 accounting for small businesses.4 It offers the most comprehensive feature set that enables small business owners to manage more of their business. From automating accounting work and preparing for tax time, proactively manage cash flow, QuickBooks can do it all. Once your business is large enough to require more automation and more employees, the Plus Plan likely makes sense, as it allows for recurring payments in addition to time tracking. It also includes inventory tracking, making it a must for an operation that sells more than a few products.

Check For A QuickBooks Online + Payroll Bundle Discount

Automatically sort transactions from your connected accounts into tax categories for easy organization. Get paid fast with credit card and bank transfers right in the invoice. Go beyond bill pay and track bill status, create recurring payments, and pay multiple vendors at once. Get a clearer view of project profitability for all your projects with user friendly dashboards and detailed reports. Katherine Haan, MBA is a former financial advisor-turned-writer and business coach.

Having an independent software expert perform the bookkeeping is good for overall ease of use. Lastly, our expert opinion score is our subjective rating based on our experience in trying the software. QuickBooks Online Advanced now offers a fixed asset accounting feature that allows you to enter and track fixed assets, such as vehicles, buildings, and equipment. Based on the depreciation method you choose, Advanced automatically calculates the depreciation for the fixed asset and creates a depreciation schedule. QuickBooks Advanced provides greater flexibility in customizing reports than the other QuickBooks Online plans. Users can tailor their reports by filtering and grouping data and creating custom fields and dashboards.

Both services offer either introductory pricing or a free trial so you can test them out. Unfortunately, you can’t do both; electing for the trial will result in paying full price at the end of the 30-day period, or you can skip the free trial and pay 50% off for the first three months. While they both also feature mileage tracking and expense tracking, that’s about all the similarities they share. 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 $5 per employee, per month. When subscribing to this service, you’ll get a 1099 e-file of forms and a next-day direct deposit.

Is QuickBooks Online Right for You or Your Business?

As a QuickBooks ProAdvisor, Mark has extensive knowledge of QuickBooks products, allowing him to create valuable content that educates businesses on maximizing the benefits of the software. Most small businesses will find Plus the perfect fit, but there are many reasons you may want to upgrade to Advanced, especially now that several new features have been added to the program. Advanced now offers fixed asset accounting, estimated vs actual cost reporting, and multi-company report consolidation. These can be useful for companies with more complex business structures and accounting workflows.

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After that, you can add your worker’s comp policy and set up your payroll taxes. Finally, you can connect to your bank account and sign your tax forms. It seems complicated, but QuickBooks Online walks you through the entire process. QuickBooks Online is available in many countries around the world. So, terms and conditions, features, support, pricing, and service options vary from country to country. The discounts, promotional offers, current rates, and renewal pricing vary depending upon the type of Quickbooks plan you choose.

Software with more advanced features, such as ADP, might be a better fit, so make sure to do your research before deciding which payroll option is right for your business. Along with a point of sale platform and payment processing, Square also offers a payroll service. If you are only paying independent contractors, you pay $6/month per contractor on your payroll. If you have employees as well, you pay $35/month plus $6 per employee/month. Accept credit cards and payments anywhere and we’ll automatically calculate sales tax for you. A lot of the features might not be relevant to you, such as payroll or managing 1099 contractors.

QuickBooks Online can be a more cost-efficient option for businesses with multiple users that don’t want to navigate the steep learning curve of QuickBooks Desktop. However, QuickBooks Desktop may be the better value for businesses that want a locally installed software option with enhanced accounting features. QuickBooks Payroll is an add-on service that starts at $45/month plus $6/month per employee. These costs are in addition to your monthly QuickBooks Online subscription fees.

Those who want to take their accounting on the go will appreciate the mobile app. It brings most of the features of the online platform, plus it enables mileage tracking and receipt capture for quick and convenient recordkeeping. QuickBooks Online is a good option for many small businesses that are looking to make invoicing customers easy and integrate invoicing and payments into the general ledger. Small businesses can customize how they use the platform so that they only use the features they need.

The tax penalty protection at the Elite level is a great added layer of security, and it comes partnered with a white glove/curated experience for business owners short on time. If your company does not have a bookkeeper, accountant, or HR team in charge of payroll and benefits management, QuickBooks can keep your payroll seamless while offering tools to meet those other needs. QuickBooks Online offers more features on the go and is a better overall value than QuickBooks Desktop. If you don’t need the advanced features offered by the Desktop plan, the Online version will save you money.

QuickBooks makes this process even easier thanks to a huge range of integrations and plug-ins you can use, with familiar names such as PayPal, Shopify and MailChimp all present and accounted for. QuickBooks Online allows up to 25 users on its most expensive plans. However, the QuickBooks Desktop Pro requires you to pay $299 for every additional user, up to a maximum of three. Desktop Premier and Enterprise, meanwhile, allow up to five and 30 users, respectively. At the most basic level, QuickBooks Online is the cloud-based version of QuickBooks. All your data is stored in QuickBooks’ cloud and you’ll be able to access it anywhere on any device.

Moving up to the Essentials Plan, you’ll pay $16.50 per month for the first three months, $45 per month. This plan adds up to three users to the account so that the right people have access to data at their fingertips. It also gives you bill management and collects employee time for invoices to add them for proper billing. Although QuickBooks Online is user-friendly, there can be a learning curve, particularly if you’re unfamiliar with the basic principles of accounting.

Plans for every kind of business

This hands-on approach helps us strengthen our accounting software expertise and deliver on the Fit Small Business mission of providing the best answers to your small business questions. Get current pricing and promotions; if you work with an accounting professional, you may want to speak with your accountant or bookkeeper prior to signing up for any possible discounts or packages. Many accounting professionals also offer set-up services, ongoing support, and advisory services to help your small business work successfully on QuickBooks.