QuickBooks for Small Business: Which Version Do You Need?

Moreover, QuickBooks allows users to customise reports based on specific date ranges, accounts, or other criteria. Customising reports helps in analysing financial trends and identifying areas for improvement. Both versions offer automatic syncing with your bank so you can categorize transactions. Add payroll to QuickBooks Online starting at $45 per month, or to Desktop starting at $50, plus $2 per employee, per month. The most notable difference, aside from price, between QuickBooks Online and QuickBooks Desktop is the Online version is cloud-based. The mobile app for Online is robust, and Desktop’s mobile app is so limited, that it essentially functions as a receipt uploader.

QuickBooks Desktop Pro

QuickBooks has an accounting tool specifically for freelancers called QuickBooks Online Self-Employed, which starts at $15 a month. QuickBooks Self-Employed tackles basic freelance bookkeeping features like expense tracking, receipt uploading, tax categorizing, https://www.accountingcoaching.online/understanding-the-balance-sheet/ quarterly tax estimating and mileage tracking. When signing up for QuickBooks Online, it only gives options for paying monthly. However, once you’ve signed up, navigate to your account settings, and you can switch to annual billing to save 10%.

Why QuickBooks Online is a better choice

It has features required specifically for accounting like income and expense tracking, payroll management, invoicing and inventory management. QuickBooks also offers both a desktop version for a fixed fee and an online version accessible through your web browser, tablet, or smartphone for a monthly or yearly subscription. Some features, such as payroll management and payment processing, incur an additional fee regardless of which version you choose.

Quick Create

In QBO Essentials and Plus, you can attach docs to transactions and customers/vendors. You can even take a photo of a receipt on the QBO mobile app, which creates an expense transaction in QBO with the receipt attached. If you’re a new QuickBooks user, it’s easy to become overwhelmed by all of the terms that you will encounter throughout the platform, especially if you’re also new to the world of business accounting. To help fill the gap, here is a list of definitions to commonly used terms in QuickBooks’ small-business software. Larger businesses also appreciate using QuickBooks to track the money they owe to their customers (the “accounts payable”). QuickBooks is the world’s most popular accounting software for small and medium-sized business owners.

These business owners appreciated the ability to minimize accounting costs while simplifying their business. As an accounting program, QuickBooks Online helps you track your finances while giving you clear insights that can guide your most crucial business decisions. To that end, each QuickBooks Online plan includes cash flow forecasting. From the dashboard, a cash flow formatting snapshot shows you both where your business stands now and where it likely will stand financially several months to a year down the road. QuickBooks Online also syncs with a variety of payroll tools, including the accountant-friendly QuickBooks Online Payroll. While QuickBooks Online users don’t get a discount when signing up for QuickBooks Payroll, the two software products integrate seamlessly with one another and are equally easy to use.

1. QuickBooks offers a separate product — QuickBooks Self-Employed — designed for freelancers and independent contractors, with plans starting at $15 per month.
2. In the world of QuickBooks definitions, your QuickBooks Online homepage is referred to as your dashboard.
3. This plan adds up to three users to the account so that the right people have access to data at their fingertips.
4. You have easy access to all the common financial statements like balance sheet, profit and loss (P&L) statement, cash flow statements and taxes filed.
5. When signing up for QuickBooks Online, it only gives options for paying monthly.

You can produce multiple invoices for multiple clients that feature the same branding for your business. During tax season, many small business owners simply give their accountant a read-only login to their QuickBooks account. This lets the accountant view, process, and submit QuickBooks data in preparation for tax season. In the past, QuickBooks came in the form of physical desktop software that you installed via CD-ROM.

You can download the QuickBooks Online mobile app from the Google Play Store or Apple App Store. Since your software for accounting is connected to the cloud, they can use their own login to access reports like the general ledger, balance sheet, or cash flow statement whenever they need. Whether you just want help tracking receipts or you’re looking to automate complex workflows and support a large team, we have options for you.

Expert Assisted is a monthly subscription service that requires a QBO subscription and provides expert help to answer your questions related to the books that you maintain full ownership and control. An expert can guide you through QBO setup and answer questions based on the information you provide; some bookkeeping services may not be included and determined by the expert. For more information about Expert Assisted, refer to the QuickBooks Terms of Service. QuickBooks Online is cloud-based software that can be accessed anytime and anywhere from any internet-enabled device and has monthly subscription options. Meanwhile, QuickBooks Desktop is an on-premise software that needs to be installed on the computer where you’ll use it and is available as an annual subscription.

If you outgrow any service, you can choose to remove or upgrade it as needed. The hardest part is finding the right balance between cost and features because QuickBooks offers more for business, but it also costs more. In some cases, QuickBooks may offer more than necessary, but in most, QuickBooks is better for business financial management than Quicken is. If you run a small or medium-size business and want to ensure you can track all financial information and create reports summarizing any aspect of your business, QuickBooks will not disappoint. Just be aware that there is a learning curve when starting out, and not all features are intuitive when you get the program up and running for the first time. It can also plug into many additional software tools for added features.

The Advanced Plan is the final tier for $100 per month for the first three months, then reverts to $200 per month. This allows more users (up to 25) and increases analytics for users to assess the business’s health. There is workflow automation, data restoration, batch invoices and expenses and on-demand training. This plan also gives you a dedicated account team to help with training, troubleshooting and setup. QuickBooks, on the other hand, is a software dedicated only to accounting.

If you’re using QuickBooks Online, you or your accountant can easily transfer all the needed tax information through a tax preparation program like TurboTax. Bookkeepers and accounting professionals using QuickBooks Accountant can simplify tax preparation through ProConnect, a professional tax management solution. You’ll get the most value out of QuickBooks Online if you understand how to use its transaction tags and what is a mixed cost reporting capabilities. If you’re not sure whether you’re getting the most of these features, consider asking your accountant to review your chart of accounts and how you’re categorizing transactions. The main dashboard will give an overview of your QuickBooks account, showing your profit and loss overview, invoices, expenses and sales. All plans include 24/7 live chat support; phone support is available 5 a.m.

Paperwork can be intimidating, but it doesn’t have to be if you use the right tools. QuickBooks Online is one of the most feature-rich, but easy-to-use accounting solutions on the market, and can help to make the process infinitely smoother. The cloud version of QuickBooks is accessible on virtually all internet-connected devices. You can access QuickBooks on Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer 10, Safari 6.1, Chrome for Android, and Safari for iOS. QuickBooks can save an enormous amount of hassle during tax season for both you and your accountant.

Money movement services are provided by Intuit Payments Inc., licensed as a Money Transmitter by the New York State Department of Financial Services. The business tools are much more limited than those in QuickBooks but work just fine for a family with a few rental properties or an individual who owns a side hustle business or sole proprietorship. If you want to use your software anywhere you have an internet connection, you’ll likely want to focus on QuickBooks Online or pay more to add remote access through hosting to QuickBooks Enterprise.

Essentially, QuickBooks is the Swiss Army knife of business financial tools—it can do just about anything you might need for your business. But there are some features that many businesses will never need, and the high price tag for QuickBooks Professional may be a reason to look elsewhere. Sometimes you want QuickBooks Online to create https://www.quickbooks-payroll.org/ transactions at a certain frequency for you so you don’t have to do them manually each time. Like a recurring check for rent, a bill for utilities or a sales receipt for a monthly customer payment. Manage Users is split into two sections — Manage Users, where you list business users who will access the file, and Accounting Firms.