Attract clients through our vast, diverse network of small businesses and sharpen your skills with comprehensive training. Quickly assess your clients’ business performance and benchmark them against similar companies, for custom, actionable insights. Katherine Haan is a small business owner with nearly two decades of experience helping other business owners increase their incomes. Another notable difference is QuickBooks Online offers a Self-Employed version for $15 per month, which is not available with QuickBooks Desktop.

Powerful products for you and your clients

Small businesses that prefer locally installed software and work from a Mac. Small businesses that prefer locally installed software and work with a PC. Many or all of the products featured here are from our partners who compensate us.

Tools for your workflow

If you have a record of bills available, you can track upcoming payments easily to ensure timely payments of bills. To manage payroll through QuickBooks Payroll, you’ll need to pay a fee for this add-on service, with plans ranging from $45 to $125 per month, plus an additional $5 to $10 per employee per month. FreshBooks is great for self-employed individuals, sole proprietors and independent contractors. It is incredibly user-friendly and easy to navigate, so if you are a sole proprietor looking for basic accounting software, FreshBooks will meet your needs at a relatively low cost. Its basic plan is in line with QuickBooks Simple Start, at $15 per month.

Talk to sales

• Invoice forms are more customizable in both design and content than what you get from other small business accounting software, and you can include custom fields.
• You can enter sales and cost prices and other descriptive information.
• NerdWallet independently reviews accounting software products before determining our top picks.
• When you enter clients into your practice, they are automatically added to your Quickbooks as customers.
• Find help articles, video tutorials, and connect with other businesses in our online community.

Freelancers and independent contractors may opt for simpler options, while larger small businesses might turn to QuickBooks products with advanced inventory, sales and reporting features. QuickBooks Online’s project tracking capabilities are roughly comparable to FreshBooks Premium’s. You simply assign transactions (invoices, payments, expenses, estimates, time, purchase orders, and bills) to specific quickbooks accounting projects. QuickBooks Online creates a page for each project, showing you at a glance its current income and expenses by category. Besides this overview, you can see lists of related transactions and time activities, as well as project reports. QuickBooks offers a separate product — QuickBooks Self-Employed — designed for freelancers and independent contractors, with plans starting at $15 per month.

Securely message clients, share documents, and consolidate notes and contact info from a single dashboard. Access a variety of self-paced and live training options to become a more trusted advisor. Hone your craft, prep for QuickBooks Certification, and earn CPE credits.

Track a document request

Accountants have complete access to a company’s books when using QuickBooks Online Accountant. They can run trial balances, export data for taxes, void or delete transactions and reclassify transactions in bulk to save time. All three options have a mobile app to make meetings with clients convenient and help you stay abreast of data while away from your computer. Choosing an accounting software to use with your clients is a big decision. You want a solution that is easy for you to use and easy for your clients to use. QuickBooks Online Accounting, Wave Accounting and Sage Business Cloud Accounting are three popular solutions.

Online help also seems to be improved over what we saw in previous years. QuickBooks Online has enhanced its automated transaction categorization tool, which can be especially helpful to new users who have dozens or hundreds of transactions to categorize. Make it easier to view and access multiple client files and work how you’re most comfortable. Our latest tools automate everyday tasks, so you and your clients can focus on business.

Larger businesses with sophisticated inventory, reporting and accounting needs. You can upload them from your computer, upload them from Google Drive, forward them from email, snap photos of receipts, and enter them manually on a form. You can make them billable to customers or projects, add markup, and make them recurring. QuickBooks Online’s customer records are thorough and can be imported in multiple formats, including CSV, Excel, Google Sheets, and QuickBooks Desktop.

• There is a lot of education and tutorial help in the program as well.
• Help your clients improve efficiency, productivity, and the bottom line by easily recording and tracking customer prepayments and deposits on sales orders.
• You aren’t required to fill out every field in an expense or income entry, but the more detailed your records are, the more useful certain reports can be.
• Its basic plan is in line with QuickBooks Simple Start, at $15 per month.
• Close your clients’ monthly books with increased accuracy and in less time with new month-end review.
• QuickBooks is one of the most popular accounting software platforms because it gets the job done in an easy-to-understand and easy-to-use format.

Set your small business clients up for success with special pricing discounts

QuickBooks Online comes in four versions, all of which look and work similarly and offer a 30-day free trial. Simple Start costs $30 per month and is designed for microbusinesses. The $60-per-month Essentials plan adds bill management, support for three users, and time tracking. For $90 per month, the Plus plan (which I tested for this review) includes inventory and project profitability tracking and support for five users. The Advanced version costs $200 per month, supports 25 users, and adds employee expenses, batch invoices and expenses, custom access controls, and other features. QuickBooks Online has its own tightly integrated payroll application, QuickBooks Payroll.