quickbooks online vs quickbooks desktop

Both include the basic reports you’d expect to find with accounting software, such as a balance sheet, a Profit & Loss report, a cash flow statement, etc. QuickBooks Online offers over 80 reports depending on your plan, whereas QuickBooks Desktop Pro has over 130 reports. QuickBooks Desktop Premier and Quickbooks Desktop Enterprise have even more reports (especially if you opt for the industry-specific versions of these programs). While QuickBooks Online boasts many of the features you’ll find with Desktop, some of its features, such as inventory management, aren’t quite as advanced.

  1. It also gives you bill management and collects employee time for invoices to add them for proper billing.
  2. Send invoices, run reports, and get mobile alerts for key events—all on your smartphone.
  3. QuickBooks Online’s month-to-month subscription service starts at $30 a month (totaling $360 a year).
  4. While QuickBooks products work for many businesses, they aren’t the best choice for all businesses.
  5. Zapier is a no-code automation tool that lets you connect your apps into automated workflows, so that every person and every business can move forward at growth speed.

QuickBooks Online vs. Desktop pricing

Our QuickBooks Online comparison is based on our internal case study, explained below. As mentioned earlier, QuickBooks Solopreneur is excluded from our evaluation since it’s not a double-entry accounting 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. The tier 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.

QuickBooks Desktop features

What stands out most about QuickBooks Online when compared to Desktop is that QBO is cloud-based accounting software. Because of this, QuickBooks Online is much easier to use and has many more integrations and time-saving invoicing automations, such as auto-scheduling. While we’re on the topic of invoicing, QuickBooks Online has the superior product, offering six invoice templates and multilingual invoicing in six languages.

It also gives you bill management and collects employee time for invoices to add them for proper billing. When working with the Desktop version, it’s downloaded right to your computer. This means the data operates as fast as your computer, all without needing to worry about a connection issue. You must pay an additional fee for every user who wants to access the account simultaneously, whereas Online lets multiple users access the account at the same time. While QuickBooks products work for many businesses, they aren’t the best choice for all businesses.

Features include mileage tracking, basic reporting, income and expense tracking, capture and organize receipts and estimation of quarterly taxes. This easy-to-use and feature-rich software is ideal if you have no bookkeeping experience and want top-notch customer support. Both QuickBooks Online and QuickBooks Desktop are capable programs with strong accounting features. In contrast, QuickBooks Desktop offers hardly any payment gateways, making it difficult for the modern merchant to accept online invoice payments easily.

quickbooks online vs quickbooks desktop

Find help articles, video tutorials, and connect with other businesses in our online community. This allows you to compare the estimated costs and revenues of your projects against the actual numbers incurred throughout the completion of the project. This helps you identify potential problems and make adjustments once you determine that your projects are not profitable. QuickBooks Checking Account opening is subject to identity verification and approval by Green Dot Bank. However you work, no matter what your business does, QuickBooks has a plan for you.

You just need to select the bills you want to pay from the Pay Bills window, place a checkmark next to the bills, and then select Save or Save and Print. The QuickBooks Online comparison chart below highlights some of the key features of the five versions. We include in-depth, side-by-side comparisons of each plan against its next-level tier in the sections that follow. It’s important to note that FreshBooks is the most competitively priced software solution we found. While QuickBooks Online is only 50 cents more than Xero, note that that is the introductory cost for the first three months.

Contact Management

Discover BusinessLoans.com’s lender network offering up to gross income vs net income $3M in funding, no minimum credit score required. The online version of QuickBooks is much easier to use than the desktop version. While QuickBooks Online and QuickBooks Desktop offer contact management, only QuickBooks Desktop allows you to manage and track leads as well as contacts. It’s hard to say which software is cheaper because there are so many variables.

For operations paying their employees through checks, QuickBooks Online Essentials fits the bill. It is also suitable for those doing business outside the US, as it supports multiple currencies, unlike Simple Start. Essentials even lets you record employees’ worked hours and track billable hours by customer and project. Today’s leading accounting platforms offer standard security features such as data encryption, secure credential tokenization and more. While human error will always play some role in security breaches, you can be confident in your accounting platform when it comes to keeping your information safe. While QuickBooks Online is very popular among business owners, some have problems with the system.