QuickBooks Online vs Desktop: Which Is Right for Your Business?

QuickBooks Online offers four standard plans—Simple Start, Essentials, Plus, and Advanced—with prices ranging from $35 to $235 per month. They vary in the number of users and features included and are built for different purposes. 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. If your home or office has a slow or unpredictable internet connection, QuickBooks Desktop can ensure you can reach most of your data even if the internet goes down overnight. The downside to locally stored data, though, is that you can only access it from where it’s stored.

The banking section of this case study focuses on cash management, bank reconciliation, and bank feed connections. The software must have bank integrations to automatically feed bank or card transactions. The bank reconciliation module must also let users reconcile accounts with or without bank feeds for optimal ease of use. Plus includes inventory accounting that allows you to monitor stock items and quantity—a necessity if you’re selling products.

Why do accountants not like QuickBooks Online?

1. It’s more affordable, easier to share with your accountant or other financial stakeholders, and offers better invoicing than its locally installed counterpart.
2. Meanwhile, if you or your accountant want to become a ProAdvisor to demonstrate expertise in QuickBooks, read our article on how to become a QuickBooks ProAdvisor.
3. If your business is service-based without any inventory, then Essentials should provide everything you need while saving you $34 per month compared to Plus.
4. You can also integrate QuickBooks Online with Zapier, which lets you connect QuickBooks to thousands of other apps in your business’s tech stack.
5. Meanwhile, QuickBooks Online provides some customization options for businesses, but they’re not as extensive as those in Enterprise.

The assisted migration offer is eligible to Desktop customers that are migrating their data and setting up QuickBooks Online. Personalized setup is limited to a 1-hour session with a customer success product expert. Intuit reserves the right to limit the number of sessions and the length and scope of each session. Assisted migration results may vary based on business complexity and file size. Terms and conditions, features, support, pricing, and service options are subject to change without notice. Terms and conditions, features, support, pricing, and service options subject to change without notice.

You can create basic asset and liability accounts in the chart of accounts (or use the existing ones) to track things like bank accounts, cash on hand, A/R and A/P, credit card balances, and loans. If you use QuickBooks Payroll, payroll liabilities like taxes and deductions will be tracked automatically. Moving up to the Essentials Plan, you’ll pay $30 per month for the first three months, then $60 per month. This plan adds up to three users to the account so that the right people have access to data at their fingertips.

Best QuickBooks Alternatives in 2024 (Free & Paid)

You can drill down to a list of your outstanding invoices instead of only the total outstanding. QuickBooks Simple Start has a decent ability to record and track payments to independent contractors, making it easier to stay compliant with tax regulations. When you add a new vendor, you can designate them as a 1099 contractor. This ensures that their payments are tracked separately for 1099 reporting purposes.

QuickBooks Online Simple Start vs Essentials

You can send email invites to your accountant from within the software. Alternatively, you can hire a QuickBooks ProAdvisor to help with your bookkeeping needs. To help you get started, we prepared a guide on how to find a QuickBooks ProAdvisor.

While QuickBooks Online does offer security features like multi-factor authorization and encrypted data storage, it’s accessible by anyone with employee login credentials and an internet connection. QuickBooks Desktop has a more dated user interface than some how to calculate contribution per unit cloud-based products and requires prior accounting knowledge to get the most out of the product. QuickBooks Online is easier to set up because it’s a cloud-based platform that doesn’t require installation. Also, the guided setup helps new users easily and effectively set up their company information, connect their bank accounts, create customers and vendors, etc. QuickBooks Plus is the first tier that includes inventory tracking and project profitability features.

Should I switch from QuickBooks Online to QuickBooks Desktop?

With our online migration tool, you can move all your data or move only what’s key—like balances and specific lists. If you need help, we can migrate your data for you at no additional cost. Yes, you can, but the process is a bit tedious, as you need to export your files from QuickBooks Online to Desktop manually.