QuickBooks Online is better than QuickBooks Desktop if you prefer a cloud-based accounting software to a locally installed one. QuickBooks Online’s biggest advantage is its ability to be accessed from anywhere with an internet-enabled device. Learn about all the differences in our comparison of QuickBooks Online vs Desktop. The right QuickBooks Online plan depends on the size of your business and the features you need.

The screens an accountant is used to seeing are still there but hidden and not as easy to find. This means it’s “harder” to use because QBO is honestly more complicated than QuickBooks Desktop. If you share accounting responsibilities with other members of your business, QBO allows individuals to use unique logins. Nonetheless, Plus has an advanced job costing capability, which is helpful for construction and contracting firms. If comparing estimated costs to actual job costs is critical to your business, check out Xero.

Ready to grow your business? See how much you qualify for:

Since QuickBooks Online is priced as a monthly subscription, it doesn’t require a contract and you can cancel your account at any time. Additionally, the desktop products are only available as annual subscriptions, making them a bigger commitment than QuickBooks Online. Depending on how many people you want to share access with — as well as whether or not your business sells physical products — you’ll likely end up choosing between the Essentials and the Plus plans. Each of these options includes a free, 30-day trial and unlimited live support.

The main difference between QuickBooks Online and QuickBooks Desktop is that QuickBooks Online is cloud-based accounting software, and QuickBooks Desktop is locally installed. In the battle between QuickBooks Online versus Desktop, it’s best to focus on the differences between the two accounting software options since they are so similar. QuickBooks Online allows you to track your activity, such as income and expenses, by class and location. This is useful for businesses with multiple departments or divisions and those that provide various types of services. Meanwhile, QuickBooks Desktop allows you to set up classes, but you can’t track your income and expenses by location. Both QuickBooks Online and Desktop are on our list of the best small business accounting software.

However, if you still need help or simply want to outsource your bookkeeping to an expert, you can also find a bookkeeping professional in the ProAdvisor directory. Hosting your QBDT file on the cloud is available for all editions of QuickBooks Desktop and is available through a variety of providers. Like its desktop counterpart, there are multiple editions of QuickBooks Online aimed at serving different purposes. Unlike QuickBooks Desktop, QBO is only available in a subscription-based format regardless of the edition you choose. QuickBooks Desktop is, as its name implies, the desktop version of the software.

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. Working from the cloud means you need an internet connection, so a poor signal or an intermittent connection can be an issue. For $27.50 per month for the first three months, then $55 per month after that, get up to three users, manage and pay bills and track time with its Essentials plan, which is its most popular plan. For $1,410 per year, get the Enterprise plan with advanced pricing, reporting and inventory. The higher your plan tier, the more reports and users you can add, although it’s important to understand concurrent users are each sold separately.

• But many businesses simply don’t understand the benefits of QuickBooks Online vs desktop and how it can help their business.
• One big drawback of QuickBooks Pro in the past was that it didn’t have mobile apps.
• Dancing Numbers helps small businesses, entrepreneurs, and CPAs to do smart transferring of data to and from QuickBooks Desktop.
• So how do QuickBooks Desktop and QuickBooks Online compare, and which version is better suited for home-service companies like yours?

Many small- to medium-sized business owners have been using QuickBooks (QB) desktop software for decades. In 2001, QuickBooks came out with an online solution (QuickBooks Online), which gained significant traffic in more recent years. We still come across businesses stuck in the QuickBooks desktop era. But many businesses simply don’t understand the benefits of QuickBooks Online vs desktop and how it can help their business.

QuickBooks Online vs Desktop: The Ultimate Guide

That might be the reason that Quickbooks desktop continues to grow. If you answered yes to any of the “functionality” or “accessibility” questions, and yes to the third question, it’s probably time you make a move and get with the times of online accounting. Moving to QBO (or a similar solution) will give many of you better knowledge of your business in better time. And timely knowledge is power that fuels important managerial and strategic decisions for your business.

With so many options, nailing the proper choice for your needs may appear more challenging than actually using the software. When you move to QuickBooks Online, you’ll create a new account and login. You can migrate your business and payroll data to QuickBooks Online and keep a copy of the original file for your records. Both QuickBooks Online and QuickBooks Desktop are capable programs with strong accounting features. QuickBooks Pro is geared toward small to medium businesses and starts at $41/month for a single user. QuickBooks Pro 2023 must be purchased through a reseller or a phone call with QuickBooks Sales.

The QuickBooks Desktop comes in the list of locally installed software with a license purchase system whereas QuickBooks Online is a cloud-based system with a monthly pricing model. Especially when you look at the other simpler online accounting software’s that price point for Quickbooks online plus is significantly higher. The manufacturing modules, that is mostly available in Quickbooks enterprise, which blows the cost out of the water. Last time I looked at those prices they were $3000 and up to buy the Quickbooks enterprise versions.

But the QuickBooks Online advanced plan helps in creating a scalable system for the scalability of the large-scale business. You will get an amazing robust feature set, online payroll, strong accounting, attractive invoices, and more than 600 integrations. The QuickBooks Online is easier to learn and user-friendly than QuickBooks Desktop. QuickBooks Online can work anywhere with an internet connection.

Reporting:

Ease of use consists of customer support, support network of bookkeepers, and user reviews. Intuit generally offers the same customer support options on all its QuickBooks Online products, but Advanced gives you access to a dedicated support manager for more personalized bookkeeping assistance. It’s a great fit if you’ll be doing the bookkeeping yourself and don’t need inventory accounting.

QuickBooks Desktop Overview:

You also have the option to import products and services into the application to avoid having to re-enter the data. Back then, you couldn’t pull industry-specific reports and could only access mildly customized reports within the system. For more than two decades, QuickBooks has been the de facto accounting software for small businesses across a vast number of industries. From restaurants to retailers and plumbers to painters, professionals in nearly every line of business have benefited from QuickBooks. And while for many years QuickBooks was limited to desktop computing environments, there now exists an alternate version of the software that’s accessible from any internet-connected device. All QuickBooks Online plans have basic mobile accounting features, such as the ability to create and send invoices.

Common QuickBooks Online Complaints

Akaunting is an online accounting platform you can access anytime with an internet connection. It includes a client portal to share invoices and transactions with clients and accept bulk payments. The software includes features like billing, inventory, project accounting, income ex 1 and expense tracking, sales tax tracking, mileage tracking, reconciliation, and support. Wave Accounting provides users with its full suite of accounting features for free. The paid account gives you access to phone or email support and payroll, payments, and advisor support.

Class & Location Tracking

Yes, you can, but the process is a bit tedious, as you need to manually export your files from QuickBooks Online to Desktop. If you are currently using QuickBooks Online and want to switch to an interface similar to QuickBooks Desktop, we recommend using the QuickBooks Online Desktop app. Read our article on what the QuickBooks Online Desktop app is to learn more. QuickBooks Online and QuickBooks Desktop both earned decent user ratings, although QuickBooks Desktop’s mobile app received low scores. With QuickBooks Desktop, you must make an Accountant’s Copy of your data file and send it to your ProAdvisor. The copy will allow you to continue to work on transactions in the current period while your accountant makes adjustments to past periods.