QuickBooks Online vs Desktop: Which Is Right for Your Business?
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. However, most users still view Quickbooks Desktop favorably, and the product receives high marks on most customer review sites. The software receives 4.4/5 (based on 1,800+ reviews) on Software Advice and 4.3/5 (based on 1,700+ reviews) on G2.
The company has updated its help centers to be more user-friendly, but there’s still no email support. Both options, however, are working to reduce long hold times on the phone by now offering a callback feature. Both QuickBooks Online and QuickBooks Pro offer a good number of how to use your uber 1099 helpful integrations and add-on products. However, QuickBooks Online offers over 750 integrations to QuickBooks Pro’s 260+ integrations. We recommend crunching the numbers to decide whether the online or desktop versions of QuickBooks are right for your specific business.
- The maximum amount of users you can have with a QuickBooks Online subscription is 25 (plus an accountant).
- If the internet goes out, you’re still able to view, edit, and otherwise work on your books.
- While the cloud-based convenience of QuickBooks Online certainly has its appeal, it seems that when functionality takes center stage, QuickBooks Desktop often steals the limelight.
- However, most users still view Quickbooks Desktop favorably, and the product receives high marks on most customer review sites.
QuickBooks was born out of the success of the popular financial management program Quicken, the first product Scott Cook and Tom Proulx created when they founded Intuit in 1983. The risk of facing irreversible data loss during an environmental disaster is higher with traditional QB desktops. However, a renowned QB hosting provider can help you back up the data during unforeseen situations to minimize their adverse impact. Hosting QuickBooks on a local computer system does not allow you to work on it when you are not around.
Here’s a quick way to tell which version of QuickBooks is right for your business. QuickBooks Online is praised for its mobility, ease of use, feature selection, time-saving automations, and integrations. One of the most common complaints about QuickBooks Desktop is its steep learning curve.
Although Intuit has talked about adding sales orders to QuickBooks Online, this feature is only available with QuickBooks Desktop products at this time. QuickBooks Premier also has a payroll add-on, or you can purchase the QuickBooks Premier + Payroll annual plan. QuickBooks Enterprise Gold and Platinum plans include Enhanced Payroll, while Enterprise Diamond includes Assisted Payroll. 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. The main difference between QuickBooks Online and QuickBooks Desktop is that QuickBooks Online is cloud-based accounting software, and QuickBooks Desktop is locally installed.
QuickBooks Desktop Premier and Quickbooks Desktop Enterprise have even more reports (especially if you opt for the industry-specific versions of these programs). QuickBooks Online and QuickBooks Desktop operate on true double-entry accounting principles and have both accrual and cash-basis accounting. Each offers a detailed chart of accounts, journal entries, bank reconciliation, accounts payable, accounts receivable, and the basic reports needed to run a company. However, QuickBooks Desktop offers better reporting and supports more complex accounting. Four pricing plans for QuickBooks Online are available, ranging from $30 to $200/month (with an additional $45+/month for payroll).
What’s the difference between QuickBooks Online and QuickBooks Desktop Pro?
However, the majority of reviews are positive, with QuickBooks Online receiving 4.3/5 stars (based on 6,200+ reviews) on Software Advice and 4/5 stars (based on 3,100+ reviews) on G2. Both QuickBooks Online and QuickBooks Pro and Premier have notoriously poor customer support (QuickBooks Enterprise support has better priority support). In contrast, QuickBooks Desktop offers hardly any payment gateways, making it difficult for the modern merchant to accept online invoice payments easily. Granted, you don’t have to be an accountant to learn QuickBooks Desktop either, but if you are new to accounting, you will need a lot of time to learn the program. Non-Plus editions of QuickBooks Desktop put the responsibility of backing up files entirely on you. This is by saving them to other locations on your PC, other sorts of media (such as flash drives), or uploading them to the cloud (using apps like Dropbox or Drive).
QuickBooks Online vs. QuickBooks Desktop: Reporting options
Your business is unique, but your routine bookkeeping tasks are going to be similar to many other businesses such as consultants/coaches, dog walkers, and photographers. The transition from QBO to QBDT is rarely smooth and will very likely take multiple attempts to get the data to load. Once loaded, there is extensive post-migration work that will vary from company to company. By using optical character recognition (OCR), details from your receipts are scanned and recorded directly into relevant transactions. QuickBooks Online simplifies both the receipt collection and organization process by allowing you to easily capture and upload a photo or document into your QuickBooks file.
Tech support
As an added convenience, if you outgrow your current edition of QuickBooks Online, upgrade to a more powerful plan in minutes. QuickBooks Desktop’s user interface is very different from QuickBooks Online, offering navigation using a flowchart style menu. To get the best possible experience please use the latest version of Chrome, Firefox, Safari, or Microsoft Edge to view this website. Live Bookkeepers aren’t responsible for errors resulting from incorrect information that you provide, or if you re-open the books by overriding closure after a Live Bookkeeper completes the month-end closure. Discover BusinessLoans.com’s lender network offering up to $3M in funding, no minimum credit score required.
Access your account via the cloud for up to 25 users with the Online version, and pay an additional fee per user, up to 40 users, for cloud access with Desktop. What used to be a huge bulk of QuickBooks business is no longer so—it focuses mostly on its cloud version and actively encourages users to make the switch from Desktop to Online. This may signal future abandonment of its Desktop version as more people move to the cloud. If you make the switch from Desktop to Online, you can import your data and access your original company file at any time. Its highest-tiered plan is the Advanced option, which costs $100 per month for the first three months, then $200 per month after that.
It’s important to note that the process may not transfer all data and features, so thorough preparation and backup are advised before switching. In conclusion, the choice between QuickBooks Online and QuickBooks Desktop comes down to individual business needs. By understanding the unique offerings of both, CPAs can make well-informed recommendations to their clients, ultimately enhancing their accounting processes and business efficiency.
QuickBooks Online vs Desktop Similarities & Differences
QuickBooks Pro 2023 must be purchased through a reseller or a phone call with QuickBooks Sales. Join me in GoSkills’ beginner-friendly QuickBooks Online course to gain the confidence you need to handle your business’ books, boost your accounting efficiency, and enhance your bookkeeping skills. For both cases, I strongly encourage you to find or buy a migration checklist.
With QuickBooks Online, you can add QuickBooks Online Payroll starting at $45/month. While QuickBooks Online and QuickBooks Desktop offer contact management, only QuickBooks Desktop allows you to manage and track leads as well as contacts. Both QuickBooks Online and QuickBooks Desktop offer a large number of features.
During the setup process, you can choose the features and functions that you will likely be using in QuickBooks Online. No need to worry if you skip one; you can always go back and add it at a later date. While people may assume that QuickBooks Online is simply the cloud version of QuickBooks Desktop, in reality, the two products are very different. If you’re a freelancer, stick with its Self-Employed plan, which is $15 per month 9after the three-month discount at $7.50).
With so many options, nailing the proper choice for your needs may appear more challenging than actually using the software. Yes, you can migrate your data from QuickBooks Desktop to QuickBooks Online. Intuit provides conversion tools and services to facilitate the transition.
But it requires manual updates and backups and lacks real-time collaboration. It has different subscription plans to fit various business sizes but offers very limited customization options. QuickBooks Online Accountant (QBOA) is a cloud-based accounting software designed specifically for accounting professionals.
Instead of showing clear images of your cash balance, outstanding invoices, and upcoming bills like the QuickBooks Online dash, the desktop version’s dash is a flowing series of connected folders and files. Unless you’re an accountant, the learning curve will likely be a little higher for you than it would with QuickBooks Online. We also don’t https://quickbooks-payroll.org/ recommend QuickBooks Desktop to Mac users, since there’s just one desktop-based plan for Mac users. This plan, QuickBooks Desktop for Mac, has the same features as QuickBooks Desktop Pro Plus, the most basic desktop-based plan. In other words, Mac users can’t scale up their software from one plan to the next as they add software users.