You can, however, switch your business’s account from QuickBooks Desktop to QuickBooks Online without losing your data. It has less of a learning curve than QuickBooks Desktop and comes with a much more simplified dashboard that’s easy to navigate. Some accountants dislike QuickBooks Online’s limited functionality, what is the distinction between debtor and creditor limited report customization, and dependency on the internet. Seeing as it’s a program installed on your local system, it relies on the device’s processing power and resources.
- Finally, they are awarded points based on the ease with which users will find assistance from independent bookkeepers with expertise in the platform.
- It also has barcode scanning capabilities — business owners can download the QuickBooks Desktop mobile app and use their mobile device as a scanner.
- It includes 100+ reports, while QuickBooks Online Simple Start includes around 40.
Ultimately, your specific business’s size, type, and needs are the real deciding factors in determining which of the QuickBooks versions is best for your business. Just remember, you will need to make a decision quickly if you want QuickBooks Desktop Pro or Premier, as sales of these products will be discontinued this year. 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 helpful integrations and add-on products. However, QuickBooks Online offers over 750 integrations to QuickBooks Pro’s 260+ integrations.
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. For those customers that choose to stay on Desktop Plus subscriptions, we’ll continue to focus on product maintenance and security. QuickBooks Desktop wins this head-to-head competition, with better reporting, industry-specific features, a better price structure, and more comprehensive features. However, if things like integration and cloud access are important to you, QuickBooks Online may be the way to go. Once you decide, if you need some assistance with your QuickBooks Migration, be sure to check out our comprehensive QuickBooks Tutorial.
Software type
If you’re searching for accounting software that’s user-friendly, full of smart features, and scales with your business, Quickbooks is a great option. You can also integrate QuickBooks Online with Zapier, which lets you connect QuickBooks to thousands of other apps in your business’s tech stack. You can do things like automatically add customers to or create receipts in QuickBooks when payments happen in other apps, or track new QuickBooks invoices or payments in another app. Here are a few pre-made workflows to show you what’s possible, but you can use Zapier to connect QuickBooks to almost any app you use.
QuickBooks Online vs. Desktop pricing
It’s also the better option for businesses requiring complex inventory accounting features. We went to user review websites to read first-hand reviews from actual software users. This user review score helps us give more credit to software products that deliver a consistent service to their customers.
Businesses that have purchased one-time licenses of the locally-installed QuickBooks Desktop versions that have been sunset can still use the software’s accounting features. However, these versions don’t receive security updates, live support, or access to cloud-based services such as live bank feeds, QuickBooks Desktop Payments, or QuickBooks Desktop Payroll. In addition, the Premier and Enterprise plans offer more than 150 reports, with industry-specific reporting options available. Its highest-tiered plan is the Advanced option, which costs $100 per month for the first three months, then $200 per month after that.
QuickBooks Online is more collaborative, whereas QuickBooks Desktop provides more tools for solo users
QuickBooks Online users can sign up for QuickBooks Live Bookkeeping to assist with getting the books up to date and managing bookkeeping tasks. As far as other add-ons, QuickBooks Online integrates with over 750 what is a travel agency debit memo business apps and programs — well over twice the number of integrations you’ll find with Desktop. What stands out most about QuickBooks Online when compared to Desktop is that QBO is cloud-based accounting software.
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. Probably not, unless your business absolutely needs advanced inventory management features, barcode scanning, or assembly builds. Not only is it the newer tool, but it also seems to be the focus in terms of update frequency, development, and marketing. QuickBooks Online is simply easier to learn, provides a detailed onboarding process, and is very intuitive.
Those interested in trying out QuickBooks Online can access a how to read financial report notes for pension and retirement benefits free 30-day demo with sample data that allows you to easily explore system features and functions without spending a lot of time entering data. 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. Another notable difference is QuickBooks Online offers a Self-Employed version for $15 per month, which is not available with QuickBooks Desktop.