QuickBooks Online Review 2024: Features, Pros & Cons

In other words, Mac users can’t scale up their software from one plan to what is replacement cost and how does it work the next as they add software users. Unlike QuickBooks Online, Desktop Pro includes built-in inventory management. And if data analysis is an important part of growing your business, QuickBooks Desktop is a solid pick. It includes 100+ reports, while QuickBooks Online Simple Start includes around 40. The Desktop Premier edition escalates to 150+ reports, including industry-specific reports for general contractors, manufacturers and wholesalers, nonprofits, and retailers.

1. And let’s not forget offline accessibility for the times your ISP decides to ruin your Monday.
2. These versions give business owners more features and reports geared toward their industry.
3. And while Desktop has a respectable number of integrations when compared to other accounting software, it falls far short of what QBO offers its users.
4. The dashboard is super intuitive with large, easy-to-understand charts, and the mobile app is similarly easy to use.

QuickBooks Online VS Desktop: Features

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.

Advanced

If you choose QuickBooks Desktop Pro Plus, you’ll also need to pay extra if you want to access customer service via live chat. Notably, only QuickBooks Desktop Enterprise includes 24/7 customer service. Pro Plus and Premier Plus limit customer service hours to just 12 hours a day, weekdays only.

Industry-Specific Features

You can (almost) always trust your local access, and QuickBooks Desktop reinforces that by keeping your accounting data on your local drive or network. QuickBooks Online is optimized to be as user-friendly as possible and very easy to navigate. The side menu categorizes features for easy access, for example, aggregating sections for employees, their taxes, and compliance details under the Payroll category. It takes a bit of time to click around and understand where everything is, but a quick run-through is more than enough to familiarize yourself with what QuickBooks Online can do.

Everything from the installation screen to the lagging UI gave me flashbacks to the 1998 dial-up tone on my family’s Pentium III computer. There were also fewer prompts of the tutorial variety, but I was pleasantly surprised by the number of features packed into it. 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.

With larger datasets or complex operations, QuickBooks Desktop might utilize more local processing power compared to the online version. 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. It’s fair to point out that multiple people can use QuickBooks Desktop over the local network at the office. But when multiple users are working on the same file simultaneously, changes made by one user won’t be instantly visible to the rest of the team. The changes need to be saved and refreshed, leaving a lot of potential for errors.

QuickBooks Desktop is more traditional accounting software that you download and install on your computer, while QuickBooks Online is cloud-based accounting software you access through the internet. For the Desktop version, you pay an annual fee starting at $1,922 per year, and the cloud-based option starts at $15 per month. Both versions have mobile apps, but the app for the Desktop version primarily functions as a way to upload receipts, and the Online mobile app is robust in comparison. 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.