QuickBooks Online vs Quickbooks Desktop: Which is best? 2024

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. 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.

Is QuickBooks Online easier to use than QuickBooks Desktop?

If you need more users than that, you can contact QuickBooks Online’s customer support to see if you can create a custom plan with custom user access. Otherwise, you’ll need QuickBooks Desktop Enterprise, which supports up to 40 users. For instance, if you choose the Simple Start plan, you’re the only person who can use the software—apart from your accountant, with whom you can share your business’s account at no impairment definition additional cost. We also don’t recommend QuickBooks Desktop to Mac users, since there’s just one desktop-based plan for Mac users.

Industry-specific Features: QuickBooks Desktop Wins

The banking section of this case study focuses on cash management, cleared synonyms and antonyms 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.

QuickBooks Online is faster, lighter, and uses less processing power than QuickBooks Desktop

QuickBooks Online is cheaper than QuickBooks Desktop if you need multiple users. For instance, QuickBooks Online Plus only costs $99 per month ($1,080 per year) for up to five users as opposed to Desktop Enterprise, which costs $1,481 per year for only one user. Yes, but the only option is QuickBooks Enterprise, as Pro and Premier will no longer be available for new users after July 31, 2024. However, existing Pro and Premier users can still renew their subscriptions. While both QuickBooks Online and Desktop are supported by a large network of independent ProAdvisors, it’s much easier to share your books with your ProAdvisor using QuickBooks Online. Getting assistance with your Desktop bookkeeping is difficult since you must save an Accountant’s Copy of your company file and send it to your ProAdvisor.

Merchant Maverick’s ratings are not influenced by affiliate partnerships. With QuickBooks Online, users receive many of the same great features while gaining the mobility of cloud-based software. QuickBooks Online is easier to use and has more automations, more integrations, and better invoicing. The downsides are the lack of sales orders, lead management, and other complexities that loyal Desktop users may miss (such as customizable letter templates, a built-in calendar, and even spellcheck). These versions give business owners more features and reports geared toward their industry. QuickBooks Online offers over 80 reports depending on your plan, whereas QuickBooks Desktop Pro has over 130 reports.

QuickBooks Online vs. QuickBooks Desktop: Reporting options

Most notably, Premier Plus has 150+ customizable reports for nonprofits, general contractors, and retailers. 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. All you need is your account information, and you can access your QuickBooks details on any device with an internet connection.

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. While they share many of the same features, QuickBooks Desktop’s features are often more developed, except when it comes to invoicing. Both QuickBooks Desktop and QuickBooks Online utilize a subscription pricing model.

1. Small to midsize businesses that want a desktop solution or need advanced inventory and industry-specific features.
2. To expedite product setup, you can choose to use the default chart of accounts that is included in the application.
3. Ease of use is one of the most important things to consider when shopping for software.
4. Yes, you can, but the process is a bit tedious, as you need to export your files from QuickBooks Online to Desktop manually.

All QuickBooks Desktop Pro, Desktop Premiere, Mac, and Desktop Enhanced Payroll products, excluding QuickBooks Desktop Enterprise, will no longer be available to new users after September 30, 2024. Existing QuickBooks Desktop Pro, Premier, Mac, or Enhanced Payroll users will not be impacted. Security updates and product updates will still be released for all users who purchase a QuickBooks Desktop Plus or QuickBooks Desktop Payroll differentiate between operating investing and financing activities subscription before the cutoff date.