QuickBooks
Bookkeeping, invoicing and payroll for small businesses, with Intuit's AI categorising bank transactions, matching receipts and chasing unpaid invoices on its own.
What it costs
| Tier | Price | For | Includes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0/mo | A sole trader with very few transactions. | 1 user, income and expense tracking, 2 invoices a month, profit and loss reports, 1 bank connection, chat support. |
| Simple Start | $38/mo list price (promotional $19/mo for the first 3 months) | One person invoicing and tracking expenses properly. | 1 user plus 2 accountant seats, automated bookkeeping, invoicing with payments, bill pay with free ACH. |
| Essentials | $85/mo list price (promotional $42.50/mo for the first 3 months) | A small business with a few people and supplier bills to manage. | 3 users, everything in Simple Start plus enhanced reports, employee time tracking on invoices, lead collection forms. |
| Plus | $140/mo list price (promotional $70/mo for the first 3 months) | Businesses tracking jobs, projects or stock. | 5 users, everything in Essentials plus budgets, project profitability, inventory, 40 classes and locations. |
| Advanced | $340/mo list price (promotional $170/mo for the first 3 months) | Larger small businesses with batch workflows and many users. | 25 users, everything in Plus plus batch invoicing, Excel sync, advanced project features, priority support. |
Read from QuickBooks's own pricing page on 25 Sep 2026. Vendors change prices without notice.
Where it breaks
The advertised price is a three-month promotion and the list price is roughly double it, so budget from the list figure rather than the one on the banner. Tiers are gated by user count as much as by feature, which means a fourth person can force an upgrade that has nothing to do with what you need. Automatic categorisation is confident and occasionally wrong in ways that are tedious to unpick at year end — review it monthly rather than annually. And moving accounting software after a year of history is genuinely painful, so the choice is stickier than the monthly price suggests.
Browser-based with iOS and Android apps. Bank feeds connect directly to most institutions, which is the mechanism that lets categorisation run unattended. Pricing and feature sets differ substantially between countries — the figures above are the US ones.
First entry in this reference. There is no previous check to compare it against.
Accounting is the least glamorous place AI has landed and one of the few where the value is immediate and measurable: transactions arriving from the bank feed already categorised, receipts matched to them, and unpaid invoices chased without anyone remembering to do it.
It happens on a schedule, triggered by the bank rather than by you, and you review the result rather than the steps. For most small businesses it is the first thing in the stack that works while they sleep.
What to watch
The headline prices are a three-month promotion. Simple Start is $38 a month, not $19; Plus is $140, not $70. Plan from the list price.
Then watch the categorisation. Intuit Assist is right most of the time and wrong with the same confidence, and the errors compound quietly — a supplier filed to the wrong account in March is still wrong in December. A monthly review of what it decided is cheaper than an annual reconciliation of what it got wrong.
The lock-in is real
A year of transaction history, bank rules and reconciled statements does not move easily. This is a decision with a longer tail than the monthly fee implies, so it is worth trying the free tier or a short paid month before committing a year of books to it.
Where QuickBooks stops is anything that is not money. Records about customers, jobs and projects belong in Airtable or HubSpot, with Make moving data between them.
Get QuickBooks
Buying the tool is not the hard part.
The ebook is about what to hand over, in what order, and how you find out when it goes wrong. One payment, no subscription.