Selecting between QuickBook subscription levels can feel overwhelming with multiple options like Simple Start, Essentials, Plus, and Advanced.

Each plan comes with different features and pricing.

This guide will help you understand the differences between the plans so you can decide which is the best fit for your business.

Which QuickBooks Online Plan Is Right for You?

When you visit the QuickBooks website, you’ll see these four subscription levels:

1. Simple Start
2. Essentials
3. Plus
4. Advanced

You’ll want to choose based on your business needs, complexity, and goals. Let’s break down each plan to understand its features.

QuickBooks Simple Start: Ideal for Basic Business Needs

QuickBooks Simple Start is the most basic option and ideal for those with very simple business models. If your business is straightforward—perhaps you’re a 1099 contractor or a sole proprietor—Simple Start might be the perfect fit. It offers:

• Basic invoicing and expense tracking.
• Receipt capture and mileage tracking.
• Full-service bookkeeping with balance sheet creation.

Simple Start is great for businesses that need minimal functionality and mainly use QuickBooks for tax compliance. If you just need an easy way to keep your finances organized without running a lot of reports, Simple Start should work fine.

QuickBooks Essentials: A Step Up with Limited Additional Features

QuickBooks Essentials is the next level up and offers a few extra features like:

• Time tracking.
• Ability to add multiple users.
• More reporting options than Simple Start.

However, if you’re considering Essentials, be cautious about the price jump. For double the cost of Simple Start, it doesn’t offer a whole lot of additional features that many businesses need. If your business is growing, you might want to skip Essentials and move directly to QuickBooks Plus.

QuickBooks Plus: Best for Growing Businesses

QuickBooks Plus is where most small businesses will find the best value. It offers all the features of Simple Start and Essentials but adds many advanced tools that growing businesses need. This is my personal favorite because it includes:

• Budgeting: Track your budget-to-actual performance right inside QuickBooks.
• Inventory tracking: Essential for product-based businesses.
• Class and location tracking: If you want to track the profitability of different locations or revenue streams, Plus allows you to create custom classes.
• Job costing: Ideal for businesses like construction or landscaping, where tracking profitability by project or job is crucial.

With Plus, you can run advanced reports and create separate Profit and Loss (P&L) statements by class, project, or location, helping you get a detailed view of your business’s financial health.

QuickBooks Advanced: For Complex and Larger Businesses

QuickBooks Advanced is a robust option designed for larger businesses with more complex needs. It offers more customization, advanced reporting features, and the ability to manage multiple entities. While this plan provides the most functionality, it’s also the most expensive.

For many small and micro businesses, the extra cost might not be necessary.

Advanced is ideal if you’re transitioning from QuickBooks Desktop and need a similar feature set online. However, if you’re just starting or running a smaller operation, QuickBooks Plus is likely sufficient.

Save Money on Your QuickBooks Subscription

QuickBooks often advertises promotional discounts on their website, but these are usually for a short period (like three months). To get the best price for a longer term, use my special link to get 30% off for 12 months—that’s better than QuickBooks’ usual 50% off for three months.

Get the deal here: jamietrull.com/accounting 

Alternatives to QuickBooks For Small Business Owners

While QuickBooks is a popular choice, it’s not always the right solution for every business. If QuickBooks doesn’t meet your needs or you want to explore more affordable options, we’ve partnered with other accounting platforms to provide you with the best deals.

Check out more software options and recommendations here: Jamie’s Accounting Software Recommendations

Simplify Your Finances with Jamie’s Profit and Loss Template

If ongoing software costs are a concern and you prefer a simpler, one-time purchase solution, consider Jamie’s Profit & Loss Template and Dashboard. It’s an excellent tool for self-employed individuals or small businesses that don’t need all the bells and whistles of QuickBooks.

Get the template here: Profit & Loss Template and Dashboard

Conclusion

Choosing the right QuickBooks plan depends on the size and complexity of your business. For most small businesses, QuickBooks Plus offers the best value with its comprehensive feature set. But if your business is more complex, QuickBooks Advanced might be the better choice.

And if QuickBooks isn’t the right fit for you, there are other accounting software platforms available that might suit your needs better.

Affiliate Disclosure: Jamie Trull is a QuickBooks affiliate and may receive a commission if you choose to purchase through the links provided. Jamie personally uses and loves Quickbooks online for her own business and would not recommend anyone who she has not fully vetted and tested herself. 

Next Steps: Learn more about how to save money on QuickBooks or explore alternative software options here: jamietrull.com/accounting.

This transcript is provided in its original format with no edits to the spoken content. Any errors or inconsistencies in grammar or wording are part of the natural conversation and should be excused as such.

Which QuickBooks Subscription Should You Use?

Which QuickBooks subscription should you use for your business? With all the different features and options, it can be difficult to decide which one to pull the trigger on.

In this video, I’m breaking down all the QuickBooks Online options and why QuickBooks Online Plus happens to be my favorite. And you’re going to want to stick around until the end because I’m also going to tell you how you can save the most money on QuickBooks. Even if you are a current QuickBooks user.

I’m Jaime Trull, CPA and profit strategist. And if you’re looking for tools and resources to help get your business finances organized and profitable, well, this is the channel that you need to be watching. So please make sure to like and subscribe.

QuickBooks Online Subscription Options

So let’s take a look at the different QuickBooks online. options.

And right now, when you go to the QuickBooks website, this is probably what you’re going to see, or something similar. You’re going to see probably these four different subscription levels.

You’re going to have Simple Start, Essentials, Plus and Advanced.

And you’re probably going to stare at this for a long time trying to figure out which one of these is right for you.

Now, they do tell you down below exactly what the features are, but it’s not super descriptive if you’re really trying to figure out What is a good fit for you? What does your business really need?

So if you’re moving maybe from a different accounting platform over to this one, you might have a better idea of what you’re going to use. But if this is the first time you’ve used an accounting platform like this, then you’re probably just going to scratch your head and wonder where you should start.

Special QuickBooks Pricing

Now, there are great things about all of these. Now, if you’re directly on the QuickBooks website, website, you might be seeing different pricing than what is being shown here.

That’s because these are my special negotiated rates, and these rates last for a full 12 months. Plus, you get a free trial when you use my link.

So if you want to get the best prices on QuickBooks, jamietrull.com/QuickBooks.

Remember that whatever they’re offering on the QuickBooks site is probably only for three months. That’s typically what they do.

Maybe it’s 50 percent off for three months, but I’ll tell you that 30 percent off for 12 months plus a free trial is generally going to save you quite a bit more money than what the QuickBooks offer will.

So definitely check out my special offer.

Breaking Down the QuickBooks Plans

Okay, so let’s delve into the differences here.

Simple Start: Who Is It For?

So we’re going to start with Simple Start. Who is Simple Start really right for?

To me, Simple Start is really for those who have a pretty simplistic business model. They don’t need any extra bells and whistles at all. They really don’t have a lot of reports that they’re planning to run. They’re really doing this just for tax compliance reasons.

That’s why you’re setting up QuickBooks, just to keep track of things for taxes. Maybe you’re a 1099 contractor and you know this is something that you need to do, but you don’t have a lot of additional things that you are planning to do with this accounting system.

That’s really a great fit for something like a QuickBooks Simple Start.

It has things like receipt capture and mileage tracking, and it is a full-service bookkeeping system, which is different than some of the other bookkeeping systems you might see out there, meaning it actually generates a balance sheet.

It does true double-entry bookkeeping.

That’s why I recommend QuickBooks Online versus some of the alternatives.

Essentials: Is It Worth It?

So now when we move from Simple Start to Essentials, which is double the price, right, you’re going to get a few more features.

You’re going to get things like time tracking. You’re going to get a couple more users that can log into the system.

But if I’m being honest, I don’t think it’s all that different from Simple Start, especially to justify that giant jump up in cost.

Why QuickBooks Plus Is My Favorite

However, the one that I recommend and love the most is actually QuickBooks Plus.

So if you don’t have a super simple business model, i.e., a 1099 contractor, service provider with no employees, right? That’s a great fit for Simple Start.

But if you have more complexity than that, then Plus is what’s going to give you the most features, the biggest bang for your buck.

Plus is what I use. Plus gives me everything that I need.

And I love just the ability to ability to get all the reporting that I need out of Plus. I can even use it for my budgeting, which is really cool.

You can see budget to actuals within the system. If you have inventory, you can track inventory in the system.

My favorite thing though, too, is that I can track profitability by certain parts of my business.

For example, I have multiple different classes is what they’re called in QuickBooks that I use to track my profitability. And I can run separate P&Ls for those different classes.

Same thing with locations. If you have multiple different locations and you want to track some of that, you know, income or cost separately, you can set all of that up within QuickBooks Plus really easily using class and location tracking.

And also, if you do any kind of job costing, if you’re trying to keep track of the cost of a particular job, maybe you’re a landscaper and you’re wanting to make sure that you’re capturing all the labor and materials for a job.

Job Costing in QuickBooks Plus

So that you bill the right amount, then this is a great, great solution for that because you get job costing as well.

So you can see just the difference here in the features that you get.

I also love the reports that you can run. You can run pretty much any report you can think of.

You can run out of QuickBooks Plus, and I’m a big fan of customized reports. So for me, that’s a great thing.

So personally, I just think your biggest bang for your buck, again, unless you’re a very, very simple business model that doesn’t need much other than maybe some invoicing capabilities, right?

I recommend QuickBooks Plus.

What About QuickBooks Advanced?

Now, you may be wondering, well, what about Advanced? Should we talk about Advanced?

Advanced is definitely advanced, right?

It’s probably not something that you’re going to want to DIY. There’s a lot of different things in here, and Advanced I think is really great if you’re moving from maybe like QuickBooks Desktop over to QuickBooks Online.

Advanced is probably going to be the most similar to what you have gotten used to in QuickBooks Desktop as far as features go.

It is the Mac Daddy, but the price is also going to support the fact that it is the Mac Daddy of QuickBooks Online.

So if you really need some of these things, then absolutely, if you have a bigger business, if you have a really complex business, you have tons of locations, tons of things you’re trying to manage, yeah, QuickBooks Advanced can absolutely do that for you.

But if you are really more on the smaller size, small to micro business, but if you want to have the features that QuickBooks is just so great at, then QuickBooks Online Plus is a great place to start.

Why QuickBooks Online Plus is the Most Scalable Option

Now other than the features that I just mentioned, overall I just think QuickBooks Online Plus is the most customizable and it’s the most scalable for small businesses.

So it’s going to be able to do all the things that you maybe don’t even know that you need at this point in time.

And it’s going to be able to grow with you as you grow your business.

Now, if you’re a visual learner like me, I’m going to jump on into QuickBooks Online Plus so I can show you some of those features that it has that the other versions don’t have so you can decide if it’s right for you.

Class and Location Tracking in QuickBooks Plus

So here’s an example of a report that you can run if you use class or location tracking.

So this means that you are assigning your income and your expenses to specific classes, i.e., potentially different streams of revenue that you have that you want to track profitability of separately.

And then same thing for locations.

If you have multiple locations and you want to track the profitability of each of those locations, which I highly recommend, this is how you can use class tracking to do it.

And this is an example of what a report could look like if you are utilizing class tracking, which is only available in QuickBooks Online Plus.

Project and Job Costing in QuickBooks Plus

So another feature that I really, really love in QuickBooks Online Plus is the ability to do project tracking.

So if you need to do job costing, if you need to track your profitability by specific job or customer, then this is great for you.

You’ll be able to track everything separately, see all of your different profit margins by project, make sure that you are capturing everything and billing it out correctly.

It is one of my favorite things to be able to see really clearly into what’s going on in your business.

Now, if you followed this channel for a little while, you probably already know that I’m a giant profitability nerd, which is why I love that feature.

And I also love the next feature, which is a budget to actual comparison.

Budget vs. Actual Reporting in QuickBooks Plus

So if you have QuickBooks Online Plus, you can do a budget to actual, you can actually set up multiple different budgets and see where you are tracking, which I think is…

Final Recommendation: Simple Start vs. Plus

So those are all the reasons that I love QuickBooks Online Plus, and I think it very, very much justifies the price of that product.

Now, if you’re saying though, I really don’t need all those functions, I’m not going to use them. I really just want something a lot simpler for my business.

Well, then I would probably look at whether you can start with Simple Start.

Essentials is fine, but if you don’t need an extra user or two, and if you don’t need the time tracking, you’re probably not going to get a whole lot extra out of Essentials for double the price.

So for me, it’s either Plus for all the bells and whistles, or it’s Simple Start to really just pare down to what you really need.

How to Save Money on QuickBooks Online

Now, remember at the beginning of this video, I promised that I was going to give you some extra tips for how to save money on QuickBooks Online.

Well, that’s what I’m going to do now.

So I already showed you my link. That’s going to be the best way to save on your subscription price.

That’s only for new users, only in the U.S. But whether you are a new user or you are an existing user of QuickBooks, there are some other ways that you can save money as well.

Better Rates on QuickBooks Payments & Payroll

And one of those major ways is to not set up QuickBooks Online payments or payroll on your own.

Even if you already have a QuickBooks Online subscription, if you want access to those things, make sure to email my team and we can give you better help.

So, we’ll be able to get you a better rate on the transaction fees and a better rate on payroll, but you do need to email my team.

📩 The email is down below [[email protected]]

I also have an entire video on how to save the most money on QuickBooks Online, so make sure to check that video out next.

Final Thoughts & Call to Action

Thanks for watching.

If you found this video helpful, make sure to press the like button and subscribe, and I will see you next time.

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