The software must have tools to track time, record billable hours what is par value of a bond or expenses, send invoices for progress billings, or monitor project progress and performance. While QuickBooks will almost certainly meet all of your accounting needs, it’s going to cost you—even for the most basic plan. Wave, on the other hand, offers its core invoicing and accounting features for free. But we all know there’s no such thing as a free lunch, so what’s the catch?

Although perpetual licenses for the standalone desktop version are still available through official resellers, this option may be temporary. We like that FastFund provides a user-defined, customized chart of accounts. You can tailor the structure with six account segments to reflect your organization’s setup. We also found managing and creating budgets for grants, departments, programs, and funds quick and simple.

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This is unique among all the bookkeeping software we’ve looked at—including QuickBooks—but makes for a very simple way to enter expenses for nonbookkeepers. In our evaluation, Zoho Books aced our mobile app and integrations categories and also scored high for its available reports. Zoho Books offers more plans and is more scalable than QuickBooks Online.

Accounting Services

FreeAgent only offers a single tier, making the choice of this accounting solution a more simple ‘all or nothing’ choice that starts with a free 30-day trial. From there, new users get a generous 50% discount for the first 6 months, and then it goes to full price. Merritt’s customer-friendly accounting software includes the essentials of bookkeeping. Use the software to reconcile accounting, provide financial information, and record transactions. Merritt’s dashboard also shows you a current snapshot of your business’ profit and loss, which means you always know where your business stands without having to generate a report.

The Best Accounting Software with Offline Access

The added bonus with ZipBooks is that you can opt to pay for handing everything over to a qualified bookkeeper instead. There is also the provision to mix your own efforts with the help of an advisor, with prices to match. Xero is a scalable software option and runs pretty smoothly as long as you’re connected to the internet and using a swift web browser. Xero even performs well on Android and iOS devices, and the overall experience of using it on a smartphone or tablet is great. Therefore, below we’ll list what we think are the best alternatives to QuickBooks. Once you’ve identified what’s essential and what’s nice to have, you can eliminate the options that don’t suit your needs.

1. FreshBooks was built with the freelancer in mind with its single-user access.
2. Selecting an alternative accounting system may be more suitable for your company’s individual requirements, such as cash management and other financial aspects.
3. You can get QuickBooks Online for as low as $30 per month at regular cost or pay as much as $1,340 per year for QuickBooks Desktop Enterprise.
4. Accounting software needs to be feature-laden for it to be useful for a small business, and that’s what we looked for when considering QuickBooks alternatives.
5. Wave takes a small percentage plus a fixed rate out of every online payment processed by the platform.

Also, it fully integrates the entire Square suite making it easy to accept payments, invoice customers, and organize products. With automatic recurring invoices and late payment reminders, you don’t have to stay on top of which client owes you what and when. Plus, no matter which plan you pick, the time-tracking feature lets you automatically add billable hours to invoices before you send them off so you get paid the right amount. Cloud-based software is far more popular today and with that comes tiers for different types or sizes of businesses.

We included the insights we gathered from our case study to illustrate our findings about these solutions based on the case study criteria. Another consideration is access to a network of experts, which Square Invoices lacks. However, Square Invoices offers a BNPL option, whereas QuickBooks Online does not. Offering a free plan or discounts for new customers, as seen with platforms like Zoho Invoice and Square Invoices, could strengthen its pricing strategy. Additionally, ease of use remains a challenge, especially since Invoicera lacks robust bookkeeping capabilities without integration with software like QuickBooks Online. Access to Sage’s receipt capture functionality costs almost twice as much as QuickBooks’, but with Sage, you get more than just receipt capture.

If you’re seeking bookkeeping features alongside invoicing, you might want to check out more powerful software like Zoho Books. Also, although Zoho Books offers a 14-day free trial, it doesn’t offer a discount for new customers. QuickBooks, in contrast, offers a choice of a 30-day free trial or 50% off for the first three months. If you want several customer support options, including phone, email, live chat, and chatbot, go with QuickBooks Online. Zoho Books leads our roundup of the best QuickBooks alternatives because it is similar to QuickBooks Online but has a more functional mobile app. Among its many useful features are the ability to receive payments, send invoices, record time worked, capture expense receipts, and view reports from your mobile app.