Small businesses can customize how they use the platform so that they only use the features they need. Xero is a better option for businesses that need to track project profitability. This is because Xero allows you to see how much each project is costing you in real time and compare that to your estimated profits.
Why QuickBooks Online wins
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Why You Can Trust Fit Small Business
This is because QuickBooks only allows up to 40 users for its highest-tiered plan, and even then, some plans require every user to pay for their own account. Xero is ideal for businesses that keep a team of bookkeepers or accountants in-house. QuickBooks offers integrations with 400 plus apps and software tools to increase the functionality of your software plan. ECommerce businesses can easily connect their accounting software with payment platforms like PayPal and Shopify. QuickBooks offers a main dashboard that can be customized with a series of tile-like graphs or lists, which lets you see real-time KPIs at a glance.
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Xero’s unlimited-users feature makes it a winner among larger businesses and well-established small businesses that require more than five users. It’s also less expensive than QuickBooks Online and a bit easier to use, thanks to its customizable dashboard and simple layout. Another notable difference is that QuickBooks Online lets you upload your file of transactions, so you aren’t required to connect your bank account. With Xero, you have to connect your account to reconcile your transactions. Total cost per year is calculated by adding all the features that require additional fees.
- Both services have plenty to offer, but in the end, Xero has more integrations than QuickBooks.
- Discover BusinessLoans.com’s lender network offering up to $3M in funding, no minimum credit score required.
- The QuickBooks Advanced plan costs $200 per month, supporting 25 users.
- Xero’s support and learning portal, Xero Central, offers access to a searchable database categorized by topics like ‘Inventory’ or ‘Reporting and Tracking,’ among others.
- Prices for QuickBooks Live Bookkeeping scale with the monthly expenses of your business, which means higher costs for businesses with higher expenses.
- It’s easy to see why QuickBooks is a standout choice for small-to mid-size businesses.
However, we want to emphasize that Xero offers fixed asset accounting in all its plans, making it an affordable QuickBooks alternative for fixed asset management. Its intuitive interface and helpful guides make it easy to navigate, even if you have no prior accounting knowledge. And if you need assistance, QuickBooks offers robust live customer support to help you along the way. It’s easy to see why QuickBooks is a standout choice for small-to mid-size businesses. Its intuitive interface, robust feature set, and readily available customer support make it a comprehensive and user-friendly solution designed to help grow—and scale with—your business. Xero Growing is designed for growing businesses, offering everything in Early, plus bill management tools, additional invoicing, and bulk reconciling transactions.
Core offers the basics, while Premium adds same-day direct deposit, role-based access, and auto time tracking. Elite also adds tax penalty protection, and a dedicated pro to help set up and troubleshoot. Premium includes scheduling for jobs and shifts, real-time reporting, custom alerts, and time-off management. The base fee for both plans is half off for the first three months.
There are a handful of differences between the features of QuickBooks Online and Xero. Xero has a more impressive contact management feature with smart lists for targeting specific customers. However, QuickBooks Online offers features you won’t find with Xero, such as mileage tracking and built-in lending, and also has stronger invoicing. QuickBooks Online has four pricing plans ranging from $35/month to $235/month.
If you have Windows, you’ll need to be running Windows 7 or newer, with at least 4GBs of RAM and a processor comparable to the Intel Core i5. Both services are available on all the most common devices and browsers. Discover BusinessLoans.com’s lender network offering up to $3M in funding, no minimum credit score required. If you don’t have the time to devote to learning the software, QuickBooks Online may be the better fit. Xero does not have its own in-house payroll software, but it does integrate with Gusto.
Ironically, we don’t recommend this plan to freelancers due to its lack of tools, even though we do recommend QuickBooks as the best accounting software for the self-employed. To compare QuickBooks vs. Xero accounting, we consulted product documentation and user reviews. We considered features such as invoicing, billing, payments, expense tracking, mileage tracking, project and time tracking and inventory management. We also weighed factors such as pricing, user experience, customer service and integrations. The QuickBooks Simple Start plan costs $30 annual financial reports per month and supports one user, making it best for very tiny businesses or for a single freelancer. Features include expense tracking, contact management, and unlimited invoices and estimates.