Intuit QuickBooks Online continues to offer a class-leading range of flexible features, superb reporting capabilities, and unrivaled depth. Since our last review, the small business accounting service has introduced AI Agents that provide financial insights and suggest actions. Moreover, it has also improved in other areas, including account reconciliation, bank feeds, custom fields, and project management. You pay a lot for the privilege of using QuickBooks Online, but it easily remains an Editors' Choice winner for small businesses that sell both products and services. FreshBooks and Wave are our other top picks, respectively, for service-based companies and sole proprietors who don't need payroll features.
QuickBooks Online is available in four versions (Simple Start, Essentials, Plus, and Advanced), all of which share a similar look and functionality. A free 30-day trial is available for each. Prices start at $38 per month and go up to $275 per month. I reviewed the Plus version, which costs $115 per month for five users. That's $16 more than a year ago, when it had already gone up $9 per month compared with the previous year. Discounts are often available.
QuickBooks Online costs more than any of the competing small business accounting applications I reviewed. Xero’s top-level Established tier, for example, is $90 per month. Wave Pro ($19 per month) and Zoho Books Standard ($20 per month) are the least expensive alternatives I've tested, but they, of course, lack many features and some flexibility compared with QuickBooks Online.
QuickBooks Online offers standard setup tools, such as connecting your bank accounts to import transactions, along with some unusual ones: automated global categorization, free phone help for new users, and integrations with four sales channels (Amazon, eBay, Etsy, and Shopify).
Once you enter the main site, you see the new dashboard. The old vertical toolbar has been replaced with what Intuit calls “Apps.” Essentially, these are navigation tabs that run horizontally across the top of the page, opening the site’s main working areas, such as Accounting, Customers, Projects, and Sales & Get Paid.
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The new Business Feed, which you see throughout the site, appears below the App icons (the blue snowflake icon signals AI-driven content). It suggests actions you might take (such as "Review [current dollar amount] in invoices,") and features you should explore (such as "Autofilling expenses keeps your records organized.")
The dashboard retains most of what you could see with the old one, just with several additions. You get charts for Cash Flow Trend, Expenses, Profit & Loss, and Sales, among others. New widgets (blocks of data) provide details about your integrated apps and unpaid sales tax returns. You can set up post-invoice feedback surveys and see customer payment totals by date range. Your bank account balances are also displayed, along with invoice status, accounts payable, and accounts receivable.
The dashboard is totally customizable, so you can easily hide widgets you don’t want to see and rearrange others. That’s good because, like much of the site, this page feels crowded. The QuickBooks Online interface was already somewhat overwhelming, and the new one takes it a step further in that direction.
Adjusting to a new user interface can be downright challenging. It takes some time to learn where all the features you use are located, which can be frustrating and time-consuming. Once you get used to it, there’s nothing difficult about actually using the site’s functions, since many of the internal pages where you do your work haven’t changed as much.
AI Agents work behind the scenes in many areas of QuickBooks Online, providing automation and insights that can support your business operations. They constantly learn about your business so they can suggest relevant actions they can take, but they never do anything without your approval. For example, an Agent might draft a reminder email when they notice a customer’s invoice hasn’t been paid and ask if you want to send it. Alternatively, it may offer suggestions for receiving payment faster when you open an invoice.
You know that Intuit Assist, which powers the Agents, is at work by the blue snowflake icon that appears. Beyond the Agents, QuickBooks Online utilizes AI to identify and resolve bookkeeping issues, assist with reconciling bank accounts, and provide insights into the Profit & Loss and Balance Sheet reports. At the time of writing, the Agents that are live in QuickBooks Online Plus are the Accounting Agent, Customer Agent, and Payment Agent. Others are in beta or available only for Advanced subscribers.
QuickBooks Online packs a lot of information within customer records, so the pages can seem claustrophobic (an alternate view is better). The records themselves are more thorough than most I’ve seen, and the software supports more import formats (CSV, Excel, Google Sheets, and QuickBooks Desktop) than others.
Each customer's page has contact information, along with more unusual fields, such as preferred language and Price Rules (which help set conditional pricing). This page also displays links to related content, including the customer’s projects, statements, transactions (one-time and recurring), and any new tasks. Only Zoho Books rivals this flexibility.
QuickBooks Online offers all the sales transaction forms you might need, from invoices and estimates to credit memos, sales receipts, and statements. Sales orders are available, but not retainer invoices, unlike with FreshBooks. Invoice forms are more customizable in both design and content than what you get from competitors, and you can include custom fields. QuickBooks Online no longer allows you to use tags, so custom fields have become more important and plentiful. Existing subscribers who have been using tags will be able to continue incorporating them, however.
The service has always been great at allowing you to include a lot of detail with your bank transactions. Intuit has implemented AI, adding three new tools to the transaction register. You can message the person responsible for a specific transaction to request more details or obtain a receipt. If you don’t recognize the vendor, you can pop open a box with a description.
Meanwhile, a new Match/Categorize column allows you to pair an incoming transaction with an existing one (unless AI does it for you) or edit the category that the site assigned to it. I didn’t find that AI made the site’s categorization suggestions much smarter (you can read about why it selected a category), but it’s supposed to learn from your changes over time.
Like competitors, QuickBooks Online accepts payments from customers via bank payment and credit or debit card. It also supports electronic bill payment through QuickBooks Bill Pay, a feature that no other competitor offers. Both services require extra fees. You have the option to upload bills from your computer via email or enter them manually. The site utilizes OCR to read the bill and complete as many fields as possible on one of its forms.
Expenses are equally flexible. You can upload them from your computer or from Google Drive, forward them from email, or enter them manually on a form. You can also snap photos of receipts with your smartphone and let the site use OCR to transfer the details to an official form. The site also allows you to create and send purchase orders, which is not a common feature in this group of applications.
QuickBooks Online excels here. Competitors either don’t offer a full complement of tools (FreshBooks) or require an add-on to access them (Xero). Item records are comprehensive. You get a warning if you try to sell something you don’t have in stock, and inventory reporting tools help you keep a close watch on stock levels. The site also supports multi-item assemblies and service-based sales. It provides strong internal time-tracking tools and also includes an integrated subscription to QuickBooks Time, the industry leader in managing individual time entries and timesheets.
Project tracking is a critical feature for businesses that need to track costs for multi-part jobs. QuickBooks Online’s tools are excellent. You simply assign transactions (bills, estimates, expenses, invoices, payments, purchase orders, and time) to specific projects. Competitors, such as FreshBooks and Xero, also offer project tracking features.
The site creates a page for each project, which shows you its current income and expenses by category at a glance. In addition to this overview, you can view lists of related transactions and time activities, as well as project reports. Your current project profit always appears, too. You can now use a new tool that enables you to estimate your employee cost rates, providing a different perspective on your project costs.
No other accounting service can match QuickBooks Online's reports in terms of content, customizability, and design. Most are standard reports that correspond to the site's core functions, such as accounts receivable and payable, expenses and vendors, sales and customers, and sales tax. Accountant reports (including standard financial reports, such as Balance Sheet and Statement of Cash Flows) are also present. Most reports are now available in a Modern View, which improves their aesthetic qualities and legibility. You can save modified reports and export them as a CSV, Excel, or PDF file.
No other service prepares you for income taxes better than QuickBooks Online. It categorizes your transactions and assigns them to the correct lines on Schedule C, estimating what you might owe at any given point. It also suggests additional areas where you can claim expenses.
QuickBooks Live Tax is a new service that moves your QuickBooks Online data into Intuit TurboTax. This requires a subscription to one of the TurboTax Live options, which offers unlimited live help from one of Intuit’s tax experts and costs more than the DIY version (pricing for the 2025 tax year is not available at the time of writing).
Intuit’s fraud prevention technology constantly scans the company’s systems and blocks individuals who are engaging in suspicious activity. Employees proactively search for scams and fraud that might impact customers. Multi-factor authentication (MFA) is an option, and the company safeguards your data using the AES-256 standard, which ensures the highest level of cryptographic security.
QuickBooks Online’s mobile apps (available for Android and iOS) haven't changed much, although I saw some traces of AI in the Business Feed and transactions. The apps provide many of the tools and much of the data from the browser-based version, but some of the content, such as contact and product records, is abbreviated. On mobile, you get just two reports. And the dashboard isn’t nearly as comprehensive as it is on the web. Transaction forms, such as bills and invoices, are more thorough.
Best for Small Businesses Overall
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Excellent dashboard
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In-depth contact records and transaction forms
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Outstanding inventory management and time tracking
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Exceptional collection of customizable reports
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Helpful AI Agents
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Expensive
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Updated interface feels crowded and unfamiliar
QuickBooks Online remains the small business accounting service to beat, thanks to its depth, customizability, insightful AI Agents, and top-notch reports.
Final Thoughts
(Credit: Intuit)
Intuit QuickBooks Online
- 5.0 - Exemplary: Near perfection, ground-breaking
- 4.5 - Outstanding: Best in class, acts as a benchmark for measuring competitors
- 4.0 - Excellent: A performance, feature, or value leader in its class, with few shortfalls
- 3.5 - Good: Does what the product should do, and does so better than many competitors
- 3.0 - Average: Does what the product should do, and sits in the middle of the pack
- 2.5 - Fair: We have some reservations, buy with caution
- 2.0 - Subpar: We do not recommend, buy with extreme caution
- 1.5 - Poor: Do not buy this product
- 1.0 - Dismal: Don't even think about buying this product
Read Our Editorial Mission Statement and Testing Methodologies.
QuickBooks Online should appeal to both growing and well-established businesses that want access to a full suite of top-notch accounting tools. The app's billing, inventory, reporting, and transaction features go well beyond those of competitors. We also appreciate how Intuit continues to use AI to streamline and simplify the work you have to do, while providing you with the necessary feedback to move your company forward. QuickBooks Online remains an Editors' Choice winner for SMB accounting solutions, thanks to its flexibility and thoroughness. Our other Editors' Choice winners are FreshBooks, for service-based companies, and Wave, for microbusinesses without payroll needs.
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About Our Expert
I write about money. I’ve been reviewing tax software and services as a freelancer for PCMag since 1993. Along the way, I took on reviews of other types of business and personal finance technology. Prior to that, I had spent a few years writing about productivity and entertainment applications for 8-bit personal computers (my first one was a Commodore VIC-20) as a member of the editorial staff at Compute!
After working at Lawson Associates, now Lawson Software, I switched my focus to accounting but learned that personal computer applications were more progressive and interesting to cover than mainframe solutions. So I served as editor of a monthly newsletter that provided support for accountants who were just starting to use PCs. I still ghostwrite monthly how-to columns for accounting professionals. From there, I went on to write articles and reviews for numerous business and financial publications, including Barron’s and Kiplinger’s Personal Finance Magazine.
