Bookkeeping, invoicing, and expense tools that cut the hours a small business loses to paperwork.
41 guides
Page 3 of 4Deleting an unpaid invoice hides the loss and overstates your past income. The correct route is a bad debt item and a credit memo, which records the loss where your accountant expects it.
Plus supports five users and Advanced supports around 25. After the August 2026 increase the gap between them widened sharply. When the jump is justified and when it is not.
Intuit stopped selling new Pro Plus, Premier Plus, and Mac Plus subscriptions to US customers in September 2024. Enterprise is the only Desktop edition still sold. What that means if you are choosing today.
Wave costs nothing and Xero starts at $25 a month. The decision is not price, it is scope: Wave has no inventory and no multi-currency, and Xero caps its cheapest plan at 20 invoices.
QuickBooks raised Plus by 41 percent and Advanced by 70 percent in August 2026. Four alternatives priced from zero, with the limits that decide which one actually replaces it.
Wave gives unlimited invoicing and double-entry bookkeeping at zero. How to set it up properly in an hour, what Pro at $19 adds, and the 2.9 percent cost nobody mentions.
Xero is cloud accounting software for small businesses. What it actually handles, the one thing that makes it cheaper than rivals for a team, and the invoice cap on its entry plan.
Quicken and QuickBooks both started at Intuit, which is why the names confuse people. They are now separate companies making different products for different users. Which one you actually need.
QBO just means QuickBooks Online. It is not a separate product or a cheaper edition. What the abbreviation covers, how it differs from QuickBooks Desktop, and what each plan costs now.
Most people are comfortable with day-to-day QuickBooks in two to four weeks. Payroll and inventory take months longer, and the real bottleneck is usually accounting, not software.
The cancellation steps for QuickBooks Online and Desktop, the one-year read-only window nobody mentions, when a refund is possible, and what to export before you click cancel.
QuickBooks charges by how the customer pays, not a flat rate. Card, ACH, swiped, and keyed rates compared, plus the 2026 ACH increase and the volume discount most businesses never ask for.