QuickBooks is a proper accounting platform, and most of it is for your accountant rather than for you. If your month is invoices out and payments chased, you are maintaining a general ledger to do it.
You open it, send an invoice, and close it again. Somewhere behind that there is a chart of accounts, a bank feed asking you to categorise things, and reports you have never run. Once a year your accountant tidies up what the categorising got wrong. None of that is what you bought it for, and all of it is what you are paying for.
Tick anything true of the last month. Two or more and the accounting is carrying you rather than the other way round.
Then you have an invoicing job and an accounting subscription. There are two honest fixes, and switching everything is only one of them. Read the next two sections before you decide, and put a number on the admin with the invoicing cost calculator.
QuickBooks Online is built around double-entry bookkeeping, which is exactly right if someone is keeping your books in it. Published plans run from $38 a month on Simple Start to $340 on Advanced, and the free tier allows two invoices a month. Simple Start includes one user, so a fourth person means moving the whole business up to Essentials at $85.
The cost is not only the subscription. A ledger has to be kept tidy to be worth anything, so the bank feed becomes a weekly job, and if it is not done the reports are quietly wrong. For a business whose real need is to send a document and get paid, that is a large amount of machinery to maintain.
QuickBooks Online list prices, from Intuit's own pricing page.
QuickBooks Online list prices as of August 2026, from quickbooks.intuit.com/pricing and Intuit support documentation. Prices can change and usually follow an introductory discount that reverts. Billbooks is $7.95 a month flat with 2 users included: see the pricing.
Stay with QuickBooks if anyone is actually keeping books in it. If your accountant works in QuickBooks, if you run payroll through it, if you need a balance sheet, VAT or sales tax returns filed from it, or if a lender or investor reads its reports, it is doing a job nothing here replaces. And you may not have to choose at all: invoices and expenses can be pushed straight into QuickBooks Online from here, so you can do the invoicing somewhere lighter while your accountant keeps the books exactly where they are. That is the better answer for most readers of this page.
Only one of these is a switch. Pick by whether anyone is really using the accounting.
Quote and invoice in a lighter tool and connect it to QuickBooks Online, so every invoice and expense lands in the books without being typed twice. Your accountant notices nothing except cleaner data.
If the ledger exists only because the invoicing lives inside it, there is nothing to preserve. Export your customers and your open invoices, rebuild the unpaid ones, and keep the old account until the year is filed.
Customers export to CSV. That list is the part worth protecting. Invoices already paid can stay as history wherever they are.
A five minute conversation avoids the expensive version of this, which is switching, discovering at year end that something was needed, and paying to reconstruct it.
Flat monthly price
One price with two users included, and no tier jump when a third or fourth person needs access inside your plan limit.
No ledger to maintain
Nothing to categorise weekly, nothing to go quietly wrong between year ends.
Unlimited invoices from the start
No two-a-month cap, and quote follow-ups automated as well as invoice reminders.
Still connected to the books
Push invoices and expenses into QuickBooks Online or Xero, so your accountant works where they already work.
Billbooks is not accounting software and does not try to be. It sends quotes and invoices, takes payment, chases what is late and tracks expenses against jobs, then hands that to your accounting system or your accountant. If you need books kept, keep something that keeps books.
If nobody is keeping books in QuickBooks, Billbooks covers quoting, invoicing, reminders and expenses at $7.95 a month flat. If your accountant does use it, the better move is to keep QuickBooks for the books and connect a lighter invoicing tool to it.
Yes. Billbooks pushes invoices and expenses into QuickBooks Online on the Professional plan, so you quote and invoice in one place while the accounting stays in QuickBooks. Nothing is typed twice and your accountant keeps working in the software they know.
Rarely for long. The free tier allows two invoices a month, so any business billing weekly passes it almost immediately and moves to Simple Start at $38 a month, which is where most of these comparisons actually begin.
On list price yes: $7.95 a month flat against $38 to $340, with two users included rather than one. They are not the same product though, because QuickBooks keeps books and this does not.
Usually the opposite, if you keep them connected. Invoices and expenses pushed into QuickBooks Online arrive consistently formatted, which is less work than tidying up entries made in a hurry.
No. It applies tax to invoices correctly, but it does not file returns and has no payroll. Those stay with your accounting software or your accountant.
Nothing. Leave the account in place while the books are being kept there. If you are leaving entirely, keep it until the year is filed so the history stays reachable.
Unlimited on every plan, including the cheapest, with no monthly cap.
Yes, 30 days with no card required. The free calculators and generators need no account at all if you want to test the workflow first.
A little kit of calculators and generators, on the house.
The two jobs, and when you need which.
Side by side on price and features: Billbooks vs QuickBooks. If you are keeping the books where they are, see the QuickBooks Online integration. Not sure whether you need accounting software at all? Four questions settle it. Free and needing no account: the invoicing cost calculator.