Accounting & bookkeeping software for the trades

Our picks by business type

What are people replacing QuickBooks with?

Within the tools KitFinch covers, the two full replacements for QuickBooks Online are Xero and FreshBooks, depending on what you are missing. Xero fits teams that need many logins; FreshBooks fits freelancers and small service teams that mostly need invoicing. We make no ranking claim; see the table below.

Read the full FreshBooks review, the QuickBooks Online vs Xero comparison, or the QuickBooks Online alternatives.

Why use Bill.com instead of QuickBooks?

Usually you do not use it instead; you add it. BILL can auto-route supplier bills for approval and pay by ACH, check, card, or international transfer, then sync back to QuickBooks.

It makes sense when many suppliers or subcontractors need sign-off before payment. If you only pay a few bills a month, QuickBooks Online alone is typically enough. See /tools/bill.

Can you use Bill.com for free?

Only for part of it. BILL's Spend & Expense plan is free and covers company cards, budgets, expense tracking, receipt capture, and a mobile app. Accounts payable and receivable automation has no free plan; it is a paid subscription, though a trial is available in most cases.

What to look for

• Sync with your field service app. Housecall Pro, Jobber, and ServiceTitan all push invoices and payments into accounting software; confirm the connection exists before committing to a platform.

• Job costing by crew, truck, or job. You want to see which jobs were profitable, not just the business total, so look for class, location, or project tracking.

• Bank feeds that reconcile automatically. A direct bank connection with matching suggestions keeps the books current without manual entry.

• User access that fits your team. Count how many people need a login at once: owner, office manager, bookkeeper, outside accountant.

• A path off paper receipts. If a crew collects paper receipts in the truck, a capture tool that feeds your accounting platform saves hours a month.

QuickBooks Online

QuickBooks Online connects with hundreds of third-party tools "including popular options like PayPal, Square, ServiceM8, and Dext" to automate workflows around invoicing, expenses, and cash flow.

It includes a free mobile app on its Simple Start plan and higher, so an owner can check numbers from a phone or tablet between jobs.

Because so many field service and payroll platforms build a QuickBooks Online connection first, it tends to require the least manual re-entry for a multi-app trades stack. Its trade-off is that job costing and higher user counts are gated behind more expensive tiers, and any introductory discount reverts to the regular price shown in the pricing table on this page.

Xero

Xero can connect most banks "automatically via a secure direct feed for daily updates," and its reconciliation screen suggests matches for imported transactions to speed up bank reconciliation.

Its Established plan can "track time and costs for projects," which gives a services business a lighter version of job costing without a dedicated trades app.

Accountants and bookkeepers can be invited into a Xero organization at no extra cost, and the platform lists over a thousand connected apps in its app store, including payroll and payment tools.

Xero's advantage over QuickBooks Online is unlimited users on every plan; its gap is fewer built-in integrations aimed specifically at trades and field service.

BILL

BILL can "auto-route bills for approval based on your company's policies," which replaces a manual sign-off process for supplier invoices with a workflow that tracks who approved what.

It supports payment methods including ACH, checks, cards, and international transfers, and syncs two-way with QuickBooks so paid bills post back to the books automatically.

BILL also offers a separate Spend & Expense product with physical and virtual company cards, budget controls, and a mobile app for on-the-go expense tracking, and this product has a free plan.

Its full accounts payable and receivable automation, with custom approval policies and user roles, sits on paid tiers above that free card product.

Dext

Dext lets a crew capture receipts and supplier invoices by taking a photo in its mobile app, or by forwarding documents to a dedicated email inbox, uploading a PDF, or dragging files into the browser.

Its optical character recognition automatically classifies, tags, and extracts data from each document for search and export, and it connects directly to QuickBooks and Xero along with several other accounting platforms.

For a contractor who collects paper receipts in the truck all week, this removes the Sunday-night data entry session entirely, though Dext replaces only the document-capture step, not the general ledger.

Free options

BILL's Spend & Expense product, which issues company cards and tracks employee spending, has a free plan; its accounts payable and receivable automation with approval workflows is a separate, paid product.

QuickBooks Online, Xero, and Dext are all paid subscriptions with no free ongoing plan; current pricing for each appears in the table on this page.

Related reading

• Compare the two leading platforms directly: QuickBooks Online vs Xero
• See where each tool fits inside a full trades software stack: /tools/quickbooks-online, /tools/xero
• Alternatives to the category leader: QuickBooks Online alternatives, Xero alternatives
• Once invoices are paid, route the crew's day with scheduling and dispatch software and collect deposits with invoicing and payment software