QuickBooks Online

In short

QuickBooks Online is Intuit's cloud accounting platform and the general ledger most field service and payroll apps in a trades stack already sync with, which is why it is the default accounting pick across plumbing, HVAC, electrical, roofing and landscaping kits on this site. It tracks income, expenses and job costs, accepts online payments directly on invoices, and hands a bookkeeper a clean file rather than a shoebox of receipts at tax time. Its job-costing depth, multi-user access and workflow automation scale up through several plan tiers, so a one-truck shop and a multi-crew back office end up on very different tiers of the same product.

Key features for service businesses

Who it's for

QuickBooks Online fits a trades business that wants its field service app, payroll and bank feed to land in one general ledger without manual re-entry. Housecall Pro, Jobber, Gusto and most invoicing tools in this kit connect to it directly, which is the main reason it is the default accounting pick for a one-to-twenty person plumbing, HVAC, electrical, roofing or landscaping operation that hands its books to an outside bookkeeper or accountant each month.

Who should skip it

A business with a single truck and a handful of jobs a month may not need a dedicated accounting platform yet; a spreadsheet or a bookkeeper working from bank statements can cover that stage. A business that specifically wants an accountant already fluent in a different ledger, or one managing books for clients outside the US, may be better served starting there instead, since switching platforms later means re-training whoever keeps the books.

How it handles job costing and reporting

QuickBooks Online's bank feed automatically syncs transactions from connected accounts and uses learned patterns to categorize income and expenses, which removes a recurring manual-entry task for an owner who would otherwise sort transactions by hand every week. Reporting depth grows by tier: every paid plan produces profit and loss, balance sheet and cash flow reports, while project profitability tracking, inventory management and class or location tracking, useful for a business running more than one crew or job site, are reserved for the mid and top tiers, and customizable KPI dashboards are limited to the top tier.

How it handles invoicing and payments

A customer can pay an invoice by card, ACH bank transfer, Apple Pay, PayPal or Venmo, or through a buy-now-pay-later option, without leaving the invoice itself. A built-in Payments Agent feature tracks a given customer's payment pattern over time and drafts reminders meant to get a slow payer to pay faster, and a business can set up a recurring invoice once so a repeat customer is charged automatically and receives a receipt without a fresh invoice each cycle. Estimates can include a deposit request a customer pays online through a secure portal at the moment they accept the job.

Integrations

QuickBooks Online's app store groups third-party connections so a business can plug in the tools it already uses rather than re-entering the same data twice, and it lists connections into e-commerce tools alongside the wider Intuit family of products. Within this kit, the field service apps a trades business already runs day to day, along with most payroll tools, are built to sync directly with QuickBooks Online's general ledger, which is the main reason it remains the default accounting pick rather than a standalone bookkeeping choice.

Alternatives

• Xero if your bookkeeper or accountant already works in Xero, or you want a comparable bank feed and reporting model built by a different vendor. See QuickBooks Online vs Xero for a side-by-side on this shared task.
• Bill if what you actually need is accounts payable and bill pay rather than a full general ledger; it is narrower than QuickBooks Online and usually runs alongside a bookkeeping tool rather than replacing one.
• Any field service app in this kit — Housecall Pro, Jobber and ServiceTitan all sync with QuickBooks Online, so switching your accounting platform does not require switching your scheduling and invoicing tool. See accounting and bookkeeping software for the full comparison.

How we reviewed it

We checked QuickBooks Online's plan feature list directly on Intuit's pricing page for job costing, class and location tracking, project profitability, batch processing and custom permissions by tier. We separately reviewed Intuit's accounting features page for bank feed, reporting and mobile capture details, its payments and invoicing page for online payment methods and reminder automation, and its app store page for how third-party integrations are organized. We did not rely on any third-party review site for feature claims in this review, and we did not restate specific dollar or percentage figures shown on those pages.