Intuit QuickBooks Desktop Enterprise 24.0 Review: Is it the Best Accounting Software for Small Businesses in 2024?

Bookkeeping may not be the sexiest part of your business but keeping a tight grip on finances will help keep your company in the black.

What is Accounting Software?

Accounting software is a computer program that helps businesses track income and expenses. The software can also be used to generate reports, such as profit and loss statements and balance sheets. Most accounting software programs include features for invoicing, tracking payments and managing inventory.

What is QuickBooks?

QuickBooks by Intuit is an accounting software for small businesses. It is best known for its bookkeeping and invoicing, but also offers a range of accounting and finance solutions for small businesses in 2024.

How to Choose the Best Accounting Software for Small Business?

We consider support, security and integration with your current applications, as well as cost and features. Accounting software typically should offer a range of features including:

• Accounting: creating and managing invoices, tracking expenses and revenues, and preparing financial statements
• Accounts Payable: Nobody likes paying bills, but keeping track of what you owe is essential for any business.
• Billing and invoicing: streamline the process of issuing invoices, keeping tabs on payments and organizing customer information.
• Inventory Management: tracking inventory levels, estimating inventory costs and creating purchase orders.
• Payroll: tracking employee hours, calculating payroll taxes and processing paychecks.
• Project Management: creating and tracking project budgets, assigning task to team members and monitoring project progress.
• Reporting: generate financial reports, track business performance and creating custom reports.
• Customer relationship management (CRM): tracking customer contact information, managing customer interactions and tracking sales opportunities.

What small businesses need to know about accounting

If you operate in a single state with a simple business structure, you should have three accounting priorities:

• Ensure that revenues exceed expenses.
• Keep the books clean.
• Pay all necessary taxes.

Is QuicBooks Intuit most comprehensive and full featured accounting solution for small business?

I’ve read a lot of hate comments on QuickBooks enterprise. The frustration seems to be so real. Some say interface is bad, while others say they are a money-sucking leech even though they add no extra value.

Some menace comments are, “I like Freshbooks 1,000 times better. Cheaper and far more intuitive”. One reddit user said something like “Every move they make is based on monetization and not customer experience”.

Despite all the titles given to QuickBooks enterprise, there are actually good ones too. Another Reddit users say that it is very quick for expenses, integrates with tax prep software most CPA use.

However, we chose QuickBooks Desktop as the best for small businesses in 2024 because not many business owners are accountants or bookkeepers by trade. They might have trouble with financials like understanding cashflows etc.

Therefore, QuickBooks help beginners straighten out their accounting and budgeting and keep track of inflows and outflows and invoices.

It checks all the boxes for accounting, invoicing and expense tracking. It uses AI for expense tracking and bank reconciliation.

It automates payment reminders, recurring invoices and bill payments. You can create reports, including aged receivable reports, general ledger reports, profit and loss statements, balance sheets, and trail balance reports.

You can automatically run reports and email them to you on a schedule you create. You can add images of inventory items and bundle products or services frequently sold together, saving you from having to enter them on an invoice separately. The program also alerts you when it’s time to reorder inventory.

I believe we need to learn how to use QuickBooks properly for our financial functions like income and expenses. It is a basic, beginner friendly small-scale accounting software and has the fundamental bookkeeping ingredients like.

Covering invoices, payroll, estimates, employee time tracking, sales tax, inventory tracking, sync bank transactions and does pretty much of accounting for your business. Well, this way you can learn and understand the basics of accounting and bookkeeping.

Why do I need Intuit QuickBooks Desktop Enterprise Solution for my business?

“Never take your eyes off the cash flow because it’s the lifeblood of business.” —Sir. Richard Branson

As Fabien Dawidowicz, CFO of Spendesk puts, “Instead of copying and pasting data from spreadsheet to spreadsheet, you have all your transaction information in one place. You can easily see what’s been spent or what’s come into the business, and you always know where to find this information.”

Whether you run a small business or are a freelancer, you already know collecting on-time payments is challenging. Generating accurate invoices, automatically following up with clients, and conducting recurring billing is tedious and repetitive. QuickBooks makes it easy!

Let’s make it simple: You need QuickBooks desktop enterprise accounting software to help you record the flow of your company’s money and examine your financial condition. With it, you can record transactions, generate reports, manage customer and vendor contacts, create purchase orders, track stock levels, bill customers, and monitor account balances.

Ken Stalcup, senior director with Houlihan Valuation Advisors sums it up perfectly: “Using an accounting package will help organize your records and ‘force’ you into a systematic structure. That will put the company’s finances into a system that can report the financial results and help when it comes to tax time.”

You can use a small business accounting service like Intuit QuickBook desktop to categorize expenses and schedule and pay bills, whether you pay online, by check, by credit card, or with cash. This will help you keep track of those financial transactions, income and expenses, prepare for tax season and manage your cash flow efficiently.

As you track expenses and income using QuickBooks, you can organize them into tax categories using automations and export your books with your accountant at tax time.

An accounting software for small businesses is a more affordable alternative to hiring an accountant, a bookkeeper or a large firm to manage their accounting, tax preparation and payroll processes. So, we picked QuickBooks for desktop a right solution for the best accounting software for a variety of small businesses.

“You have to understand accounting and you have to understand the nuances of accounting. It’s the language of business and it’s an imperfect language, but unless you are willing to put in the effort to learn accounting – how to read and interpret financial statements – you really shouldn’t select stocks yourself” – Warren Buffett

What exactly can I use QuickBooks for?

• Invoicing: Create custom professional invoices as well as schedule recurring invoices.
• Bills & Expenses Tracking: Connect your banks as well as credit card accounts to the software. Track your bills and expenses automatically.
• Payroll: The payroll add-on calculates payroll automatically as often as you want. This service combined with time tracking adds on to the base package and the costs go up even higher.
• Third-party integration: Automatically sync data between systems: top POS systems, popular online stores, the best CRM software, project management solutions, payroll systems and more. In fact, QuickBooks integrates with more Amazon Business, Square, Shopify, PayPal, QuickBooks Time, Fathom and SOS Inventory and many more.
• Online payments: Accept payments in local currencies when you send invoices from within the app.
• Bank reconciliation: Quickbooks features automatic bank feeds that import your business checking account and credit card transactions.
• Automation: Automate payment reminders, recurring invoices and bill payments. Also, backs up your data to the cloud. The accounting software can also match foreign currency bank accounts. It recently added machine learning technology that can learn about your spending habits and help you better organize expenses. It will prompt you to help fill in gaps when it isn’t sure how to categorize an expense.
• Security: Uses bank-grade security, two-factor authentication. It includes an audit log that tracks every login, logout and file change. These safeguards should help you prevent employee accounting fraud.

How Quickbooks Can Benefit Your Business

• Financial Statements at your fingertips
• Straightforward Inventory Management
• Easy Taxation

How much does it cost for QuickBooks?

All those benefits, ecosystem of features, apps, and integrations comes at a price that your business. The pricing is divided into three tiers. Gold, Platinum and Diamond.

• Gold: $1922/yr
• Platinum: $2363/yr
• Diamond: $4668/yr

Deals are often available on these prices too.

Now that does feel hefty for a business that has to manage its finances and are on a shoestring budget. However, you save tons of hours managing your account and paying heavy fees to accountants. You’ll be able to keep thorough, detailed records of your transactions.

There is QuickBooks Online also. The first tier is the Simple Start Plan at $15 per month for the first three months, then is $30 per month. This gives you all the basics needed to run your business accounting, including income and expense monitoring, invoice and payment capability, tax deductions, receipt capture and mileage tracking.

Moving up to the Essentials Plan, you’ll pay $30 per month for the first three months, then $60 per month. This plan adds up to three users to the account so that the right people have access to data. It does bill management and collects employee time for invoices to add them for proper billing.

Those who want to take their accounting on the go will appreciate the mobile app. It brings most of the features of the online platform, plus it enables mileage tracking and receipt capture for quick and convenient recordkeeping.

QuickBooks is a stand-out accounting choice if you’re selling products or retail goods. It is a better choice if you manage and invoice many clients for your business. QB also offers the better solution for retail businesses that need to track inventory.

This small accounting software offers more features than FreshBooks, but those come at a price. If you’re looking for double-entry bookkeeping, time tracking or inventory management, then QuickBooks is the better option. However, if you don’t need all those features and just want something to help you keep track of your income and expenses, FreshBooks may be a better fit.

FreshBooks is incredibly easy to use and will be sufficient for the needs of most small businesses or freelancers. It compares really well to QuickBooks at the lower plan level but is even more affordable if you don’t need more than a single user. When you want integrations, more difficult accounting features such as inventory management, or if you need a bunch of users, then QuickBooks starts to become a better option.

Limitations

Here’s what I hate about it. They really need to address this:

• Upgrading from the Solopreneur plan is unnecessary challenging. The process requires you to download your data and reimport it into QuickBooks after updating the package.
• The software lacks niche feature like the need to track time for billable hours or enterprise resource planning. Here FreshBooks will help.
• You don’t have unlimited users. Doesn’t charge for additional users but limits the number of active users depending on your plan.
• A Reviewer wrote that it doesn’t have an easy way to migrate from POS to Quickbooks for inventory. Also, every time there is an upgrade – there is an issue with our bank downloads. It’s as if it takes a few days or a few weeks for either QuickBooks to notify the banks to update their code or whether it takes a while for the adjustments to be made.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

What are Intuit QuickBooks used for?

Put simply, QuickBooks is accounting software designed for keeping track of income and expenses.

What is Intuit vs QuickBooks?

Intuit Inc. is the company that develops various financial, accounting, and tax-related software products, and QuickBooks is one of the products developed by Intuit.

Do you have to pay for Intuit QuickBooks?

To track business transactions in QuickBooks Online, you need to have an active paid subscription. Different subscription plans include different features

Can I teach myself QuickBooks?

Once you’ve purchased your license for the QuickBooks software package, you can access QuickBooks training for beginners.

How do I get QuickBooks Online for free?

When you register as an educator or a student, you can get the program free after a validation process.

What is the difference between QuickBooks and QuickBooks Online?

The inventory management and job costing features are more robust in QuickBooks compared to QuickBooks Online.

What do accountants think of QuickBooks Online?

Intuit reports that 94% of accounting professionals feel QuickBooks Online saves them time and thus saves their clients’ money.

How many different versions of QuickBooks are there?

• QuickBooks Online: Best for small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) with up to 25 users; a cloud-based version of QuickBooks; provides more than 650 integrations with other software
• QuickBooks Self-Employed: Best for freelancers and solopreneurs
• QuickBooks Pro: Good for SMBs; ideal for up to three users; offers more advanced features than QuickBooks Online as well as additional software integrations
• QuickBooks Premier: Ideal for medium-sized businesses with up to five users; best for industry-specific companies; also offers advanced features
• QuickBooks Enterprise: Best for large companies with up to 40 users; even more advanced features than QuickBooks Online, QuickBooks Pro and QuickBooks Enterprise
• QuickBooks for Mac Plus: Best for SMBs for up to three users; similar to QuickBooks Pro

Is Intuit getting rid of QuickBooks desktop?

Intuit has made a decision that after July 31, 2024, it’ll no longer sell new subscriptions of the following products: QuickBooks Desktop Pro Plus. QuickBooks Desktop Premier Plus. QuickBooks Desktop Mac Plus.

What regions are affected by this stop sell of QuickBooks Desktop?

This discontinuation of QuickBooks Desktop applies to the U.S. only.