Which QuickBooks version a contractor should buy
QuickBooks Online comes in four tiers. Prices below are list prices as of October 2026, before any promotion.
| Plan |
Price |
Users |
What it means for a contractor |
| Simple Start |
$38/mo |
1 |
Invoices, expenses, bank feeds. No real job costing. |
| Essentials |
$85/mo |
3 |
Adds bill management and more users. Still no project profitability. |
| Plus |
$140/mo |
5 |
Adds projects, classes and inventory. The real starting point for job costing. |
| Advanced |
$340/mo |
25 |
More users and deeper reporting. Worth it only for larger offices. |
The user count is office logins, not techs. A 12-tech HVAC company with an owner, an office manager and a bookkeeper fits in Plus, as long as the techs work in a field app and only the office touches QuickBooks. Your outside accountant connects through accountant access and normally doesn't use one of your seats.
If you're searching for "QuickBooks contractor edition," that's the Desktop product. Intuit stopped selling new Desktop Premier Plus subscriptions to new US customers in 2024, and Desktop Enterprise is priced well above Online. Existing Desktop users can keep going while their version is supported, but a new contractor should start on Online.
Setting up QuickBooks for a contracting business
Most of the value comes from the first two hours of setup. Do these in order.
1. Fix the chart of accounts. The default accounts lump all costs together. Split cost of goods sold into at least: materials, subcontractors, direct labor, equipment rental and permits. Keep overhead (office rent, the office manager's salary, software, insurance) out of those accounts. This split is what lets you see gross margin, and gross margin is what tells you if your pricing works.
2. Build products and services that match how you bill. One item for labor, separate items for common material categories, and items for trip charges, permits and disposal fees. Map each item to the right income and cost accounts. If your field app syncs items, build the list there and let it push across instead of maintaining two lists.
3. Turn on projects and classes (Plus and Advanced). Projects are for individual jobs. Classes are for divisions: service, install, new construction, or residential versus commercial. Use both. A project tells you the Johnson kitchen lost money; a class tells you that remodels as a whole are losing money.
4. Set up sales tax correctly. States differ on whether labor, materials or both are taxable for contractors, and the rules for repair work and new construction can be different. Get your accountant's answer for your state, then set each item's taxable flag to match.
5. Connect bank and card feeds with rules. Create rules for the supply houses, fuel cards and recurring software charges you see every week. Rules that categorize automatically save hours a month, but review them, because a rule that sends every Home Depot charge to "materials" will also catch the shop vacuum.
6. Flag subcontractors for 1099s. Mark each sub as a 1099 vendor, store their W-9, and make sure payments to them go to the subcontractor cost account. In January the 1099 report is then mostly done.
7. Add your accountant as an accountant user, and agree on a monthly close: bank accounts reconciled by the 10th, open bills entered, jobs closed out.
Job costing with projects and classes
Job costing in QuickBooks Online is a tagging discipline. The software adds things up correctly as long as every cost is attached to a project.
Create a project per job. For service companies running dozens of small calls a day, that's too many; use projects only for jobs over a set size (say, anything over $2,500) and classes for the rest. Then, for each project:
- Materials. Tag every supplier bill and receipt line to the project. Supply-house statements covering ten jobs need to be split by line, which is tedious but the only way the numbers come out right.
- Subcontractors. Enter sub bills against the project.
- Labor. Timesheets tagged to the project, with a cost rate for each worker, put labor on the job. If you run QuickBooks Payroll, wages can flow to projects directly. Labor burden (payroll taxes, workers' comp, benefits) is the piece most contractors leave out; build it into the cost rate, or your margins will look better than they are.
- Income. Invoices and progress invoices against the project. QuickBooks can create progress invoices from an estimate, so you can bill a deposit, then phases, and see what's left.
The project profitability report then shows income, costs and margin per job. Run it at the end of every job, not just at year-end, while the crew still remembers why the job ran two days long.
Where QuickBooks falls short for contractors
QuickBooks is accounting software, and contractors run into its edges quickly:
- No scheduling or dispatch. There's no calendar of techs, no dispatch board, no route.
- No field-friendly pricebook. Techs can't tap through a flat-rate pricebook on a phone and hand the customer good-better-best options.
- Weak retainage and AIA billing. Commercial subs billing against a schedule of values usually need Knowify or a construction tool.
- Estimates versus actuals are basic. You can compare, but there's no real budget-by-cost-code tracking without an add-on.
- Costs keep rising. Users commonly report repeated price increases, and support quality draws inconsistent reviews.
Add a field app when any of these is true: you have more than two people in the field, you schedule more than about 15 jobs a week, the office retypes job notes into QuickBooks invoices, or customers ask to pay by text link. At that point a tool like Jobber or Housecall Pro pays for itself in hours saved and faster payment.
The rule for a clean setup: jobs, customers and invoices start in the field app and sync one way into QuickBooks. Payments sync with processing fees recorded separately. Bills, payroll and everything else stay in QuickBooks. Pick one system to own the customer list and turn off customer creation in the other.
Commercial subcontractors are the exception. Their missing piece is progress billing and job budgets, not dispatch, which is why Knowify is on this list.
QuickBooks Payroll for contractors
Running payroll inside QuickBooks has one real advantage for a contractor: wages can flow onto projects without exporting anything, which makes labor costing much less manual. The downside is price. As of November 2026, Intuit sells payroll on its own as Workforce Payroll at $50/mo plus $7 per employee, or bundled with QuickBooks Online: $88/mo base with Simple Start, $135 with Essentials, and $228 for Workforce Premium with Plus ($13 per employee). A 5-tech shop already on Plus that adds standalone Workforce Payroll pays about $85/mo for payroll on top of its $140 accounting bill. Intuit was also advertising 50% off the base fee for the first three months, so check the current page before you budget.
Compare that to keeping your QuickBooks plan and adding a standalone service. Gusto's Simple plan is $49/mo plus $6 per person, and OnPay is $49/mo plus $6 per worker as of October 2026, and both sync to QuickBooks. For a crew of eight, the standalone route is often cheaper. Either way, pay 1099 subcontractors as vendors through bills, not through payroll, and keep their W-9s on file.
What it costs at 1, 5 and 15 techs
All prices as of October 2026, annual billing where offered.
| Shop |
QuickBooks plan |
Field app |
Monthly total |
| Solo contractor |
Simple Start $38 (or Plus $140 for job costing) |
None needed |
$38 to $140 |
| 5-tech service shop |
Plus $140 |
Jobber Connect, 5 users, $149 |
About $289 |
| 15-tech service shop |
Plus $140 (3 to 5 office logins) |
Jobber Connect, 15 users, $299 |
About $439 |
| Commercial sub, 10 users |
Plus $140 |
Knowify Advanced $329 (yearly) |
About $469 |
Card processing is extra and usually the biggest number on the list once volume picks up. QuickBooks doesn't publish its card rates on the pricing page, so get them in writing if you plan to take payments through QuickBooks rather than through your field app.
