QuickBooks is often a go-to choice for small and medium businesses to make sense of their finances.
QuickBooks provides services like 1099 aid, producing batch invoices, and even tracking your inventory.
Some businesses might feel locked out of using QuickBooks, however, because of its high prices.
Why Is QuickBooks So Expensive? (10 Reasons)
The cheapest plan at QuickBooks is for self-employed freelancers at $15 a month, but for businesses, the cheapest plan is $30 a month.
As you scale your business, QuickBooks becomes even more expensive with its most advanced subscription costing $200 a month.
QuickBooks is expensive because of the free services and trials it offers, the different features included in a subscription plan, whether you’re using the mobile app or a version for a desktop, and the various operational costs that QuickBooks faces.
Let’s look at these factors in more detail.
1. Offers Free Educational Sources
One of the benefits of using QuickBooks is that the company does offer some educational resources for free.
When you first sign into QuickBooks, all the different tables and interfaces may be overwhelming.
You might be unsure what needs to go where or even how to use the software.
QuickBooks wants to ensure you make good on your investment.
As such, it offers free guided set-up services.
A live human will help you figure out how to connect your credit cards or bank to QuickBooks to make figuring out your finances that much easier.
They can also help you determine which regular tasks you can automate with the software.
That means less work for you overall.
Finally, they’ll go over the various features that your subscription plan covers.
Learning how to use the different features can ensure you’re getting the most of your money.
Although QuickBooks offers this service for free, the company is doing so at a cost.
The company factors that cost into its pricing.
QuickBooks is expensive because it offers free educational sources and tools.
2. Free 30-Day Trial
Free educational tools aren’t the only thing that QuickBooks offers.
It also offers free 30-day trials on most of its services.
When you sign up for a free 30-day trial, you’re able to access all the features of your particular subscription plan for free.
QuickBooks hopes you’ll find its services so convenient and beneficial that you’ll remain after the trial finishes.
Considering the amount of work you need to do to set up your account, it’s also likely that you’re going to stick around simply because you put a lot of work into it.
Regardless, you’re using QuickBooks’ services for free for a whole month.
This makes QuickBooks expensive because it means the company isn’t receiving money from you for a month.
It’s a loss of income instead.
To ensure the company can offer free trials without going in the red, it needs to have enough profit to cover that cost.
High subscription plans allow the company to do just that.
QuickBooks is expensive because it offers free trials, which increases its costs.
3. Tiered Subscription Plan
QuickBooks uses a tiered subscription system.
You’re unable to pay for one QuickBooks service and call it done.
Because QuickBooks is regularly updating its services, it’s easier for the company to implement those updates online.
While it does offer a desktop version, you still have to pay an annual price for it.
In addition, the more expensive the subscription plan is, the more features it unlocks.
For example, the advanced subscription plan costs $200 a month.
With it, you receive all the services of cheaper subscription plans like bill management, estimator services, tax deductions, and many more.
However, the advanced subscription plan also has features that the cheaper plans don’t.
Those features include services like employee expenses, batch invoices, a dedicated accounting team, and even data restoration.
Because QuickBooks is doing more work for you, you’re essentially paying the company more money as a result.
Extra features cost the company money to implement.
To make a profit despite the costs, the company charges more.
You might have all you need with a cheaper subscription plan for QuickBooks.
However, if you want all of its features, then you’re going to have to pay an expensive price for them.
It’s simply how the company has structured its services.
QuickBooks is expensive because of how it structures and prices its subscription plans.
4. Discounted Subscription Plans
Besides offering a 30-day free trial, QuickBooks often has some sort of discount running on its subscription plans as well.
One example is an offer for 50% off a subscription for a certain number of months.
Once the discount period is over, then the individual starts paying the regular price for the subscription plan.
The goal of offering discounted subscription plans is to try and get people into the door.
QuickBooks believes that once businesses start using its product, it will be difficult for them to want to use anything else.
The company makes managing a business’s finances easy and convenient.
By lowering the cost initially, businesses might feel that they can easily afford the monthly cost.
However, as soon as the discount ends and the business has to pay the regular fee, it might find that the actual price is too expensive for them.
Even if the business chooses to leave QuickBooks, QuickBooks was still able to make some money off them even with discounted prices.
QuickBooks is expensive because its discounted subscription plan may seem cheap, but as soon as it’s over, you might find yourself paying for a very expensive subscription plan each month.
5. QuickBooks Online Versus QuickBooks Desktop
The type of business you have can also make QuickBooks expensive.
For example, if you have a business that deals with a lot of inventory, then you likely have a few computers that handle all your inventory needs.
In this case, you might need a bookkeeping service that is also on one or two computers.
QuickBooks Desktop is often a preferred choice.
QuickBooks Desktop allows you to download the QuickBooks software directly to the computer.
It offers many of the same features as the online version including inventory management.
There are two main desktop plans from which businesses can choose.
The cheaper option is QuickBooks Desktop Premier Plus.
It offers basic bookkeeping services and costs $799 a year.
The more expensive plan is QuickBooks Desktop Enterprise.
It costs $1,410 a year.
While it has more features than the standard desktop service, some available add-ons can make it even more expensive.
The benefit of using the desktop versions is that they’re often less expensive than the monthly, online, version of QuickBooks.
That largely depends on which QuickBooks subscription plan you’re using, of course.
If you’re paying for the advanced subscription, then you’re looking at paying $200 a month, which amounts to $2,400 a year.
That’s far more expensive than $1,410 a year.
Since it takes a bit more money to run a live online service as opposed to a product that’s packaged and shipped off, it makes sense that QuickBooks online is a bit more expensive than QuickBooks Desktop.
QuickBooks is expensive when you choose certain subscription plans for its online service as opposed to its desktop product.
6. QuickBooks Live Bookkeeping Add-On
There are several different add-on services that QuickBooks also offers.
You might have a certain subscription plan but want a particular service added to your plan.
Depending on what it is, QuickBooks might be willing to sell the service to you as an add-on.
One popular add-on that QuickBooks advertises is live bookkeeping.
This essentially means that a QuickBooks-certified bookkeeper is in charge of handling your books.
The bookkeeper performs certain additional services like going over your past accounts and bringing everything up to date, categorizing your transactions, and even helping personalize your QuickBooks set-up.
They can essentially run certain parts of your QuickBooks service for you.
The goal is to make QuickBooks even more convenient to use.
Hiring live bookkeepers makes QuickBooks a bit more expensive though.
Since it’s not included in your subscription plan, this is an additional service you’ll need to pay for on top of everything.
That can make your monthly payments even more expensive.
QuickBooks is expensive because it offers live bookkeeping services as an added service for a fee.
7. Number Of Employees
The number of employees you have can also determine how expensive certain elements of your subscription plan are.
For example, some subscription plans allow you to track things like employee expenses.
If you have a large number of employees, then QuickBooks might charge you extra for them.
That’s because it’s going to cost the company more money to keep track of all your employees’ expenses.
It might make other services the company offers a bit more costly, too.
Since QuickBooks is taking on more costs to provide certain services to you, it’s going to charge you more for that certain service.
QuickBooks is expensive because it sometimes charges per your employee numbers.
8. Server Costs
Because QuickBooks runs an online service, it needs to use servers.
The servers enable them to store information and process data quickly.
However, the cost of owning a server isn’t always cheap.
Considering that QuickBooks helps tons of businesses and clients, it’s processing a lot of data.
As such, its server costs are likely quite high.
QuickBooks might have its own servers that it uses on-site.
This makes the company expensive because it means it’s paying a lot of money for energy and storage costs.
If it’s using a third party for its server needs, then it’s likely paying rent.
Either way, servers present a high cost.
To cover those costs, QuickBooks has to earn a decent amount of revenue.
That’s done by charging high prices for its subscription plans.
QuickBooks is expensive because of the costs it faces with its servers.
9. Labor Costs
While QuickBooks likely uses automated features for some of its services, by and large, those who help out clients are humans.
There is a large number of QuickBooks experts who can help clients figure out how to make QuickBooks work for them.
Some accountants and bookkeepers are also available to help companies with their finances.
Then there are the software engineers, cyber security specialists, and other workers that QuickBooks employs to ensure the site is working and safe.
Since QuickBooks employs quite a few people, it has higher labor costs.
To offset its high labor costs, it has to charge higher prices on its subscription plans.
QuickBooks is expensive because of high labor costs.
10. Convenience
Accounting and keeping track of your business’s expenses and income isn’t easy.
It’s even more difficult to analyze all that data to determine what your business is doing right and what it’s doing wrong.
These are things that QuickBooks can help with.
It makes managing your business’s finances easier while also offering services like reporting to make sense of your finances.
Essentially, QuickBooks makes the financial part of your business more convenient to manage and understand.
Since it’s more convenient, QuickBooks can charge a high price for it.
The company knows that businesses that want to make their finances more efficient will be willing to pay more for such a service.
It’s more convenient for them.
QuickBooks is expensive because it makes finances and complex subjects more convenient and easier to understand which is valuable to certain businesses.
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