First of all, QuickBooks Self-Employed includes built-in mileage tracking—a crucial feature if you plan to include business travel as a tax write-off. As a result, QuickBooks Self-Employed isn’t our top self-employment accounting software recommendation for most contractors or freelancers. But if you’re extremely tax conscious and want to focus on maximizing your business expense tax deductions, QuickBooks Self-Employed could still work for you. Ideal for when you’re on the move, making it perfect for those who are self-employed. Now, you can capture receipts, sort expenses and send invoices from one app.
If you think QuickBooks Self-Employed doesn’t fit the bill, check out our recommendations for the best accounting software for small businesses. As for inventory tracking, this feature is also available in the Plus plan. It sends you notifications when product levels are low and also lets you track the gross cost of goods. One of the selling points of QuickBooks Self-Employed is its ability to calculate your quarterly estimated taxes for you. However, if you want to pay these taxes directly through QuickBooks, you’ll need to upgrade to a special tax prep plan.
Cost of QuickBooks Online vs. QuickBooks Self-Employed
Mileage tracking isn’t available with Wave, so you’ll need to use a separate tracker like MileIQ or Hurdlr. Our partners cannot pay us to guarantee favorable reviews of their products or services. Each of our subscription plans include access to online help articles and customer support, when needed. QuickBooks Solopreneur is designed for one-person businesses, who may or may not use 1099 contractors. It includes easy to use organization, tax and growth focused tools to help drive financial stability. If you’re claiming allowances, such as the Married Couples Allowance, you’ll also need to calculate that manually.
Organise your finances in one secure, automatically backed up place and work anytime from any device. Larger businesses with substantial accounting teams may want to consider the QuickBooks Advanced plan. It covers up to 25 users and provides dedicated customer support and advanced reporting features. The dashboard includes a left navigation bar where you can access its features, including income and expense entry, tax tracking, invoicing, and reporting. It also shows important numbers, including your profit and loss (P&L), expenses, accounts, invoices, mileage, and estimated taxes.
How to write off QuickBooks Self-Employed
QuickBooks Self-Employed has an intuitive dashboard that’s easy to navigate. The tabs on the left side of the dashboard make it easy to explore the other features. Overall, it’s intuitive and not cluttered with unnecessary information, making it approachable for accounting novices. When setting up your account for the first time, you can choose to connect your bank account or manually enter transactions. Based on the tax profile that you complete during setup, QuickBooks Self-Employed will project your annual profit, calculate your estimated tax payment, and alert you of tax due dates. This valuable tool helps protect you from an underpayment penalty because of not making the required quarterly estimated tax payments.
You can’t even send quotes or estimates or schedule automatic late fees. Meanwhile, FreshBooks has the same starting price as QuickBooks Self-Employed—but it does all of the above invoicing tasks and then some. Wave is a free alternative to QuickBooks Self-Employed that offers unlimited invoices and estimates that can be customized with your logo and company colors.
More ways to learn about QuickBooks Self-Employed
If you choose this option, be aware that while bank transfer transactions are free, credit card payment rates are 2.99%. Once your invoice is completed, you can email it to your customer as a PDF attachment. QuickBooks Online quickbooks self employed login offers a more scalable, albeit more expensive, option to QuickBooks Self-Employed. Its least expensive option (the Simple Start plan) starts at $25 per month for essentially the same features as the self-employed version.