QuickBooks Review: Intuitive Accounting for Growing Businesses

QuickBooks has established itself as one of the most popular accounting solutions for small and medium-sized businesses, promising intuitive features and user-friendly workflows. But does its reputation align with reality?

In this QuickBooks review, we take an in-depth look at its standout features, usability, pricing, and how it compares to leading accountancy software competitors—all supported by detailed testing, extensive research, and direct user feedback.

QuickBooks Review: Overview

Before we dive into the full QuickBooks review, here’s a brief summary of our key findings from extensive hands-on testing, highlighting its biggest strengths, notable limitations, and pricing structure at a glance.

QuickBooks Review: Key Features

QuickBooks has an array of features worth highlighting, starting with essential invoice and quote creation features every accountancy team will need.

Invoicing, quoting, and customisation

Our testing of QuickBooks has proved it provides powerful quoting and invoicing tools for creating, sending, and tracking financial documents, coupled with superior customisation options to tailor them to your needs – ideal for businesses wanting greater control over their branding and client communications.

From the QuickBooks dashboard, you can easily click on the “+ New” button and select “Invoice” or “Estimate” from the dropdown menu to create a new invoice or quote, respectively. Here, you can select an existing client or create a new one to invoice or provide a quote to, and we found all the points to enter invoice information clear, even to an inexperienced user.

You can choose and customise your template by adapting settings for regular clients, including recurring schedules for specific periods and automatic reminders for unpaid invoices, as well as attaching relevant documents and adding payment options.

Our testers particularly appreciated its customisation flexibility, such as easily adding logos, adjusting layouts, and changing fonts and colours in an intuitive, exploratory way for the user, as you see below.

Compared to Xero, QuickBooks offers significantly deeper customisation in this respect. While Xero supports essential invoicing and quoting functions, it lacks the personalised templates and detailed layout adjustments that QuickBooks offers. FreshBooks offers some customisation, but again, QuickBooks allows a more granular level of personalisation.

Even better, another feature Xero lacks is the ability to preview how your invoice or quote will look exactly as the customer will see them via the Print/Preview button, providing added reassurance that everything is displayed as you intended.

Additionally, QuickBooks offers multi-currency support (for its Essentials plan and above), allowing you to issue invoices and quotes in over 145 currencies with automatic real-time exchange rate updates. This significantly benefits businesses with international clients, making QuickBooks more flexible and comprehensive compared to FreshBooks, which lacks multi-currency capabilities entirely, and Xero, which offers multi-currency options only at higher-priced plans.

Like Xero and ZohoBooks, all these features led us to give QuickBooks a perfect score in this assessment area. However, given the additional customisation options available here, the lower cost for multi-currency support, and the ability to preview your invoices and quotes clearly, we’d say QuickBooks is the true winner for invoicing and quote creation.

Transaction documentation and categorisation

QuickBooks is excellent at documenting transactions, as well as automatically remembering frequently used descriptions, categories, and prices. This feature helps businesses manage financial records consistently and accurately, reducing repetitive manual data entry by automatically recalling commonly entered transactions, account codes, and associated prices.

If you navigate to the Expenses section from the left-hand menu on your QuickBooks dashboard, you find that transactions automatically appear with suggested categories or descriptions based on past usage when you enter them.

This ability to remember frequently entered transaction details is an area our testers praised QuickBooks’ ease of use. This substantially speeds up data entry processes, saving time and reducing errors.

QuickBooks also has features for mileage tracking, allowing you to easily record business journeys via its integrated mobile app. The app automatically calculates mileage expenses using standardised rates, currently set at 45p per mile in line with HMRC guidelines, ensuring accuracy and simplifying expense reporting for reimbursements.

In these areas, QuickBooks surpasses providers like Sage and Clear Books, which have limited or no ability to recall frequently used details or standardise mileage tracking, leading to greater manual entry. We’d also argue it provides a more effective system than Xero, which remembers basic account codes but lacks the detailed recall of prices and descriptions offered by QuickBooks.

Reporting and custom reports

QuickBooks has several useful capabilities related to reporting, offering advanced customisation and insightful tools. From the main menu, selecting the “Reports” tab will take you to the options available, where you can then choose a predefined report or create a custom one using filters and layout settings.

We found QuickBooks provides comprehensive financial reports, such as profit and loss statements, balance sheets, and cash flow statements, with the added benefit of full customisation for each. Users can adapt reports to meet specific business requirements, providing clear visibility of their financial health. Meanwhile, all reports can be exported in PDF, Excel, or Google Sheets formats, which is a wide variety of options should you want to present or analyse the data elsewhere (Clear Books, FreshBooks, and FreeAgent limit exporting to CSV or PDF).

Our testers found QuickBooks’ reporting intuitive and praised this flexibility most of all. Users can customise report layouts, add or remove data fields, and save custom reports for frequent reuse. This versatility helps businesses tailor reporting exactly to their needs.

QuickBooks significantly outperforms FreshBooks and Clear Books in this way, both of which offer limited reporting customisation. Zoho Books and Xero also have strong reporting capabilities, but QuickBooks edges them out in terms of overall ease and customisation, particularly in creating tailored financial dashboards.

Tax preparation

If you are worried about preparing and filing taxes with HMRC, QuickBooks has a few tools to make your work-life simpler in that regard, too. From the Taxes section on your dashboard, you can easily track VAT liabilities, file returns directly to HMRC, and stay updated with automatic changes in tax regulations via HMRC’s PAYE dashboard.

This automatic updating feature ensures compliance without manual intervention, providing a substantial advantage over FreshBooks and Sage, which lack automated tax updates. Xero provides similar compliance features but requires more manual configuration of VAT codes for specific items or contacts compared to QuickBooks’ more streamlined approach.

Financial planning and visibility

Another area of note is QuickBooks’ financial planning and forecasting tools, providing businesses with clear insights into their financial health.

Notably, the aforementioned financial dashboards display critical financial metrics, helping users easily understand business performance at a glance. You can access it from the main QuickBooks dashboard or Reports menu, and customise your view by selecting key metrics like cash flow, profit/loss, and outstanding invoices.

Our testers once again praised QuickBooks for its user-friendliness here, since the dashboards and straightforward financial overviews clearly stated essential information. However, it is worth noting that this only provides a general view rather than highly detailed predictive analytics.

We’d say it’s less advanced than Xero’s more detailed Analytics Plus forecasting tool, which provides deeper insights and scenario adjustments. Still, QuickBooks comfortably outperforms FreshBooks and Clear Books, which provide limited or no forecasting and financial visibility tools..

Operational efficiency, automation, and integrations

QuickBooks provides robust automation features designed to streamline accounting workflows by reducing the number of repetitive tasks you need to do, such as manual data entry.

Our testers rated QuickBooks highly for its intuitive automation features, praising the ease of reconciling transactions and categorising expenses. Its automatic flags for mismatched balances also helped identify discrepancies quickly, improving financial accuracy.

QuickBooks’ automation functionality outpaces the likes of FreshBooks, Clear Books, and FreeAgent, all of which have less comprehensive reconciliation and categorisation capabilities. Xero provides strong automation and AI categorisation as well, QuickBooks matches it effectively with intuitive ease of use, making it one of the top platforms in operational efficiency.

QuickBooks Review: Pricing Plans Explained

QuickBooks has five pricing plans, from its least feature-rich tier made for sole traders to its most advanced package designed for medium-sized businesses with all its features.

At the time of writing in early April 2025, each of its plans is on sale for between 60% and 90% off for six months if you commit today. Alternatively, QuickBooks is also offering the first month free, followed by a return to the regular retail price if that’s preferable (though financially, the first option is likely to make for more savings).

For our most up-to-date and detailed pricing information, please visit our QuickBooks Pricing page.

Xero Review: Help & Support

QuickBooks delivers comprehensive customer support through multiple channels, including live chat, phone support, and detailed self-help guides.

Users can quickly access help through live support options or an extensive library of detailed self-service resources. Users can click on the “Help” icon prominently displayed in the top-right corner of the QuickBooks dashboard. Access live chat and phone support, or browse detailed help articles and video guides.

Our users consistently received prompt and informative responses across all channels during our testing period. The variety of support options means users can select the method most convenient for them, too.

QuickBooks notably outperforms Zoho Books and Clear Books, which provide fewer live support channels. QuickBooks’ comprehensive and accessible customer support is also more accessible than Xero’s, which lacks direct phone support and instead only offers call-backs upon request.

Xero Review: Alternatives

When comparing Xero to other accounting software, several key points emerge. Let’s take an overview of what competitor accountancy options can offer before we detail our thoughts on Xero’s main rivals.

As the above table shows, QuickBooks earned the second-highest assessment score from us in our research and testing of accounting platforms. That leaves one obvious competitor that we think is a little better overall, though there are more specific reasons why you might want to look at another option besides QuickBooks.

➡️ Zoho Books: Earning the top score besides QuickBooks, Zoho Books is particularly strong in ease of use and automation, offering rule-based tax automation and clear transaction documentation, both areas highly rated in our testing.

Yet, QuickBooks has a substantial advantage in reporting flexibility and customisation, an area our research identified as limited within Zoho Books. Additionally, QuickBooks’ comprehensive phone and chat support significantly surpasses Zoho Books’ narrower customer support options.

➡️ Xero: The main strong suit of Xero is its extensive integration ecosystem, featuring over 1,000 third-party integrations. However, with QuickBooks offering a solid 750+, that difference may not be all that noticeable, but if you have niche integration needs, Xero might be a slightly better pick.

Elsewhere, Xero also outperforms QuickBooks in financial planning capabilities, with advanced predictive analytics through its Analytics Plus feature – something QuickBooks provides only in basic form.

On the other hand, QuickBooks has excellent customisation, particularly with invoices and reporting – areas our research showed Xero falls short comparatively, lacking detailed template adjustments that QuickBooks easily handles. QuickBooks also provides better direct customer support channels, including phone and video support, contrasting Xero’s callback-only approach.

➡️ FreshBooks: FreshBooks stands out for its straightforward design and simplicity, particularly for its ease of use, which our testers rated higher than QuickBooks in our usability tests. We’d say it’s particularly appealing for freelancers and micro-businesses prioritising simple invoicing and expense tracking.

However, if you want a more comprehensive toolkit, QuickBooks significantly outperforms FreshBooks in advanced automation features, detailed financial reporting, and transaction categorisation. FreshBooks lacks the deeper financial visibility and robust automation capabilities that QuickBooks offers, making QuickBooks a stronger choice for growing businesses.

Methodology: How We Reviewed QuickBooks