QuickBooks Desktop Pro Review: Features and Pricing

QuickBooks Pro could have earned a perfect score if it could track income and expenses by location, which is a standout feature of its cloud-based counterpart, QuickBooks Online. However, Pro still has great general accounting features, comparable to QuickBooks Online and the other QuickBooks Desktop products.

After you download and activate your QuickBooks Desktop Pro account, you can set up a new company by entering your company name, telephone number, email address, and entity type. You can also customize the chart of accounts or start with a default chart of accounts or import your existing chart of accounts.

Pro also offers the other general features we look for, including the ability to import beginning and ending balances, create user-defined classes, and close year-end books. One of the best things about it is that a single license allows you to do bookkeeping for an unlimited number of companies—something you can’t do with QuickBooks Online. You can add a new company from the File menu in your QuickBooks Desktop homepage.

QuickBooks Desktop Pro doesn’t fall short in terms of A/P features, but we found the A/P module difficult to use. While you can enter bills and vendor credits easily straight from the A/P register, the process can be difficult to follow for nonaccountant users.

However, despite this minor issue, Pro offers almost all the A/P features we look for in accounting software. It allows you to enter bills as you receive them and then pay them later. You can record a new bill from the Enter Bills window from the Vendors menu.

Enter Bills window in QuickBooks Desktop Pro

QuickBooks will include the unpaid bills in your expenses if you choose to print an accrual-basis income statement—but not if you print a cash-basis income statement. You can track outstanding bills until they’re paid and set up recurring expenses, which is useful when you have regular monthly bills to pay, such as subscription fees.

Bill tracker in QuickBooks Desktop Pro

QuickBooks Pro also allows you to record purchase orders, create bills from purchase orders, and short-pay an invoice. You can also set up reminders so that you’ll know when your bills are due.

Based on our subjective evaluation, QuickBooks Pro’s A/R module wasn’t as easy to use as we expected—hence the slight blow to its score. However, the program offers a solid A/R management solution.

There are three ways you can create an invoice in QuickBooks Desktop Pro: from scratch, a sales order, or an estimate. When creating an invoice from an estimate, you can either convert the entire estimate to an invoice or choose a selected item or percentage to invoice, which is called progress invoicing.

Create an invoice from an estimate in QuickBooks Pro

To help you stay on top of your A/R, Pro has an income tracker that monitors overdue and almost overdue invoices and sends email reminders of due payments to your customers.

Income tracker in QuickBooks Desktop Pro

You can set up invoices to send on a recurring basis, issue a credit memo to a customer, and accept short payments from customers. You can also track unpaid invoices and print an Aged Accounts Receivable Report to identify potential collection problems.

Using QuickBooks Payments, you can include a link with every invoice so that your customers can pay online using their credit cards. For customers who pay at the time of purchase or service, you can print or email a sales receipt instead of an invoice. Read our QuickBooks Payments review to learn more about the platform.

Another useful feature is the ability to track employee time, assign it to customers and jobs, and then mark it as billable to add it to a customer invoice. Time tracking can be integrated with payroll through QuickBooks Time, which you can read about in our QuickBooks Time review.

The platform earned a perfect score in this criterion because of its comprehensive bank reconciliation feature that’s comparable to QuickBooks Online. You can set up a bank feed for your checking and credit card accounts to transfer transactions automatically. After the transfer, you can review the information and make changes prior to adding it to your account register.

Classifying bank transactions in QuickBooks Desktop Pro

One thing we like about QuickBooks Desktop is that you can combine multiple cash and checks into a single deposit, which is a very useful feature if you accept multiple checks daily.

QuickBooks Pro has all the ideal project accounting features, including the ability to create an estimate, attach items (like inventory and sales taxes when creating an estimate), and allocate costs and estimates to a project. QuickBooks Desktop is better at project accounting than QuickBooks Online because of its ability to compare actual costs to estimates, which is an important feature for contracting companies.

You can create a project, or “job” as QuickBooks calls it, for a customer to track your income and expenses by job. You can monitor the progress of the tasks involved in a project and even compare your actual to planned costs and progress so that you can easily identify issues that might affect your schedule and budget. This provides project managers meaningful insights into what and how much work has been done and whether the project can be completed on time.

You can access the New Job screen from the Customer Center window under the Customers menu. The New Job screen menu includes four sections to complete: Address Info, Payment Settings, Additional Info, and Job Info.

Typically, the address info and payment settings are automatically filled in, but you can make changes on the fly if needed. You will most likely need to provide important details in the Job Info section, such as job description, job type, job status, and projected end date.

New job form in QuickBooks Pro

After creating the job, you can look at its progress by running job reports, such as Job Profitability Summary, Profit and Loss by Job, and Unbilled Costs by Job.

If you’re selling taxable products and services, you can use QuickBooks Desktop to track sales tax collections and remittances for each state and tax authority. Sales taxes can be added to receipts, estimates, and invoices.

You can run a tax liability report for a certain time period and track tax payment due dates to avoid late filing and penalties. In addition, you can monitor what you owe from the Sales Tax Payable register and the Pay Sales Tax window.

Tracking tax liabilities in QuickBooks Desktop Pro

QuickBooks Desktop Pro’s inventory accounting isn’t as enhanced as QuickBooks Premier’s, but it does a great job of monitoring the COGS and calculating ending inventory. You can track the availability of inventory and the average and the total number of items, create purchase orders (POs) for vendors, and set up alerts when you’re running out of inventory.

QuickBooks Pro lets you set up inventory items so that you can track what you have on hand and how much you’ve spent and earned with it. When you sell a product, the program records both purchase (COGS) and sales revenue in a single entry. This helps you easily track and analyze your gross profit and gross margin and whether you are making enough money on a certain item to replenish your inventory. Also, QuickBooks will adjust your inventory in your balance sheet automatically, eliminating the need for manual data entry.

There are three types of items you can add in QuickBooks Desktop: noninventory items, inventory items, and services. Noninventory items are those you purchase but don’t track, such as office supplies, while inventory items are those you purchase, track, and resell. Service items are services you purchase or offer, such as consulting hours and labor fees.

When recording an inventory item in QuickBooks Pro, select Inventory Part and then complete the New Item form that shows up. To set up new inventory, complete important details, such as item name, purchase cost and description, and sales cost and description.

One of the best parts about inventory in QuickBooks Pro is that you can set reorder points. QuickBooks will alert you to replenish your inventory when the item’s count hits the reorder point you specified.

Adding a new inventory item in QuickBooks Pro

QuickBooks Desktop Premier is more advanced as it handles inventory assembly items to build and track finished goods. This is essential when building products with separate parts or materials to track. You can learn more about the version through our in-depth QuickBooks Desktop Premier review.

We attempted to generate 16 types of reports in QuickBooks Desktop Pro, and the only missing report is profit and loss (P&L) statements by location. QuickBooks Desktop lets you run an array of reports, including P&L statements, cash flow statements, and balance sheets. There are more than 100 reports available, and you can find the list of present reports from the Reports Center:

Report Center in QuickBooks Desktop Pro

If you need to track P&L separately between two locations, you need QuickBooks Online. QuickBooks Pro or any version of QuickBooks Desktop doesn’t offer location tracking.

The QuickBooks Desktop Pro mobile app is very limited as it’s intended mostly for receipt capture. Snap a picture of an expense receipt or a vendor invoice from your smartphone, and QuickBooks Pro will create a digital transaction automatically from the uploaded receipt or invoice. Additionally, the iOS app lets you track business mileage.

If mobile accounting is important to you, you should consider QuickBooks Online or even the more powerful Zoho Books mobile app. It has almost all the mobile accounting features you wish to have, such as the ability to send invoices, enter bills and payments, record billable time, and assign projects to customers. You may check out our Zoho Books review to learn more about its mobile app.

If you have no more than three accounting users, need basic inventory tracking, and don’t need remote access to your books, then QuickBooks Pro is right for you.

No, it isn’t. QuickBooks Pro and other QuickBooks Desktop products are no longer offered as a one-time purchase. Instead, subscriptions are purchased on an annual basis.

If you need access for up to five users and require an industry-specific edition like Retail and Manufacturing and Wholesale, then choose Premier. If you need up to 40 users and desire advanced inventory, like multilocation tracking, then you should upgrade to Enterprise.

No, it’s not. Some of the older versions are being phased out (recently the 2020 version), but it only means you need to upgrade to the newer version of QuickBooks Pro.

Yes, as QuickBooks Desktop syncs with QuickBooks Online Payments, which allows you to process payments online through credit card or automated clearing house (ACH) bank transfer. Learn more about the solution in our QuickBooks Payments review.