QuickBooks Premier Professional Services Edition Review

QuickBooks Premier Professional Services Edition, a version of QuickBooks Desktop Premier, is tailored to businesses that bill customers by the hour. Hourly rates can be set by the type of service, employee, or customer, and unbilled time and expenses can be added to invoices easily.

The biggest drawback to using QuickBooks Premier Professional Services is that it can’t be accessed from the cloud. It’s also a bit costly for one user, with a starting price of $799 per year—same as the general business edition. Learn if it’s worth the price through our detailed QuickBooks Premier Professional Services review.

Is QuickBooks Premier Professional Services Right For You?

Is QuickBooks Premier Professional Services for You?

Premier Professional Services Alternatives & Comparison

Comparison Use Cases

	Pricing	Number of Users Included	Deployment Type	Time Tracking and Client Billing	Project Costing	Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
	$799 to $1,999 per year	1 to 5	Desktop	✓	✓	✕
	$38 to $275 per month	1 to 25	Cloud	✓	✓	✕
	Visit QuickBooks Online
	$79 to $139monthly	1	Cloud	✓	✕	✓
	Visit CARET Legal
	Custom-priced	Undisclosed	Desktop (cloud option via hosting)	✓	✕	✓
	Visit PCLaw

If you think that a general-purpose bookkeeping solution is suitable for your firm, explore our list of the best small business accounting software.

QuickBooks Premier Professional Services Edition Reviews from Users

4.50 / 5

We haven’t found any specific Professional Services Edition reviews, but based on feedback on the general business edition, many users like Premier’s extensive feature set. Having used the platform myself, I can attest that Premier offers many useful functions that can automate various tasks, like invoicing, expense tracking, and reporting.

One user appreciates that they can connect their bank accounts to better manage their financials and that they could generate customized reports based on their needs. We agree that QuickBooks Premier’s biggest strengths are banking and reporting, as highlighted in our QuickBooks Desktop Premier review.

On the downside, some reviewers commented that Premier is a bit costly, especially for small businesses. One dislikes that they had to purchase the program at a higher cost every year. Moreover, we found some complaints about its inefficient customer support, but we can’t vouch for these claims, as the quality of customer service you’ll get could vary from one agent to another.

As of this writing, here’s how QuickBooks Premier is rated by top review sites:

• Capterra^[1]: 4.5 out of 5 based on around 100 reviews
• TrustRadius^[2]: 8.2 out of 10 based on more than 400 reviews

QuickBooks Premier Professional Services Pricing

3.00 / 5

QuickBooks Premier earned a fair rating in our evaluation for pricing. While it’s a bit expensive for a single user at $799 per year, the cost for each additional user is reduced, so it becomes affordable for three to five users.

Prices for QuickBooks Premier Professional Services are the same as the general business edition, which is summarized in the table below:

Are you unsure which QuickBooks Desktop product is right for you?

We have a QuickBooks Desktop version comparison to guide you.

QuickBooks Premier Professional Services New Features for 2023

• Cash Flow Hub: The new Cash Flow Hub can help professional service businesses project their future cash flow based on your bank and activity, helping you make budget-related decisions wisely.
• Automatic mileage tracking: The new mileage tracking app (only for iOS devices) lets you calculate your business mileage automatically. Enter your place of origin and destination, and the app will calculate the mileage automatically. This means you don’t have to track your odometer readings manually.

QuickBooks Premier Professional Services Accounting Features

QuickBooks Premier Professional Services offers the same accounting features found in the general business edition. These include accounts payable (A/P) and accounts receivable (A/R) management, banking, and project accounting. These features are evaluated using our internal case study and are explained in detail in our review of QuickBooks Premier.

QuickBooks Premier Professional Services Edition Features

In addition to general accounting features, professional service firms will find even more useful functions in the Professional Services edition.

Professional Menu (Dashboard)

The Professional menu in your Professional Services Edition dashboard gives you access to features that are most relevant to professional service companies. These include invoicing, proposal management, weekly timesheets, project costing, and professional service-specific reports.

Proposal & Estimate Management

In addition to estimates, you can create proposals. You can access the proposal form from the Professional menu on your dashboard. To complete the form, you need to enter details about the product or service you wish to provide, such as class, rate, amount, markup, and total.

Billing Rate Setup

You can set any number of billing rate levels and apply them to whichever employees you choose. For example, in a legal firm, you might want to set different billing rates for partners, paralegals, law associates, and outside consultants.

You can also set fixed or custom hourly rates by service item and assign them to employees. Then, every time you create an invoice, QuickBooks Desktop will provide the rate of each item automatically based on the assigned employee.

You can choose from the two billing rate types in QuickBooks Premier Professional Services:

1. Fixed Hourly Rate: This applies a fixed hourly rate to an employee, which can be set in the Hourly Rate field.
2. Custom Hourly Rate Per Service Item: Use this billing type when employees are billed at different rates based on the service being performed.

Price Adjustments

You can set a per-hour price level and assign it to particular types of work. For example, you can create a service item for lawn care and set a price level of $50 per hour, regardless of which employee performs the service.

Also, you can set special price levels to be applied to particular customers. For instance, you can set a friends and family special price level equal to 90% of the standard rate for all services. After assigning the friends and family rate to the desired customers, it would be used automatically when an invoice is calculated.

Batch Invoicing

You can batch-create invoices for unbilled time and expenses. QuickBooks will provide a screen showing all unbilled time, expenses, and mileage by job. You can select the clients you want to bill, and invoices will be generated automatically. You can also choose to select a single job and view the details of unbilled time and expenses to bill only a portion.

Time Tracking

You can enter employee time in a weekly timesheet and assign it to a particular service code and customer job. Nonbillable time can be assigned to a nonbillable service item. The timesheet entry isn’t only used to accumulate hours to bill but also to calculate an hourly employee’s paycheck if you’ve subscribed to QuickBooks Workforce. Hours entered for salaried employees won’t affect their paychecks.

Project Costing

Project costing in QuickBooks Premier Professional Services Edition allows you to track the expenses for a project and compare them to your revenue, giving you an idea of how much you make and spend for each project. An important feature unavailable in QuickBooks Online, the cloud-based version, is the ability to compare job estimates and actual expenses.

Professional Service-specific Reports

While Professional Services Edition includes all the traditional financial reports of QuickBooks Premier, it also has a list of reports that help track your billable expenses to ensure they eventually get assigned and billed to a customer or project.

• Expenses not Assigned to Projects: You can refer to this list to find expenses that haven’t been assigned to customer jobs.

• Unbilled Expenses by Project: This will provide a list of expenses that have been assigned to a customer’s job but not yet billed to the customer on an invoice.

• Billed vs. Proposal by Project: This compares the proposed fee for a customer job to the amount that has already been billed. You can refer to this report to determine if additional unbilled time and expenses should be billed.

• Billed and unbilled hours by employee and project: Here, you’ll find a list of hours that have been charged by employees to a customer’s job but haven’t been billed to the customer.
• Actual project costs detail: You can analyze this report to determine the actual cost incurred on a customer job. This is different from the amounts billed for a job. For example, while you might bill a customer $100 per hour for a particular employee, the actual project cost report will only show the amount you paid the employee, such as $25 per hour.

QuickBooks Premier Professional Services Ease of Use

3.00 / 5

QuickBooks Desktop Premier Professional Services uses a workflow-based navigation system, which may require a learning curve for those who are new to the software. We often recommend it for experienced accountants and bookkeepers because these professionals are more likely to appreciate and leverage the workflow system effectively. Additionally, since it’s desktop-based, it might not be that intuitive for those who are accustomed to cloud-based software.

QuickBooks Premier Professional Services Customer Support

3.80 / 5

We consider QuickBooks Premier Professional Services’ customer support generally efficient. It offers users different ways to seek assistance, including phone support (callback), live chat, a chatbot, and plenty of online resources, like setup guides and tutorial videos. However, it would have done better in our evaluation if there was an option to directly call an agent without sending a request first. Also, the addition of email support could be useful for many users.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Bottom Line

QuickBooks Premier Professional Services Edition helps businesses that bill clients by the hour, such as engineers, consultants, and lawyers, by managing billing rates so that they can invoice clients effectively. However, it doesn’t track billing adjustments by employee. Larger firms may want to use it for their core accounting needs while using specialized software to track employees’ billable-hour realization.

User review references:

¹Capterra
²TrustRadius