6 Best QuickBooks Self-Employed Alternatives in 2023

• Invoicing customers: QuickBooks Online Simple Start is our top-recommended invoicing software because of its unique ability to calculate sales tax rates automatically based on your customer’s location. It also lets you customize invoices to almost any industry type.
• Sales tax tracking: QuickBooks Online lets you add sales taxes in invoices, which is something absent in QuickBooks Self-Employed. QuickBooks Online will also compute sales taxes per invoice automatically.
• Paying contractors: You can assign payments to 1099 categories and file 1099 directly within QuickBooks Online .

QBSE cannot add sales tax rates to invoices automatically—and QBO Simple Start is more suitable for tracking sales tax. You can also create estimates and invoices in QBO Simple Start for your clients and customers, making QBO our best invoicing software.

• Freelancers who need a fully functional mobile app: The Zoho Books app has more features than QuickBooks Self-Employed and most other accounting applications, making it our choice for the best mobile accounting apps. In addition to invoicing and mileage tracking, Zoho Books allows you to record billable time and enter bills and bill payments.
• Freelancers with few clients to invoice: Zoho Books Starter is limited to 5,000 invoices per year—this number of invoices is enough if you don’t have a lot of clients. For the price of $15, having only 5,000 invoices is a good trade-off for freelancers who might not exceed that limit.

Zoho Books Standard is a great alternative to QBSE because it offers more features, including a great mobile app. Even if it has an invoice limit of 5,000 per year, most freelancers wouldn’t mind this limit. Service-based freelancers can settle with the Standard plan since it already has features like project expense tracking and project tasks. However, upgrading to the Professional tier is an option if you want timesheet approval by customer and multicurrency transactions.

• Integrated payroll: Patriot Accounting can integrate with Patriot Payroll, the provider’s payroll services arm. Although it’s a separate billing from the accounting plans, we recommend choosing Patriot if you want the same service provider.
• Credit card payments: Patriot Accounting can integrate with your credit card merchant so that customers can use their credit cards.
• Contractor payments: Patriot Accounting can help you create and print 1099s and 1096s, which can be a big help if your business hires contractors regularly.

We chose Patriot as a QBSE alternative because it is affordable and has all the features needed for basic bookkeeping, plus it features a direct integration to Patriot Payroll (charged separately). If you need to process employee wages, Patriot’s solutions create a seamless payroll processing experience, especially for business owners with no payroll experience.

On top of that, Patriot is easy to use for freelancers wanting to DIY their bookkeeping. It also has features that QBSE lacks, including A/R and A/P tracking, bank reconciliation, and recurring invoices.

• New freelancers: You can use Wave to save some money as long as they only need a simple solution for sending invoices, managing unpaid bills, and tracking income and expenses.
• Freelancers who manage multiple companies: The program allows you to add as many companies as you want for free.

Wave is the best free option for freelancers who are still new to accounting software. It has more features than QuickBooks Self-Employed, like creating and sending invoices without having to manually input all the information, connecting bank accounts, and processing payments. We recommend Wave for freelancers who don’t need complex features like creating custom tags and generating custom reports.

• Businesses that want to outsource bookkeeping to the same provider: ZipBooks offers bookkeeping services, so you don’t have to do it yourself. These assisted bookkeeping services already include a ZipBooks plan.
• Freelancers billing by the hour: ZipBooks has a built-in time tracker that can help freelancers track billable hours. We recommend choosing ZipBooks because you don’t need to purchase another time tracking software.
• Simple and easy bank reconciliation: If you’re fond of using credit and debit cards for payments, ZipBooks Sophisticated makes it easy for you to reconcile bank accounts. You don’t need to be an expert to perform bank reconciliation on ZipBooks.

We chose ZipBooks Sophisticated because it is the highest plan but is priced affordably at $35 per month. If you want to outsource bookkeeping, ZipBooks offers monthly bookkeeping assistance that comes with a ZipBooks Plan. It means that you don’t have to pay for the software subscription if you decide to let ZipBooks handle your books.

But if you prefer to do do-it-yourself (DIY) bookkeeping, the monthly cost of ZipBooks Sophisticated is lower than QuickBooks Self-Employed but contains more useful features, like adding sales taxes and creating bills.

• Landlords: Quicken features rental property management features that can help landlords track rent income and expense.
• Personal finance: Quicken has personal finance features that can track and classify expenses, set spending budgets, and monitor bills.
• Investment management: You can use Quicken to track 401(k) retirement plans, private investments, educational plans, and investment portfolios.

We chose Quicken Home & Business for self-employed individuals managing rental property and other investments. Quicken can also be used for managing retirement 401(k) and tracking home value. We recommend Quicken as the best QBSE alternative for landlords because QBSE lacks basic rental management features.