Simple Start is the entry-level subscription tier of QuickBooks Online: one user plus your accountant, invoicing, expense tracking, mileage tracking, receipt capture, and basic reports. It doesn't include bill management, multiple team members, or inventory tracking, all of which show up starting at the next tier up, Essentials.
1. One login, plus accountant access. Simple Start supports a single user account for your team. You can still invite your accountant separately at no extra cost, but a second employee needs the next tier up.
2. Invoicing and estimates. You can create, send, and track invoices and estimates, accept online payments if QuickBooks Payments is connected, and set up basic recurring invoices for things that repeat on a fixed schedule.
3. Expense and mileage tracking. Connected bank and card feeds pull in transactions for categorization, and the mobile app tracks mileage automatically using your phone's location, useful if you or your team drive for work.
4. Receipt capture. Snap a photo of a receipt in the mobile app and QuickBooks reads the amount, date, and vendor automatically, attaching it to the matching expense.
5. A basic set of reports. Profit and loss, balance sheet, and a handful of other standard reports are included, though without the customization and deeper breakdowns the higher tiers add.
6. What's missing: bill pay, multiple users, and inventory. There's no accounts-payable workflow for tracking and paying vendor bills, no second user seat, and no inventory tracking at all. All three show up starting with Essentials or Plus.
Simple Start works well for a true one-person operation: a freelancer, a solo consultant, someone invoicing clients and tracking their own expenses without anyone else needing to touch the books. The moment a second person needs login access, even just a part-time bookkeeper reviewing transactions, the single-user limit forces a decision.
The other common trigger is vendor bills. Without a bill-pay workflow, a business on Simple Start that starts owing money to vendors on terms ends up tracking what's due in a spreadsheet or a sticky note instead of inside QuickBooks itself, exactly the kind of manual workaround that outgrows a plan quietly, one vendor at a time, until someone finally notices how much is being tracked outside the system that's supposed to track it.
For a business on Simple Start that's started owing vendors but isn't ready to move up a tier yet, we've built a lightweight approval and due-date tracker outside QuickBooks that still logs the final payment back in as an expense.
Receipts forwarded to a shared inbox or dropped in a folder get matched to the right expense and categorized automatically, extending what Simple Start's own receipt capture does to receipts that never touch the mobile app.
Tell us how you're handling it today, a shared login, a spreadsheet on the side, anything else, and we'll tell you if there's a cleaner fix than upgrading.
Tell us what you're tracking outside QuickBooks because Simple Start doesn't cover it, and we'll tell you honestly whether an upgrade fixes it or whether a smaller build does the job for less. Plan tiers are one lever; whatever else is running manually in your business is worth the same conversation.
Let's talk →It's priced as the lowest of QuickBooks Online's four subscription tiers, below Essentials, Plus, and Advanced. Intuit runs promotional pricing often and adjusts list prices over time, so check the current rate on QuickBooks' own pricing page rather than relying on a number that could be months out of date.
No, they're the same product; people just drop "Online" since Simple Start only exists as a QuickBooks Online tier. QuickBooks Desktop doesn't use that tier name at all; its entry-level product is QuickBooks Pro, which isn't structured the same way.
Yes, upgrading is a self-service change inside QuickBooks, done from Settings, and it happens in place: your existing data, invoices, and history carry over to the new tier without needing to start a fresh company file.
Essentials adds the two things Simple Start leaves out that most growing businesses hit first: support for multiple users and a full bill-pay workflow for tracking and paying what you owe vendors. Inventory and project tracking still wait for Plus.