QuickBooks Live (also sold as QuickBooks Live Bookkeeping) is Intuit's add-on bookkeeping service: a real, human bookkeeper, working remotely, who helps set up your QuickBooks Online company, categorizes transactions, reconciles your accounts monthly, and prepares reports. It's a subscription on top of your regular QuickBooks Online plan, not a feature inside the software itself.
1. Initial setup or cleanup. A Live bookkeeper reviews your existing QuickBooks file, or helps set up a new one, fixing miscategorized transactions and getting your chart of accounts in reasonable shape before ongoing work starts.
2. Ongoing monthly categorization. Transactions coming in through your bank feed get reviewed and categorized by the bookkeeper rather than you doing it yourself, though you can usually still weigh in through messaging inside QuickBooks.
3. Monthly reconciliation. The bookkeeper reconciles your bank and credit card accounts against your statements each month, the same Reconcile process covered on this site's reconciliation guide, just done by someone else.
4. Reports and check-ins. You get standard financial reports (profit and loss, balance sheet) and some level of access to the bookkeeper to ask questions, with the exact depth of involvement depending on which Live tier you're on.
QuickBooks Live solves a real problem: bookkeeping hygiene, categorization, reconciliation, clean reports, done by a qualified person instead of nobody. It's genuinely useful for a business that doesn't have an in-house bookkeeper and doesn't want to hire one.
What it doesn't do is touch anything outside QuickBooks itself. A Live bookkeeper works with whatever's already in your books; they don't connect your CRM, your e-commerce platform, your field service tool, or any other system you run your business on. If the real time sink is getting data into QuickBooks accurately in the first place, not what happens to it once it's there, a bookkeeping service doesn't fix that part. It's a person doing a defined job well, not a system that reshapes how your other tools feed QuickBooks.
Transactions arrive in QuickBooks already tagged with the right job, client, or department, pulled from whatever system the business actually runs on, so a bookkeeper's time goes to genuine judgment calls instead of re-guessing context from a vendor name.
Something that looks wrong, a duplicate, an unusually large charge, gets flagged the day it happens instead of waiting for the next monthly bookkeeping cycle to catch it.
Tell us what a bookkeeper (yours, or QuickBooks Live's) spends the most time fixing, and we'll tell you if that part can be handled before it ever reaches them.
Tell us what a bookkeeper, in-house or through a service like QuickBooks Live, spends their time untangling, and we'll tell you whether the mess reaching them can be cleaned up before it gets there. Bookkeeping is one piece of running a business on QuickBooks; whatever else is still manual around it is fair game too.
Let's talk →Yes, same service, used interchangeably. Intuit has sold it under both names, sometimes with tier names attached (like Live Expert Assisted versus Live Full-Service), but it's the same underlying human-bookkeeper add-on to a QuickBooks Online subscription.
It can, for the categorization and reconciliation work specifically, since that's what the service is built around. It's not a substitute for a dedicated accountant handling tax strategy, complex entity structures, or anything beyond standard monthly bookkeeping, which is usually a separate relationship either way.
A separate subscription, priced on top of whatever QuickBooks Online plan you're already paying for. It's a service add-on, not something that activates inside your existing plan.