QuickBooks Plus is the third-tier QuickBooks Online subscription, sitting above Simple Start and Essentials and below Advanced. It adds inventory tracking, project profitability tracking, budgeting, and class and location tracking, features Essentials doesn't include, and supports up to five users. It's the plan most product-based or project-based businesses end up needing once basic invoicing and bill pay (what Essentials covers) aren't enough.
1. Everything in Simple Start and Essentials. Invoicing, expense tracking, bill pay, basic reports, receipt capture, and time tracking all carry over; Plus builds on top of them rather than replacing anything.
2. Inventory tracking. This is the headline feature. Plus tracks quantity on hand, cost, and automatically adjusts your books as you buy and sell inventory items, something neither Simple Start nor Essentials supports.
3. Project profitability. You can tag income and expenses to a specific project and see, in one report, whether that project actually made money, rather than piecing it together from the general ledger.
4. Budgeting tools. Plus lets you build budgets by account, by class, or by location and compare actuals against them, which isn't available on the lower tiers.
5. Class and location tracking. You can tag transactions by department, location, or any other category you define, then run reports split by those tags. Useful for a business with multiple locations or revenue streams that wants to compare them side by side.
6. Up to five users. Essentials caps at three; Plus allows five, plus a couple of additional accountant-only seats that don't count against the limit.
Plus adds inventory, projects, budgets, and class tracking, but it doesn't automate any of them. You still manually enter inventory receipts, tag transactions to the right project, and update budgets by hand unless something else is driving that data in.
A lot of businesses upgrade to Plus expecting the higher tier to solve a workflow problem, and it does turn the feature on, but the day-to-day grind of actually using that feature (keying in every inventory count, tagging every transaction correctly, remembering to check the project profitability report) is still manual work layered on top of the subscription.
Expenses and time entries from a project management or field service tool get tagged to the right QuickBooks project automatically, so the project profitability report that comes with Plus is actually accurate without someone tagging every line by hand.
Quantity on hand updates in QuickBooks the moment a sale happens somewhere else, a storefront, a point-of-sale system, instead of someone reconciling inventory counts between two systems at the end of the week.
Tell us whether it's inventory, projects, or budgeting that pushed you to Plus, and we'll tell you if the manual upkeep around it can run on its own.
Tell us which Plus feature you actually use, inventory, project tracking, budgets, and where the manual work still lives around it. We'll tell you what can run itself. And if it's not QuickBooks Plus that's the real friction, that's fine too, n-frames automates whatever's manual, any tool, not just this one.
Let's talk →List price generally runs somewhere around $90-100 a month, though QuickBooks regularly discounts the first few months for new subscribers, and the exact number has changed more than once. Check QuickBooks' own pricing page for the current rate rather than relying on a figure that might already be out of date.
No, different product line entirely. "Pro Plus" and "Premier Plus" are QuickBooks Desktop subscriptions, software installed on a computer rather than run in a browser. QuickBooks Online Plus is the cloud-based plan this page covers; the two don't share features, pricing, or a signup process.
Essentials covers invoicing, bill pay, and basic reporting with up to three users, but has no inventory tracking, no project profitability reports, and no budgeting or class/location tracking. Those four features are the real line between the two tiers.
Advanced raises the user limit to 25, adds more detailed reporting, batch invoicing, custom user permissions, and (depending on your plan) a Fixed Asset Manager for automatic depreciation. It's aimed at larger teams that have outgrown Plus's five-user cap or need tighter permission controls.