What acupuncturists need from their software, from sources outside QuickBooks and outside Nexa:
Full disclosure: this page's publisher makes Nexa, so weigh what follows with that in mind. The test we applied is whether the tool does what an acupuncture practice depends on, and on that test our own product mostly fails. QuickBooks handles the money side well: invoicing, bank feed reconciliation, comprehensive reporting, 800+ app integrations, and it is the tool most accountants already know. It does not handle what is specific to acupuncture. Nothing in its feature list records start and stop times or chooses between 97810/97813 and the 97811/97814 add-ons. The 15-minute units count face-to-face contact, not needle retention time, so the software has to capture that distinction. QuickBooks has no visit notes with points, modality, needle count and retention time, and no signed, dated, visit-specific entries with addendum labeling. It has no per-patient counters for Medicare's 12 visits in 90 days, 8 more if the patient improves, and 20 a year, and no way to separate covered chronic low back pain from non-covered care. It also has no record of each provider's credentials and supervision, which a practice needs before billing Medicare, and no tracking of continuing education hours and certificates for renewal. Paid plans also cap users: 1 on Simple Start, 3 on Essentials and 5 on Plus.
Nexa covers a different slice, and not the clinical one. It has a public booking page with intake forms and reschedule and cancel links, time tracking, invoices, a client pay portal through your own Stripe account, a CRM, and bookkeeping with expenses, bank reconciliation, profit and loss, and 1099 summaries. It has no acupuncture billing codes, no visit-note templates, no Medicare visit counters, no CE tracking, and no place to record provider credentials or supervision. Its time tracking totals hours, which is not the same as coding 15-minute face-to-face units. If you use its automated reminders, they send only while Nexa is open on one of your devices. It has no sync or import with QuickBooks, so moving over means re-entering your history. It is software you own and run yourself, with no hosted support desk or vendor-run onboarding. Nothing in Nexa does what QuickBooks does for an accountant-managed practice, and neither one does what the clinical side requires.
Over three years QuickBooks at $38/month comes to $1,368 ($456 a year). Nexa is $279 once, or $458.64 over three years with Cloud Sync at $4.99/month. Without sync it runs on one device. Nexa costs less, but the savings don't matter much here, because neither tool does time-based coding, acupuncture documentation, Medicare caps or CE tracking. If your accountant works in QuickBooks, keep it for the books, and don't switch just to save money. If you have no accountant dependency and only need simple booking and invoicing, Nexa is a cheaper way to do that part. Either way, the core need calls for a separate acupuncture practice-management and clinical-records system. Before you buy one, check that it follows your state board's CE rules and your payers' rules, including whether you can bill Medicare directly. The Medicare page we drew on doesn't say whether an independent acupuncturist can.
Our read for acupuncturists: Neither QuickBooks nor Nexa covers acupuncture coding, visit documentation, Medicare caps or CE tracking, so look for an acupuncture practice-management and clinical-records system, and keep QuickBooks for the books if your accountant uses it.
Read on each linked page in October 2026. Check them again before you decide; vendors change plans often.
QuickBooks costs acupuncturists $456/year at today's list price. Nexa is $279 once for invoicing, scheduling, CRM, time tracking and accounting in one suite — so after 7.3 months it has cost less than QuickBooks, and you own it after that. What it is not: hosted-for-you software with a support desk and a roadmap you can lobby. That is the trade, and the rest of this page is the detail behind it.
Nexa is $279 once, about $23 a month over its first year. Its Drain Guard reads your expenses (from a linked bank, an imported statement, or ones you type in), finds the charges that repeat, and adds them up by the month. Keep or Cut then walks you through them one at a time. Cancel $23 a month of charges you'd forgotten about and Nexa has paid for itself inside the first year, before you count the QuickBooks bill you'd stop paying.
It depends on what you find and what you cancel, so we don't promise a number. In our demo data, Drain Guard finds 5 subscriptions adding up to $110.13 a month. That is sample data, not a customer's.
The verdict for acupuncturists: Neither QuickBooks nor Nexa is the main system for this work; start with software built for it. Nexa only makes sense beside it, at $279 once against $1,368 for QuickBooks over three years.
Scheduling, invoicing and client records are the pieces of that day. Some tools rent you each piece separately. A few — Nexa among them — bundle the lot and carry their own booking link, with no per-appointment cut. The sections below price both routes honestly.
None of that is a software problem you can buy your way out of in one click — it is why the tool you pick matters more than what it costs. QuickBooks solves some of it. So does Nexa. The difference is what you are left holding in three years.
Today's list price is $38/month — $456 a year, from QuickBooks's own pricing page. Every figure below is that price, multiplied. Nothing is projected.
Nexa: $279 once (or 3 × $99). Over the same three years, that is $1,089 less.
If QuickBooks raises its price, the three-year cost goes up; if it cuts it, the cost comes down. We don't guess which. Add-ons, extra seats and card-processing fees are not included, on either side.
Today's sticker price only tells you what a subscription costs today. These are dated changes, each linked to the announcement or report it comes from. Tap one for the numbers.
For renewals on or after February 1, 2026, Pro Plus and Mac Plus went from $999 to $1,149 a year for one user, and each extra seat from $200 to $230.
Source: SWK Technologies, Insightful Accountant (Dec 2, 2025)
From July 1, 2025: Simple Start $35 to $38, Essentials $65 to $75, Plus $99 to $115, Advanced $235 to $275 a month.
Source: Woodard Report (May 27, 2025)
After September 30, 2024, new US customers can no longer buy these Desktop editions. Existing subscribers can keep renewing.
Source: Intuit
Only changes we can link to a vendor announcement or a named publication are listed. Plans, add-ons and discounts vary, so check the vendor's current pricing page before you decide.
| Feature | QuickBooks | Nexa |
|---|---|---|
| Invoicing | ✓ | ✓ |
| Scheduling | ✗ | ✓ |
| CRM | ✗ | ✓ |
| Time Tracking | — | ✓ |
| Full Accounting | ✓ | ✓ (SIMPL) |
| Task Management | ✗ | ✓ |
| Works offline | — | ✓ |
| Price | $38/mo | $279 once or 3 × $99 |
| 3-Year Total | $1,368 | $279 |
| You own it? | No — stop paying, lose access | Yes — forever |
✓ and ✗ for QuickBooks come from its own published feature list. — means the feature isn't in that list, which is not the same as QuickBooks lacking it: check with them. Three years is at today's price.
Straight from QuickBooks's own feature set. If one of these is the reason you pay them, that reason does not disappear because Nexa is cheaper.
QuickBooks is the better call if you need industry standard - accountants know it specifically, or if your team is large enough that per-seat pricing still beats buying software outright.
QuickBooks Online is aimed at freelancers and new businesses, small and mid-size businesses, product-based businesses, and nonprofits. Larger or more complex operations are pointed to Desktop Enterprise (up to 40 users) or Intuit Enterprise Suite (multi-entity). (quickbooks.intuit.com)
What people outside QuickBooks and outside Nexa say:
Read on each linked page in October 2026. Check them again before you decide; vendors change plans often.
Software doesn't do your clients — it automates the business around it. And that part is the same for every acupuncturist: find the work, manage it, bill for it, get paid. Each step has a tool — and the right single tool runs the whole loop, so the handoffs are automatic and you get back to your clients. Tap a step to see what gets automated.
A new client finds you and books a time — no phone tag, no double-booking.
The session itself — with the client history, notes, packages, and add-ons right there instead of in three different places.
The work becomes the invoice — the hours, the add-ons, the materials, the deposit credited — totaled and sent, instead of re-typed at 9pm.
Paid by card or link, the deposit credited, and what's overdue chased — without you doing it by hand.
You can stitch four separate subscriptions across these four steps, or run one tool that does the whole flow so a booking becomes a job becomes an invoice becomes a payment without re-typing. Either way the goal is the same: less time on the business of the business, more on your clients. (Nexa is built to be the one — but the honest options for each step are above and below.)
QuickBooks plus whatever else you're paying for:
Email yourself this comparison?
The median Acupuncturist earns $65,000/year. At $456/year, QuickBooks is a recurring slice of that — paid again every year, whether the year was good or not. Owning the same jobs outright is $279 once, and the slice stops.
Nexa is $279 once. Invoicing, scheduling, CRM, time tracking, accounting — all connected, built for acupuncturists. You own it like you own your Sterile single-use filiform needles in assorted gauges (0.16-0.30mm).
An honest fit check — because the wrong tool is worse than no tool.
The honest fit: if you're a solo or small acupuncturists business that owns its tools and is sick of renting software, Nexa replaces your whole stack for $279 once. If you're scaling into a large team with dedicated admin staff, a bigger platform may fit better — and we'd rather tell you that now than sell you the wrong thing.
Scheduling, invoicing and client records are the pieces of that day. Some tools rent you each piece separately. A few — Nexa among them — bundle the lot and carry their own booking link, with no per-appointment cut. The sections below price both routes honestly.
She unlocks the clinic around 8:30, switches on the diffuser, and warms the room because patients won't relax on a cold table. The first patient is a recurring lower-back case; she checks the tongue, takes the pulse at both wrists, and notices it's wirier than last week. She inserts a dozen needles, clips on the e-stim leads, dims the lights, and leaves him to rest for twenty-five minutes while she preps the next room and lights a moxa stick for an arthritis patient. Between treatments she's refilling the sharps container, restocking cotton balls, and answering a text from someone asking if their insurance covers dry needling. Midday a new patient fills out a long intake; she spends the consult mapping symptoms to a TCM pattern before a single needle goes in. The afternoon is back-to-back, and she's quietly counting how many sessions remain on each patient's prepaid package in her head. After the last patient she sits down to write up SOAP notes she didn't have time for between visits, reconciles two superbills, and wipes down every table. She closes the sharps log, turns off the TDP lamp, and reminds herself to reorder 0.20mm needles before Thursday.
Real acupuncturists near you who run their business on Nexa — book directly, no platform fee. Are you an acupuncturist? Post your business and get found in your area — $2.99 one-time. Or browse every acupuncturist on Nexa →
The tools of the trade — each a one-time buy that earns its keep for years.
You paid for these once because good tools last. That's the bar your software should clear too — priced like a tool you own, $279 once, not a subscription that costs more than your kit every year.
We build an acupuncturist's guide the same way every time, and we'd rather you trust it than take it on faith. Nexa is our product, so the test we hold ourselves to is simple: a tool only "wins" a job here when it genuinely does that job better for an acupuncturist — and where something free, open-source, or buy-once does it better, we say so and link you to it. Where Nexa falls short (payroll is the honest example), we name the alternative outright.
Found something out of date? Prices change and we don't catch every move the day it happens. This guide is published and maintained by the Nexa team; if a figure here is wrong, tell us and we'll fix it — getting it right matters more to us than the sale.
For solo acupuncturists and small teams, yes. invoicing, scheduling, CRM, time tracking, task management, and full accounting — all for $279 once. QuickBooks may be better if you have a large team (10+) or need enterprise-specific features.
QuickBooks has features like Industry standard - accountants know it and 800+ app integrations that some businesses rely on. For most solo acupuncturists, these aren't dealbreakers.
At $38/month, Nexa pays for itself in 7.3 months. After that: $456 saved every year.
Yes. Nexa is $279 as a one-time payment, or 3 payments of $99 ($297 total). Either way it's a one-time purchase — no subscription, no recurring fees ever.
Own your tools. Stop renting your software.
Get Nexa — $279 Once