What consultants need from their software, from sources outside QuickBooks and outside Nexa:
QuickBooks covers the bookkeeping side of consulting well. It has bank feed reconciliation, comprehensive reporting, multi-currency support, 800+ app integrations, and it is the tool most accountants already know. The Plus plan adds project profitability, which helps with project fees. Its listed features don't include proposal or quote templates that carry an accepted proposal into billing, a way to log client-site travel by client, or a running estimate for quarterly taxes. Free 1099 e-filing comes only with the Advanced plan plus Bill Pay Elite, which matters if you pay subcontractors and must file Form 1099-NEC. You would likely cover the gaps with add-on apps.
Nexa covers more of the front half of a consulting practice. Its estimates, quotes and proposals convert to invoices, and clients can sign estimates and pay by card through your own Stripe account. It has time tracking for hourly work, projects (called Missions) with sub-steps, expense tracking, receipt scanning, bank reconciliation, profit and loss, and 1099 summaries. It also has a CRM with a pipeline board, which suits winning work through bids. It does not sync or import with QuickBooks, has no app marketplace, and has no manual journal entries. Nothing in its feature list covers quarterly estimated-tax planning or a travel log. If you use automated emails or reminders, they send only while Nexa is open on one of your devices. Nexa is software you run yourself, so there is no hosted support desk or vendor onboarding, and it runs on one device unless you add optional Cloud Sync.
Over three years QuickBooks at $38 a month comes to $1,368 ($456 a year). Nexa is $279 once, or 3 payments of $99. With Cloud Sync at $4.99 a month the three-year total is $458.64. If your accountant works in QuickBooks, or you want its reporting and integrations, stay. If you work alone, bill by the hour and by project, and mainly want proposals that turn into invoices, Nexa costs much less and does that job. Either way, plan on a separate way to track quarterly tax estimates and travel.
Our read for consultants: Stay with QuickBooks if your accountant relies on it; a solo consultant who wants proposals, time tracking and invoices in one place can pay much less with Nexa.
Read on each linked page in October 2026. Check them again before you decide; vendors change plans often.
QuickBooks costs consultants $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 consultants: Either can do the job, for the reasons in our read above. On price alone, that is $279 once against $1,368 for QuickBooks over three years.
Time tracking, invoicing, client records, scheduling and the books 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 the creative work — it automates the business around it. And that part is the same for every consultant: 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 the creative work. Tap a step to see what gets automated.
An inquiry becomes a proposal becomes a signed project — with the scope and the deposit locked in.
The work itself — tracked against the project: hours, milestones, revisions, and expenses, so nothing bills late or goes uncounted.
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 the creative work. (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 consultant earns $85,000/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 consultants. You own it like you own your Laptop.
An honest fit check — because the wrong tool is worse than no tool.
The honest fit: if you're a solo or small consultants 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.
Local rates and saturation vary widely — price for the city you serve, not a national average.
Time tracking, invoicing, client records, scheduling and the books 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.
I start at 8 with a call to the operations director of a mid-sized distributor, the client on my operations review and 90-day improvement plan. We go over last week's interviews and the order-to-ship data I asked for, and I find out the warehouse export is missing two weeks. At 9:30 I walk the warehouse floor with the shift lead, timing the pick-and-pack process with a stopwatch and sketching the flow, noting where orders wait for a signature and where they re-key data by hand. Late morning I'm back at my desk building the current-state process map, a list of the bottlenecks and a rough estimate of what each one costs in labor hours. At 1 I take a call with a retainer client about a hiring question that is not on the retainer, and I say I'll send a short proposal. The afternoon is deliverable work: drafting the 90-day plan with three phases, owners, dates and the measures we'll track weekly, and rewriting the executive summary so the CEO gets the point in one page. At 4 I prep the slides for Thursday's steering meeting and send the client a list of what I still need. At 5 I do admin: log today's hours split into billable and non-billable, write the scope and fee for the new proposal, and check which invoices are outstanding. The big one from last quarter is forty-five days late, so I send a polite note to accounts payable with the invoice attached and the original terms.
Real consultants near you who run their business on Nexa — book directly, no platform fee. Are you a consultant? Post your business and get found in your area — $2.99 one-time. Or browse every consultant 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 a consultant'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 a consultant — 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 consultants 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 consultants, 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