What electricians need from their software, from sources outside QuickBooks and outside Nexa:
QuickBooks covers the accounting side of an electrician's business well. It is the industry standard that accountants know, and it has bank feed reconciliation, comprehensive reporting and 800+ integrations. Higher tiers add project profitability, and Advanced adds free 1099 e-filing with Bill Pay Elite, which helps with subcontractor payments. The plan that does the core job is $38 a month. Nothing in its feature list tracks license status, CE hours, certificates or renewal dates per license, and that is the trade's most distinctive record-keeping need. It also doesn't say how it handles flat-rate service-call pricing, and it doesn't help decide whether a helper is an employee or a contractor. Paid plans cap users, which matters as a crew grows.
Nexa covers more of the field-service side. It has invoices, estimates and quotes that convert to invoices, jobs with costing and profit per job, and a client pay portal where customers pay by card through your own Stripe account. It also has time tracking, crew assignment with a crew view, today's stops sent to Google Maps, and bookkeeping with 1099 summaries and bank reconciliation. It works offline. It does not track licenses or CE either. It does not run payroll: it has no payroll taxes, pay stubs or direct deposit, only a CSV of hours times rate. It has no sync or import with QuickBooks, no app marketplace, and no dispatch board. Nexa is software you run yourself, with no hosted support desk or vendor onboarding. Its automated emails and reminders send only while Nexa is open on one of your devices, and without the optional Cloud Sync it runs on one device.
Over three years QuickBooks at $38 a month costs $1,368 ($456 a year). Nexa costs $279 once, or $458.64 with Cloud Sync at $4.99 a month. If your accountant works in QuickBooks, you rely on its integrations, or you have several users, stay put. A solo or small shop that is comfortable self-supporting and retyping its records could reasonably move to Nexa for the lower cost and job costing. Either way, license and CE deadlines, certificates and renewal dates for each license holder need a separate tool built for that.
Our read for electricians: Neither tracks per-license CE deadlines and certificates, so use a compliance or license-tracking tool alongside whichever one you already use, and stay on QuickBooks if your accountant or integrations depend on it.
Read on each linked page in October 2026. Check them again before you decide; vendors change plans often.
QuickBooks costs electricians $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 electricians: 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.
Time tracking, invoicing, job tracking and the books are the pieces of that day. Some tools rent you each piece separately. A few — Nexa among them — bundle the lot into something you buy once. 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 actual work — it automates the business around it. And that part is the same for every electrician: 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 actual work. Tap a step to see what gets automated.
A lead, a call, a referral — and a quote or estimate that turns it into a booked job.
The part you actually get paid for — with the time, materials, add-ons, and tasks tracked as you go, not guessed at later.
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 actual work. (Nexa is built to be the one — but the honest options for each step are above and below.)
This is the connection that makes the rest worth it. A electrician's job already holds the services, the hours, the add-ons, and the materials — so the invoice builds itself from the work instead of you re-typing it at 9pm. Toggle an add-on or nudge the hours and watch it recompute.
You didn't write this invoice — the job did.
QuickBooks plus whatever else you're paying for:
Email yourself this comparison?
The median electrician earns $60,240/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 electricians. You own it like you own your Multimeters (Fluke).
An honest fit check — because the wrong tool is worse than no tool.
The honest fit: if you're a solo or small electricians business that owns its tools and is sick of renting software, Nexa replaces your whole stack for $279 once. If you're scaling past a handful of crews, a fleet 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.
Year-round construction in SoCal. Fire season (June-November) drives restoration demand. Drought impacts landscaping. Earthquake retrofitting is ongoing market.
Extreme summer heat drives HVAC demand. Hurricane risk on Gulf Coast. Year-round construction. Rapid population growth in DFW, Austin, Houston, San Antonio creates sustained demand. Freeze events (like 2021) create emergency plumbing/HVAC surge.
Hurricane season June-November creates massive restoration demand. Snowbird season November-March boosts service volume 30-40%. Year-round construction. Pool service is year-round industry. Pest control peaks in summer humidity.
Harsh winters in upstate, moderate in NYC. Construction limited in winter upstate. NYC market is enormous but hypercompetitive. Brownstone/pre-war building maintenance is specialized trade. NYC licensing is notoriously complex.
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Technical questions, career path advice, tool reviews
Open on Reddit →Active community — tool picks, pricing, and day-to-day questions.
Open on Reddit →Active community — tool picks, pricing, and day-to-day questions.
Open on Reddit →Active community — tool picks, pricing, and day-to-day questions.
Open on Reddit →Time tracking, invoicing, job tracking and the books are the pieces of that day. Some tools rent you each piece separately. A few — Nexa among them — bundle the lot into something you buy once. The sections below price both routes honestly.
Most of my work is residential service calls and small projects: a dead circuit, a breaker that keeps tripping, adding outlets in a kitchen remodel, a panel upgrade, an EV charger in the garage. Troubleshooting is the real skill; I'm testing circuits, tracing where a fault actually is, and finding the loose connection or the overloaded circuit behind the symptom. Safety is everything. I verify every circuit is dead before touching it, because assuming kills electricians. Anything beyond a simple repair usually needs a permit, which means paperwork before the job and an inspection after, and I plan my schedule around the inspector's availability. Panel upgrades and new circuits start with a load calculation to make sure the service can handle it. I carry the common breakers, devices and wire on the van, but special-order parts can push a job back a week. Quoting is careful work, because opening a wall in an old house can reveal knob-and-tube wiring nobody expected. I keep my licence current with continuing education and invoice every job before I leave the driveway when I can.
Real electricians near you who run their business on Nexa — book directly, no platform fee. Are you an electrician? Post your business and get found in your area — $2.99 one-time. Or browse every electrician on Nexa →
The tools of the trade — each a one-time buy that earns its keep for years.
Here's the bar that matters: you spent $940–$3,600 on tools that last for years, and never thought twice. So why should the software cost more than your whole kit — every single year? Hold it to the same standard as a good tool: $279, once.
We build an electrician'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 electrician — 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 electricians 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 electricians, 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