Intuit QuickBooks Self-Employed is a simple small business accounting tool that offers an exceptional user experience. Designed for freelancers, independent contractors, and sole proprietors, the software connects to your financial accounts and imports transactions, tracks mileage, creates and sends invoices, and estimates quarterly taxes. New features since our last review include a specialized setup tool (Tax Timeline), simple time tracking, and tags. However, despite these strengths, the site isn’t as capable as other accounting websites aimed at similar markets. Our Editors’ Choice pick for smaller-scale accounting is FreshBooks, which costs less and offers a more robust set of features.
How Much Does QuickBooks Self-Employed Cost?
Intuit QuickBooks Self-Employed costs $15 per month. The current promotion prices it at $7.50 per month for three months (plus the free trial), but $15 per month is more than FreshBooks charges for its first-tier service ($13.50 per month). Wave and Sunrise are free, and GoDaddy Bookkeeping starts at $4.99 per month. That makes Intuit QuickBooks Self-Employed one of the most expensive services in this group.
Intuit is also the developer and publisher of TurboTax, so it offers two bundled deals with that service. For $25 per month ($12 per month for the first three months), you get the Self-Employed Tax Bundle. Because Intuit QuickBooks Self-Employed and TurboTax Self-Employed are integrated, you can transfer your income and expense data directly into TurboTax Self-Employed and pay your estimated taxes online. The package includes one free federal and one free state return filing. Self-Employed Live Tax Bundle ($35 per month; $17 per month for the first three months) adds unlimited help and advice from a CPA year-round and a final review of your return from that professional.
Intuit QuickBooks Self-Employed doesn’t offer true double-entry accounting like Wave and FreshBooks do, but that’s not as important to many workers in the gig economy as it is to larger companies who might share their bookkeeping tasks with an accountant. In addition, the site’s excellent companion apps could serve many of today’s mobile entrepreneurs—who tend to live on their phones—well. Like other Intuit financial applications, Intuit QuickBooks Self-Employed uses an easily understandable navigation system and offers an exceptional user experience. It’s almost fun to use. The interface is consistent across desktop and mobile platforms too, so it’s an attractive choice if you want this kind of interoperability.
Getting Started With QuickBooks Self-Employed
QuickBooks Self-Employed has changed its setup process since I last reviewed it. The site opens to your Dashboard, with a new tool displayed at the top: the Tax Timeline. This will appear whether or not you signed up for the Self-Employed Tax Bundle, and it’s optional. The Timeline walks you through a series of setup steps that prepare you for sending your data to TurboTax. Even if you’re not planning to do so, it’s a good setup tool. It asks for basic information about your company, then about your tax situation (like dependents and withholding), your vehicle, your home office, and your healthcare. Next, you enter login credentials for your online bank accounts so the site can import transactions. Finally, it helps you categorize your expenses and track your business miles driven so you take every deduction possible.
The Tax Timeline really serves as QuickBooks Self-Employed’s setup tool, since when you close it, the site’s Dashboard appears with no further setup instructions. It’s a good idea to go through the steps and stop when you hit the TurboTax import step. If you don’t, you can click the gear icon in the upper right to find the links to those steps
This first step can take some time if your finances are very active, since you are encouraged to categorize all of your transactions, but it’s time well-spent. Once you go through the process with data from the previous 90 days (or more), you’ll not only be caught up, but you’ll get meaningful feedback when you head to the Dashboard and look at the charts. Intuit QuickBooks Self-Employed didn’t guess at the categorization for hardly any of my transactions, as some sites do, but it asked me a question about one and offered to create a rule that would automatically categorize transactions from that vendor the same way.
Popular Pages
Intuit QuickBooks Self-Employed’s Dashboard showcases the data it tracks with proficiency. It displays six graphs that provide an overview of your most important numbers: Profit and Loss, Expenses, Accounts, Invoices, Mileage, and Estimated Tax. Click on any active area of the graph to drill down to original recordkeeping. Links to outstanding tasks and the most frequent transactions to review appear above these charts.
A vertical toolbar to the left contains navigation links to Home, Transactions, Miles, Taxes, Reports, Invoices, Time (new; technically in beta), and Capital. Clicking the gear icon in the upper right opens the site’s settings, and a help link sits to the right of it. To the left of these, the site displays the amount in estimated tax you owe as of the current time (this number, of course, changes as more transactions come in and are categorized).
Intuit QuickBooks Self-Employed is simple and intuitive enough that you’re unlikely to need assistance. If you do, you can search for topics or start a conversation with the QB Assistant — an interactive support tool that provides possible answers to your questions and helps you drill down if the question was too broad. If the QB assistant cannot answer your question, then you can get help via chat, email, a callback, or Intuit’s online community of users.
The Transactions page is the heart of the Intuit QuickBooks Self-Employed experience. There’s a chart at the top of this screen that displays your business income, spending, and profit for the past three months. Below that are filtering tools that allow you to see only a subset of your transactions (like business, personal, or unreviewed and uncategorized). You can also sort by account, date range, or tags (new). To the right of those filters is a search tool. The rest of the page consists of a register-type display of the transactions you’ve downloaded and entered manually.
Here’s how it works: Let’s say one of your downloaded transactions is a monthly subscription fee for a web service. The name of the vendor appears first, after the date. The amount appears in the next column. To the right of that are three buttons marked Business, Personal, and Split. Since it’s a business expense charged by one vendor, you’d click Business. The Category column then displays the one guessed at by Intuit QuickBooks Self-Employed. If that is incorrect, you click it, and a box opens containing your most often used categories. If it’s not there, you click Show all categories and select the correct one from that list.
A small link marked Add Rule appears once you select a category. Click it, and a small window opens, helping you to easily teach the site how to categorize similar transactions whenever they appear. You can even have the rule apply to past transactions, which is unusual in this class of applications. New since last year is the ability to create your own Tags and assign them to transactions. These allow you to set up filters like clients or projects, and group related transactions.
You can also attach a receipt from a file on your computer, add a note, or exclude transactions (if, for example, it’s a duplicate). Intuit QuickBooks Self-Employed uses OCR technology to extract the data from photos of receipts you’ve snapped on your smartphone. It then enters the relevant details in the correct fields on the site. Intuit has implemented this technology well, but it’s not always 100 percent successful.
Mobile Miles, Mobile Apps
If you drive for work and can deduct the mileage, you can enter that specific expense by clicking the Miles link in the left vertical toolbar. You provide a few details about your vehicle(s), then about each trip. Each entry, of course, will need a date and purpose. You can enter start and end addresses and let Intuit QuickBooks Self-Employed calculate the miles or simply enter the miles driven yourself. If you’ve logged trips in either MileIQ or Google, the site can import that data. The site keeps a running tally of the business miles you’ve driven and calculates your mileage deduction for tax purposes.
If you’re using the Intuit QuickBooks Self-Employed mobile app, you can let it track your mileage automatically by turning on Location Services. FreshBooks is the only other accounting service I’ve reviewed that offers this, and it’s a great tool for rideshare and meal-delivery drivers, as well as professionals who simply track business miles for client visits, for example.
Intuit QuickBooks Self-Employed’s mobile app lacks little—if anything—found on the browser-based version. It’s the best companion app I found in this group of accounting websites designed for freelancers. From invoices to mileage tracking to estimated taxes to reports to interactive help, the vast majority of features are here. Unfortunately, time tracking and tags have not yet been added to the apps. Like other Intuit applications, the user experience is exceptional. There’s an Intuit QuickBooks Self-Employed app for both Android and iOS, so no matter which platform you’re on, you can do your books on the go.
Both work similarly, though there are some minor differences in their navigation tools. The iOS version displays five icons along the bottom of the screen that open the Dashboard, Transactions, Mileage, Invoices, and Taxes sections. You access the app’s settings and other housekeeping tasks from an icon in the upper-left corner. The Android version opens a menu with the same functions when you click a link in the lower-left corner of the screen. There are also some minor user interface and navigation differences once you get into the working screens themselves. Both apps, though, are quite attractive and intuitive.
Calculating Estimated Taxes
If you didn’t set up your Tax Profile initially, click the gear icon, then Tax profile to do so. In this window, you provide some important personal details (marital status, dependents, and so on) so the service calculates your estimated taxes correctly.
Once you’ve been working with Intuit QuickBooks Self-Employed for a while, your categorization and data entry work begins to pay off, since the site uses the income and expenses you’ve entered to estimate the quarterly taxes you’re required to pay as a self-employed individual. Click the Taxes navigation button to the left, then on Annual. Intuit QuickBooks Self-Employed displays your taxable business profit for the current tax year to date, breaking it down into income and Schedule C deductions. Below that is a more detailed breakdown of those deductions, divided into Business, Vehicle, Home office, and Healthcare sections. Click the Email tax details link, and you can download Excel spreadsheets containing both summary and detail views of your taxes.
When you click on Quarterly, you see your quarterly tax schedule for the current year, with figures for both recommended payments and what you have already paid. If you have used Intuit QuickBooks Self-Employed in previous years, then you can view your historical data on this same page. The site also projects your annual profit based on your actual income and deductions to date. And, you can click a link to fill in your 1040-ES payment voucher that you can submit with your payment.
Intuit QuickBooks Self-Employed provides four reports in addition to the comprehensive summary and detailed versions. One is an accounting of all the receipts you’ve entered. You can’t simply view this report; you must download it. There’s also a mileage log and a profit and loss statement and, new since last year, a report showing income and expenses by tag. These six seem sufficient considering the scope of the site, though GoDaddy Bookkeeping offers more reports beyond taxes, as well as a Schedule C Worksheet.
Basic Invoices and Time Tracking
Intuit QuickBooks Self-Employed doesn’t offer much invoicing functionality, but you can send very simple invoices to customers and receive their payments online. There are no customization options for the lone invoice format except for the addition of a logo. Invoice forms contain fields for the name, address, phone number, and email address of both your business and the customer. You can select the client from a drop-down list if you’ve already entered it on another invoice. GoDaddy Bookkeeping offers more robust templates and automation. There’s no way to build product or service records, but the site remembers descriptions you’ve typed in on earlier invoices and displays them in a drop-down list.
Intuit QuickBooks Self-Employed also doesn’t handle sales taxes. You can’t prespecify a variety of tax rates, and there’s no integration with a sales tax service such as Avalara. You have to manually calculate any sales taxes due and, worse, include them as line items. There’s also no report for your sales tax items. However, your payment processing service may add sales tax and report back to you on how much you’ve collected.
The site now allows you to do very simple time tracking. You can add a new client record or select one you’ve already created, then build a simple project. This is not a true project management solution. Intuit QuickBooks Self-Employed uses this term to describe services, and you can only provide a name, description, and hourly rate. Both the client and project fields are optional. Whether you’re simply tracking time for your own purposes or assigning it to a client and project, you can either start and stop a timer or enter your hours manually. Once you’ve saved a time entry, the site displays it and any others you create in a table below the time entry tool. You can view these by date, client, or project. You can’t yet convert time entries into invoices, but you can mark them as paid. Intuit QuickBooks Self-Employed has a ways to go before its time tracking abilities catch up to those found in FreshBooks.
A Simple, Pricey Service
Intuit QuickBooks Self-Employed lacks many of the features that competitors offer, like project management and robust time tracking, item and contact records, sales data exchanges with sites like eBay, and recurring transactions. Still, the service has carved out a niche for itself as an easy-to-use set of tools for a growing market: freelancers or independent contractors who work for themselves full-time or have side hustles. Those individuals need to watch their finances carefully and get assistance preparing for estimated taxes four times a year.
The service provides a user experience rivaled only by that of FreshBooks, and its automatic mileage tracking may appeal to frequent business travelers. Beyond that and the income tax help, though, there’s really no compelling reason to go with Intuit QuickBooks Self-Employed. Many sole proprietors could get by with FreshBooks’ $13.50-per-month level, which is less than Intuit QuickBooks Self-Employed’s regular price. And FreshBooks does so much more in every possible area, including customizable invoicing, time tracking, and income/expense management. It’s our Editors’ Choice winner for smaller-scale accounting this year.
One advantage of using an Intuit solution, though, is that you can upgrade to an application that’s more sophisticated while staying in the same product family. The next step up from Intuit QuickBooks Self-Employed is Intuit QuickBooks Online, which is our Editors’ Choice winner for small business accounting again this year. It offers much more in every possible way, while maintaining the same exceptional user experience found in its more junior version.
While you’re thinking about your money, you should also check out our stories on the best personal finance services and the best tax prep software.
