QuickBooks Pro vs. Premier: What’s the Difference?

Whether you’re self-employed, the owner of a small business, or amongst the Fortune 500, Intuit’s QuickBooks offers a wide range of products to cater to your industry-specific accounting needs.

Even though you might be sure that QuickBooks Desktop 2020 is the best accounting solution for your business, it can be difficult to choose which version would be best-suited for accounting needs.

QuickBooks offers a wide range of desktop solutions including:

1. QuickBooks Pro
2. QuickBooks Premier
3. QuickBooks Enterprise
4. QuickBooks Accountant

This blog will help you understand the features offered by QuickBooks Pro and Premier and choose the best edition for your business:

QuickBooks Pro: Details

Number of Users: QuickBooks Pro supports up to 3 users. Therefore, it is often considered as an ideal accounting solution for small businesses and early-age startups.

QuickBooks Pro is designed to amplify the efficiency of small businesses by simplifying the menial accounting tasks that an accountant, CPA, or bookkeeper performs on a routine basis. It offers various features and functionalities to their users. Let us understand each of those in detail.

1. Automatic Payment Reminders

With scheduled payment reminders in the latest version of the QuickBooks Desktop update, make sure you get paid on time every month. This feature lets you send customized payment reminders to clients with overdue bills and separate lists for late-paying customers to ensure you get paid on time.

2. Add Customer PO Numbers

QuickBooks Desktop Pro lets you modify the subject line of emails by adding the customer Purchase Order (PO) number to it. This eases up the lookup process as you are able to search invoices efficiently.

3. Consolidate Multiple Invoices Into A Single Email

The latest update in the QB Desktop Pro has made it possible to combine multiple invoices for a particular customer into a single email. By doing so, you no longer need to download each invoice manually and attach them to an email while sending it to vendors or customers.

4. Collapse or Expand Columns

With QuickBooks Desktop Pro 2020, you can horizontally contract or expand columns per your convenience from the Customer: Jobs or Class report.

5. Smart Help

The latest update offers enhanced help to QuickBooks desktop users by pressing the F1 key. It redirects the users to Intuit’s community to access help content or talk to a live agent.

6. Employee Self-Setup

QuickBooksDesktop Pro offers a simplified, guided payroll experience to its payroll subscribers so that they can fill out their personal tax details and banking information on their own with expert guidance.

QuickBooks Premier: Details

Number of Users: QuickBooks Premier supports up to 5 users and is considered to be an ideal accounting solution for small-medium businesses.

QuickBooks Premier offers all the features as offered by QuickBooks Pro, plus some additional industry-specific functionalities tailor-made for your business. It performs accounting operations such as job costing, maintaining payrolls, and automatically filling accounting forms, etc.

Let’s find out some of its features in detail:

1. Inventory Reports

QuickBooks Premier gets you much deeper insights into the inventory and sales order management. It comes with the ability to track each piece of inventory and non-inventory items with multiple measurement features.

2. Forecasting

QuickBooks Premier’s advanced reporting features minimize the menial data entry tasks and help accountants and business owners make better business decisions. It generates forecasts to identify future trends and opportunities to help the business thrive.

3. Sales Orders

QuickBooks Premier helps in tracking sales orders with fulfillment worksheets and workflow management. It helps businesses track the current availability of items and backorders to be able to provide their customers with transparent estimates of the stock.

4. Industry-specific Editions

To cater to the industry-specific accounting needs, QuickBooks Premier offers the following editions:

a) General Business

It is an ideal solution for businesses that sell goods to their consumers. This software can help you keep track of all your stock by location, department, and shelf. Also, it helps create bills and invoices for clients by time, material, and phase.

b) General Contractor

This edition of the QuickBooks Premier software can be beneficial for any contracting business that requires advanced job costing and product management features. It helps create job estimates and simplifies tracking.

c) Manufacturing and Wholesale

Manufacturers and wholesalers usually deal with large orders and require strong inventory tracking and reporting features. The QB Premier software simplifies inventory management, profitability tracking, reordering, and product tracking.

d) Nonprofit

This version of the QB software can let nonprofit organizations receive a special tax-exempt from the IRS. This software gives you the ability to track nonprofit reports, donors, and individual donations made by them.

e) Professional Services

Mostly used by experts working with firms like architectural, legal, and medical, this edition of the QuickBooks software offers the ability to send a proposal to clients and create extra reports. Also, it allows you to see the clients with unbilled expenses and bills on one screen as a whole. It simplifies the procedure to send invoices.

f) Retail

Retail store owners like departmental stores or small shop owners who deal with individual customers and sell products in small quantities can benefit from this edition of the QB software. It helps them create sales reports, manage inventory, reorder, track daily sales, and profits.

Comparing the Cost of the Two Products

Now that you know about the features and functionalities offered by both the products, you might want to compare the most crucial parameter, according to most businesses – Cost. While a Premier license would cost your business $499, you’ll get Pro for $299.

There’s no denying that QuickBooks Premier costs significantly higher than the Desktop Pro. Still, at the same time, it offers more users and additional features that can benefit your small business.

Final Thoughts

QuickBooks offers a variety of products to cater to all your accounting software needs. In a nutshell, QuickBooks Pro offers all the essential features required during accounting processes. On the other hand, QuickBooks Premier adds more functionalities and provides deeper insights that could turn out to be advantageous for businesses.

To know more about the QuickBooks products, get in touch with our Solutions Consultant at +1-855-223-4887.