how much is quickbooks online

QuickBooks Online plan tiers, explained

QuickBooks Online is sold in four main tiers — Simple Start, Essentials, Plus, and Advanced — with each step up adding users, more automation, inventory tracking, and reporting depth. Intuit runs promotions constantly (often 50% off for the first 3 months), so the price you see on any given day may not reflect the standard rate.

Rather than quoting exact numbers that will be stale by the time you read this, know the general pattern: Simple Start is built for a single user tracking income and expenses with basic invoicing; Essentials adds bill management and multiple users; Plus adds inventory and project/class tracking, which most product sellers need; Advanced adds custom user permissions, deeper reporting, and batch invoicing for larger teams. Check the current schedule directly on QuickBooks' pricing page before budgeting, since tiers and prices are revised at least annually.

• •Simple Start — single user, basic income/expense tracking, invoicing
• •Essentials — adds bill pay and multiple users
• •Plus — adds inventory tracking, budgeting, project profitability (the tier most Amazon sellers land on)
• •Advanced — custom permissions, batch operations, more granular reporting

What Amazon and Walmart sellers actually need beyond the base subscription

The subscription fee is rarely the real cost of running QuickBooks for an ecommerce business. Amazon settlement reports bundle sales, refunds, FBA fees, advertising spend, storage fees, and reimbursements into one lump deposit every two weeks — QuickBooks doesn't know how to split that automatically. Sellers typically need either a manual bookkeeping process (expensive in hours) or a connector app that maps each settlement line to the right account.

This matters more than it sounds like. More than half of everything sold on Amazon comes from third-party sellers, not Amazon itself, according to Amazon's own investor disclosures — meaning a huge share of QuickBooks' small-business customer base is dealing with exactly this settlement-reconciliation problem, not simple retail sales. Getting it wrong doesn't just create messy books; it distorts your actual product margins because fees and refunds get miscategorized as generic "other expense" instead of tied to specific SKUs or marketplaces.

This is the gap Amazon accounting software that syncs to QuickBooks & Xero is built to close — pulling settlement data in at the transaction level so QuickBooks reflects true unit economics, not just a lump deposit.

Sales tax and 1099-K costs that show up regardless of your QBO plan

No QuickBooks tier automatically solves multi-state sales tax exposure. Since the Supreme Court's 2018 ruling in South Dakota v. Wayfair, states can require out-of-state sellers to collect tax once they cross sales or transaction thresholds — economic nexus, not just physical presence. Amazon and other marketplaces now handle collection and remittance for third-party sales in nearly every state with a sales tax, per marketplace facilitator laws tracked by the Sales Tax Institute, but you're still responsible for registering, filing, and reconciling in states where you have other nexus triggers — inventory storage, employees, or non-marketplace sales.

On top of that, 1099-K reporting thresholds have been shifting; the old flat $20,000/200-transaction rule is being phased down rather than staying fixed, according to the IRS. That means more sellers will receive 1099-Ks that need to reconcile cleanly against their QuickBooks revenue — another reason accurate, transaction-level bookkeeping matters more than which QBO tier you pick.