QuickBooks Self-employed Vs QuickBooks Online

QuickBooks self-employed and QuickBooks online as the name suggests, both are Intuit’s products. They both cater to the needs of different kind of businesses, while QuickBooks self-employed mainly cater to the needs of independent contractors, freelancers, and solopreneurs, QuickBooks Online is mainly for small businesses.

Main Differences Between QuickBooks Self-employed and QuickBooks Online

The main differences between the two Accounting software are as follows:

1. QuickBooks Online helps in tracking business bank and credit card expenses through a business account, it does not provide the feature for tracking business expenses through personal accounts while QuickBooks self-employed provides the feature of tracking the business bank and credit card expenses from business as well as a personal account.
2. QuickBooks Online uses a customized Chart of Account for categorizing the transactions, QuickBooks Desktop uses schedule C (tax return) which cannot be customized for transaction categorization.
3. QuickBooks Online does not estimate quarterly income tax while QuickBooks self-employed does provide the feature of estimating the quarterly income tax.
4. QuickBooks Online does not export directly to turbo tax while QuickBooks online can do so if you purchase the Turbo tax bundle.

The list is not exhaustive, there are some features like integration with other apps, payroll preparation which is present in QuickBooks Online but not there in QuickBooks Self-employed.

How can Business Owners Switch from QuickBooks Online to Self-Employed?

You will have to export the data from QuickBooks Online and cancel your subscription and then sign up for QuickBooks Self-employed (QBSE). You cannot automatically switch from QuickBooks Online to QuickBooks Self-employed as they are both different software programs catering to the need of different kinds of businesses.

1. At the first step, you need to sign in the QuickBooks Online and click on the Gear icon (settings).
2. In the second step, you need to select the export data feature and on the reports tab, select the desired date range.
3. Now add or remove items from the report as per your requirement and click ‘Export to Excel’.