QuickBooks Self-Employed Review

37 Comments

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Brooks Robbins May 31, 2021 at 6:13 pm

Organization Name: 5005664

AVOID QUICKBOOKS SELF EMPLOYED. MAJOR GLITCHES FOR THE LAST FEW YEARS BUT RECENTLY A GLITCH IS NOW REMOVING GST FROM ALREADY SENT OUT INVOICES, COSTING BUSINESSES OWNERS ALOT OF MONEY. THIS SOFTWARE NEEDS TO BE TAKEN OFF THE MARKET. ABSOLUTELY NO PHONE SUPPORT. DATA IS NOT TRANSFERABLE EVEN BETWEEN QUICKBOOKS VERSIONS. WHAT A SCAM THIS IS. IVE BEEN USING IT FOR 2 YEARS BUT WANTED OUT AFTER 2 MONTHS, JUST HAVENT HAD TIME TO TRANSFER ALL DATA MANUALLY WHICH IS REQUIRED. NOW I AM STUCK WITH IT STORING 2 FULL YEARS OF NONTRANSFERABLE DATA WITH A GLITCH THAT MAKES THE PROGRAM USELESS, MONTHLY FEES ARE STILL BEING CHARGED, NO PHONE SUPPORT AVAILABLE. ABSOLUTE NIGHTMARE!!!

1

This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Harold October 1, 2019 at 10:52 pm

Organization Name: Wholesome Wallet

I like QuickBooks self employed. It’s been helping me with the accounting for my business.

4

This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Simon Ste-Marie June 4, 2019 at 7:47 am

Hi,Please close my account. I registered 75 min ago, linked my credit card, bank account, edited my info, downloaded the app (as told to do). Then, tried to log in online and with the app, doesn’t work even says that I don’t have a plan for the app (I choose the self employed because of the milage tracking… and I can’t use the app ???? ), called to ask questions, being told that only chat is possible, chatted with one guy, told me that it was not the good chat because it was the self employed, got the good chat, chatted with another guy, be told that it was only by email for my account to be send a ticket… well…money back please and close my account. Please send me an email when my account will be close.Thanks

1

This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.

Jessica Dinsmore June 7, 2019 at 5:32 pm

Hi Simon,

Unfortunately Merchant Maverick can’t do that for you- we wish we could! You’ll need to get in touch of QuickBooks directly to discuss your options. We wish you the best of luck!

This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Ummyusuf Sahar May 4, 2019 at 9:43 am

Organization Name: Moda Management LLC

I’ve been using QB products for a year and a half. I have the self employed and QB online versions. The programs are pretty easy to figure out. However if I need to SPEAK to a person on the phone, forget about it. I had a problem with missing transactions in QB. The problem lasted for 3 months due to bad communication. Now I have an issue signing in the program. Again, no one to speak to. both issues could be fixed in minutes instead of days, if i could just speak to a person instead of playing email tag.

2

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Alfred Wong April 15, 2019 at 12:08 pm

I only just started using Quickbooks self-employed mobile app. I haven’t used all its features yet but I’m having a lot of issues with setting rules for expense transactions; namely they don’t work at all! After having inputted some expenses manually I set a list of rules for categorizing my expenses as well as split expenses for business use of my home, but not a single one worked when I try to input new entries. Not only that but I can’t even manually choose the split option if I try to input my home office expenses. There’s no phone support for QBSE, only email and the guy tells me to do the same thing over and over again, to no avail. I tried reinstalling the app but it did nothing. So for now while it may be convenient for keeping track of my direct expenses it’s very limited due to the problems I am having. The tech support is just terrible by today’s standards.

2

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Randolph Pazdur November 20, 2018 at 7:39 pm

Organization Name: PBreefs

I purchased and pay the monthly subscription to keep track of milage.When it works, its dead on.BUT, more often than not, it does not track my miles. Whats the sense of using/paying this app for one reason only, when it only works 35-40% of the time.I originally decided to use it because it integrates with QB so easily, but without the tracking feature working, I have to manually enter each trip… and this could be as many as a weeks worth at a time.I am canceling my subscription, and entering my miles manually now since thats what I am doing with the app most of the time anyways.

2

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Robert January 30, 2018 at 5:12 pm

Organization Name: Affordable Advertising Solutions LLC

I’m one month in to using the self employed version. Syncing and importing transactions from my business checking account went as planned. However, when I synced my business PayPal account and imported transactions it showed quite a few of the payments I received via PayPal as double income deposits. I have thousands of transactions thru PayPal each year.I reached out to their email support and after going back and forth via email for several hours to find out why, they came back with this answer….”I understand, Robert.I am hoping for your understanding that whatever transaction reflected on your Paypal account, those are the same transactions to reflect as well on your QuickBooks Self-Employed account since we are a read only system as mentioned on the previous email. What I can suggest is to Exclude the other amount if these two are the same.”The whole purpose of paying for Intuit Quickbooks was to automate my transaction record keeping to free me up from weeks of preparing my tax info for my CPA. So with this solution I still have to stop running my business and spend days filtering thru transactions so that I’m not being double taxed on inaccurate deposits.If you use PayPal as part of your billing and payment transactions I would not use their Self-Employed solution.I’m still looking for a viable solution to help with this. Any suggestions?Thank you,Robert

2

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Rebecca January 29, 2018 at 8:42 am

Organization Name: Reith Stripe

I’ve used TurboTax the last few years to do my husband and my’s joint return. We’re both self employed. His business has grown a bit and using Excel spreadsheets to enter info into Turbo is getting more time consuming. If I use this self employed software and it integrates with Turbo for taxes, can I still add my self employed income separately to complete the federal return?
Thanks,
RR

This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.

Chelsea Krause January 30, 2018 at 8:24 am

Hi Rebecca,

I just spoke to Intuit and they said that is definitely possible. They said you would just use QuickBooks Self-Employed with Turbo Tax as usual and when you’re actually filing with Turbo Tax it’ll walk you through how to add his additional income. Turbo Tax should have some support articles in their customer service center that will help with this as well.

I hope that helps and happy filing!

-Chelsea Krause

This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Dave Peckham January 4, 2018 at 9:57 am

Question around who owns your data for the Quickbooks Self employed with Turbo Tax option.
My data is loaded into the cloud. How do I download my data to my PC if I need it for an IRS audit? or if i retire and need to keep it for the next 7 years? What do they charge me? It seems no one at Quickbooks knows the answer or wants to tell me the costs. Quickbooks doesn’t even seem to know after 3 calls into their support teams. Can you help with an answer please?

This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.

Chelsea Krause January 4, 2018 at 10:40 am

Hi Dave,

Thanks for reaching out! I know QuickBooks is not always the easiest company to get a hold of, so I’m happy to help.

Before filing for taxes, you can export data directly from QuickBooks Self-Employed for your records (including Transactions, Miles, and all Reports). Read our post How To Get the Most Out Of Your Accounting Software This Tax Season to learn which reports to save in case of an audit.

You can also use Turbo Tax to download your current and previous tax records so long as you have paid for Turbo Tax this year. Since you are paying for and using QuickBooks Self-Employed with Turbo Tax, you should be able to follow these instructions to access records.

I hope this helps!

Best wishes,
-Chelsea Krause

This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Amber August 12, 2017 at 1:01 am

Katherine,

Former bookkeeper with a lot of experience with QuickBooks online, but I always worked under supervision of the CPA and almost never actually prepared taxes, payroll, or quarterlies (or very limited experience of these anyway).

I now have a small S Corp doing strictly consulting for one company that I contract to, and basically no invoicing needed.

I don’t mind not being able to reconcile.

What I really need assistance with from the software is quarteries, how I should be doing payroll, and annual tax returns

Cost wise, or otherwise, would you recommend QuickBooks online with TurboTax, or QuickBooks self-employed with TurboTax?

Thank you!!

This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.

Chelsea Krause August 14, 2017 at 9:59 am

Hi Amber,

Thanks for reaching out! My name is Chelsea Krause, and I’ve taken over Katherine’s position as the head of our accounting reviews here at Merchant Maverick.

It sounds to me like QuickBooks Self-Employed might be a better fit for your company. Since you are already familiar with QuickBooks Online, QuickBooks Self-Employed should be very easy for you to use and get used to. QuickBooks Self-Employed also calculates your quarterly estimated taxes, supports Schedule C’s, tracks mileage deductions, calculates home office deductions, and allows you to separate personal and business expenses if needed.

The only tax support QuickBooks Online offers is 1099s and Sales Tax Returns. QuickBooks Online is also much more expensive than QuickBooks Self Employed. The cheapest QuickBooks Online plan is $15/mo and you’d have to pay an extra $25/mo for payroll and tax support. In addition, the self-employed version of Turbo Tax is $115, so you’d be looking at $535/year (not including the cost of additional payroll employees). On the other hand, QuickBooks Self-Employed with Turbo Tax is $17/mo, or $204/yr to give you some perspective.

However, if you are running payroll for more people than yourself, I’d definitely take into consideration that QuickBooks Self-Employed doesn’t offer payroll support.

I hope this helps! Let us know if you have any further questions.

-Chelsea Krause

This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Suzanne May 30, 2017 at 9:08 am

Hi Chelsea – I’m an accountant and one of my new clients has been using this software and from an accounting perspective, I think it stinks. I can’t find anywhere to reconcile the bank account. Am I missing this or does it not exist?
Thanks, Suzanne

This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.

Chelsea Krause June 2, 2017 at 9:55 am

Hi Suzanne,

Thanks for reaching out! You’re not missing anything. There isn’t a bank reconciliation feature in QuickBooks Self-Employed, which is one of the biggest drawbacks of the software. Users can import bank statements or connect to their bank accounts in order to track and categorize expenses–but that’s about it.

Best wishes,
Chelsea Krause

This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Alexander April 10, 2017 at 10:29 am

Thank you for your thorough review of QuickBooks Self-Employed, Chelsea. I really appreciate your comments regarding QBSE being more of a [federal] tax reporting app by making it very easy to categorize expenses as business or personal, and tracking mileage.I’m taking a second look at QBSE and am trying to decide between it and Everlance. Leaning toward the latter because of it’s exporting capabilities. The tradeoff between QBSE and Everlance appears to be the federal tax reporting capabilities and filing if you opt for the QBSE+TurboTax package, versus the data portability of Everlance.Do you have any thoughts on this?Every year I go thru days of exporting spreadsheets for income and expenses from MINT, which I’ve been using since 2009. I find it can do everything I need from an accounting perspective, if you know how to properly setup categories and tags, and are disciplined about categorizing and tagging transactions. I signed up for a QBSE free-trial last April (13th > last minute Larry here!), thinking QBSE would automatically assign personal vs business expenses. Of course this was not the case, and that is what you get when you take a shortcut that leads one down the road to hell rather than the path to salvation…but I digress.Your comments about QBSE support are reminiscent of what I went through when I contacted them for instructions about completely deleting my existing data, essentially doing an account reset, so I could do a fresh import of my now properly categorized 2015 MINT data after tax season, and move forward with 2016. I was told to “ignore” previous transactions, and never got a clear answer on how to delete existing transactions at that time. I concluded that I should just set up a new QBSE account. I didn’t want to do this because I thought MINT and QBSE would link to each other and I would have a complete tax reporting and expense tracking solution. I now know this is not the case, that the import of MINT transactions was a first-time set-up. This feature looks to have been discontinued.Thanks in advance for any feedback!Alexander

2

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Chelsea Krause April 24, 2017 at 12:00 pm

Hi Alexander,
Thanks for reaching out! Since I don’t know whole lot about your business, I’m not sure I can give you a definitive answer about which way to go. But, that won’t keep me from trying so here are my general thoughts about the concerns you brought up.
I have never tested Everlance myself, but from what I’ve seen of the software, you’re right in that you’d be losing tax support, but you would also be losing invoicing and reporting. I’m not sure how important these features are to you or your business. To me, it seems that as long as you are using Mint, you will have to do your fair share of exporting and importing data, as it doesn’t integrate with other software.
If you don’t want to keep doing this, another option could be to move to another accounting software entirely where you can easily manage your personal and business expenses along with tax support. Wave is probably the best software for separating personal and business expense, but its reports and exporting are limited and there is no tax support. FreeAgent might be more up your alley. It offers personal and business expense management, tax support, and a full set of accounting features if you think you’re ready for a full accounting program. So if spending less time on exporting is your main concern, this could be a good solution. But if your main concern is Turbo Tax support, it’s important to know that while other software does offer tax support, QuickBooks Self-Employed is the only software that integrates directly with TurboTax. Ultimately, I would think of which feature is most important to you and I’d choose a solution from there.
I hope some part of this was helpful! Please let me know if you have any more questions.

This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.