Reaching parity with QuickBooks Advanced
Advanced is the top of QuickBooks Online, at US$340 a month and twenty-five users. It is sold to firms that have outgrown Plus on control rather than on accounting: who may approve what, who may see what, what happens automatically, and what can be recovered. This chapter measures that increment, finds two modules we lack and three control layers we have only in part, and sets out nine enhancements. Above Advanced there is only Intuit Enterprise Suite, quoted, not priced.
4.1The increment
Advanced has risen faster than any other tier — $150 in 2021, $200, $235, $275, and $340 from August 2026 — because Intuit keeps bundling into it what it used to sell separately. The August release folded in the Elite payroll base fee, Bill Pay Elite, the construction and professional-services editions, and the new AI layer. Strip the bundles out and the increment over Plus is still the longest list in the book.
- Scale: 25 users, 3 accountants, unlimited chart of accounts, unlimited classes and locations, 12 custom fields per form type (3 of them printed), reports-only and time-only users outside the cap.
- Custom roles: per feature area, per transaction type, with view / create / edit / delete / approve as separate rights; sales access restrictable by location. Banking stays all-or-nothing.
- Workflows and approvals: sixty-odd templates (overdue stamps, reminders, statements, deposit prompts) and custom rules — a transaction type, conditions on amount, party, status, dates or custom fields, and an action: remind, approve, notify, send, update. Bill approval with approver groups of up to five and a minimum count; invoice approval before sending; a separate payment-release approval from Bill Pay Elite.
- Batch entry: grid screens for invoices, bills, expenses and cheques; CSV invoice import capped at a thousand lines; batch reclassification of bank lines.
- Revenue recognition: per service item, straight-line by days or by period, monthly or daily calculation, posting to a deferred-revenue liability with the periodic journals generated automatically. Invoices only; credits by hand.
- Fixed assets: a register fed by hand, CSV or from the purchase; straight-line, 150% and double declining balance with mid-month convention; the month-end depreciation journal posted automatically; disposal with gain or loss.
- Spreadsheet Sync: an Excel and Google Sheets add-in that pulls any report live, and posts or bulk-edits invoices, bills, journals, POs, lists and the chart, a thousand records at a time; combined reports across several companies, which is the only consolidation Advanced has.
- Backup and restore: continuous capture plus daily backups, point-in-time restore within the previous calendar year, company copies. Budgets, inventory quantities, recurring transactions, custom reports and the audit log are not restored.
- Reporting: a custom report builder with pivots and saved templates, the Performance Center with a library of KPIs and industry benchmarks, KPI scorecards, branded management-report packs, an AI 13-week cash and P&L forecast, project cost estimates with an Estimates vs Actuals report, and expense claims with their own approval roles.
- The August 2026 bundle: Workforce Elite payroll (base fee waived, $12 per employee remains), Bill Pay Elite (free ACH, payment approvals, unlimited 1099 e-filing), the construction edition (phased budgets, change orders, AIA-style progress billing, WIP over/under billing) and professional-services edition (milestone billing, change orders), stock reservation from sales orders and automatic POs at the reorder point, Continuously Clean Books, Intuit Intelligence, and Priority Circle 24/7 support with training.
4.2Where our SQL-Ledger stands
Marks as before: have partial build skip. Items already assigned to an earlier chapter are marked as they will stand once that chapter is done.
| Advanced capability | Ours | Where it is, or what is missing |
|---|---|---|
| Scale | ||
| 25 users, unlimited chart, classes and locations | have | All unlimited; the chart of accounts has never had a cap and departments never had a count. |
| 12 custom fields per form, 3 printed | partial | Chapter 1 item 9 adds user-defined fields with no fixed count and all of them printable through the templates. |
| Control | ||
| Roles per area and per transaction type | have | System → Roles excludes any menu path, so a role can hold AR → Sales Invoice and not AR → Credit Note. Enforced at dispatch after chapter 1 item 8. |
| View, create, edit, delete and approve as separate rights | build | An exclusion is by screen, not by verb: whoever can open the invoice screen can post from it. There is no read-only right below the whole-login accountant seat. |
| Data restricted by location | build | Departments and warehouses are dimensions on the data, not on the login; a user in one branch sees every branch. |
| Bill approval before payment | have | Vouchers: payables are entered into a batch, reviewed and posted by whoever holds the Vouchers menu; nothing is paid until posted. Payment batches and reversals likewise. The mechanism Advanced sells as a workflow is a module here. |
| Invoice approval before sending | build | Vouchers cover AP and GL only; an invoice is posted by whoever raises it. |
| Rule-based workflows: conditions and approver groups | build | Nothing routes by amount, vendor or user; the voucher batch is a queue, not a rule. |
| Reminders, overdue stamps, statements on a schedule | partial | Chapter 1 item 3 schedules reminders; statements and low-stock lists follow on the same scheduler in chapters 2 and 3. |
| Audit trail of approvals | partial | The audit log records posting; the voucher records who posted the batch; nothing records who approved what, since approval is not yet a distinct act. |
| Volume | ||
| Batch entry of invoices, bills, expenses, cheques | have | Generate Sales Invoices from orders; Consolidate orders; CSV import of invoices, orders, payments and GL with no thousand-line cap; batch print, email and queue for every document type. |
| Batch reclassification of bank lines | partial | Falls out of the statement-matching grid in chapter 1 item 1. |
| Modules | ||
| Revenue recognition | build | Absent. A prepaid annual contract is posted to income on the invoice date, or deferred by a hand journal each month. |
| Fixed asset register with depreciation | build | Absent. Item 48 on the backlog. Assets are accounts; depreciation is a recurring GL transaction the user sets up. |
| Expense claims | build | Absent; the receipt inbox of chapter 1 item 4 is the intake it would need. |
| Project cost estimates, Estimates vs Actuals | partial | Budgets by project in chapter 3 item 1 and the profitability page in item 4 give the numbers; the report needs naming. |
| Data | ||
| Spreadsheet Sync: pull reports live into Excel or Sheets | partial | Every report exports CSV after chapter 1 item 7, and the hosted database can be opened read-only over ODBC; there is no add-in and no refresh button. |
| Spreadsheet Sync: post and bulk-edit from a sheet | partial | CSV import posts new records for eleven kinds; nothing round-trips an existing record out, edited, and back. |
| Combined reports across companies | partial | Several datasets per account on the panel, each a database; the statements are run one at a time and combined by hand. |
| Continuous backup, point-in-time restore | partial | System → Backup saves or mails a full dump; Maintenance → Restore loads one; the panel downloads a backup on demand; the host takes nightly dumps. Restore is to a dump, not to a minute, and nothing on it is self-service beyond “last night”. What is restored is everything, which Advanced cannot say. |
| Company copies for trying things | partial | The panel can create a dataset; copying a live one into a sandbox is an operator task. |
| Reporting | ||
| Custom report builder, saved templates | partial | Every report chooses columns, filters, sort and subtotal, and Recall Report saves the choice; the report library of chapter 2 item 5 names them. No pivot, no cross-module builder. |
| KPI scorecards, Performance Center | build | The dashboard of chapters 1 and 2 shows figures; nothing defines a KPI, trends it or compares it to a target. |
| Management report packs | partial | Chapter 1 item 8 bundles the statements into one PDF; commentary and charts are not in it. |
| 13-week cash forecast | partial | The 90-day planner of chapter 1 item 6 is the same horizon from open items and recurring entries; a P&L forecast is not in it. |
| The bundle | ||
| Payroll | partial | HR → Payroll posts pay with wage and deduction tables and prints payslips; the tables are not date-effective and there is no filing. Backlog item 50. Advanced’s payroll is a US filing service, which is a different thing to compare. |
| Bill Pay Elite: ACH, payment approvals, 1099 e-filing | partial | Payment files in chapter 2 item 6, 1099 totals in chapter 1 item 11; no e-filing, and payment approval needs the workflow of enhancement 3 below. |
| Construction and professional-services editions | partial | Projects and jobs with time, stores and finished goods cover the costing; phased budgets arrive with chapter 3 item 1 and milestone billing with item 7. Change orders and a WIP report are not there. |
| Stock reserved by sales orders, automatic POs | have | Open orders count against stock in Supply/Demand and Requirements; Generate Purchase Orders raises the POs from the shortfall; chapter 3 item 6 makes it nightly. |
| AI bookkeeping, conversational BI | skip | Not a ledger capability; revisited if it ever is. |
| Priority Circle: 24/7 support, training | have | Support from the people who run and modify the software is included on every Ledger123 plan; the manual is public. |
Thirty-one capabilities: six we have, sixteen in substance or already assigned to an earlier chapter, eight absent, one declined. The absences fall into three groups: two modules (revenue recognition, fixed assets), three controls (rights by verb, data by location, rule-based approval), and three conveniences built on things earlier chapters supply (invoice approval, expense claims, KPI scorecards). Nothing in Advanced’s scale column applies: the limits it lifts are ones we never had.
4.3The nine enhancements
1Fixed asset register
A fixedasset table (number, description, department, project, asset
account, accumulated-depreciation account, expense account, cost, acquisition date,
depreciation start, method, life, salvage, status) with a depreciation
table of periods posted. Assets are created from a vendor-invoice line (an Add to
asset register flag on lines posted to an asset account), by hand, or by CSV
import. Methods: straight-line, declining balance at any rate, and units of
production; mid-month or full-month convention; more than one book per asset so tax
depreciation can differ from the accounts. A Post depreciation screen shows
the period’s charge by asset, posts it as one GL transaction with the audit link
back, and can be scheduled. Disposal takes a date and proceeds, posts the cost and
accumulated-depreciation reversal and the gain or loss, and stops the schedule.
Reports: register, depreciation schedule, additions and disposals for the year,
net book value reconciled to the balance sheet.
2Deferred revenue and prepaid expense schedules
A recognition setting on a service (or on a part, which Advanced cannot
do): deferral account, method (straight-line by days, or even by period), frequency,
and term, or a term taken from dates on the invoice line. Posting an invoice with such
a line credits the deferral account instead of income and writes a
deferral schedule; the same in mirror for a vendor invoice against a
prepayment account. A nightly job, or a Recognise screen for those who want
to see it, posts each period’s release as a GL transaction linked to the
invoice. Credit invoices reverse the unrecognised balance rather than the whole
amount, which is the case Advanced leaves to hand journals. A Deferred Revenue report
lists, per invoice, invoiced, recognised, and remaining, agreeing to the liability
account.
3Approvals as rules
Vouchers already separate entry from posting. Generalise them: an
approvalrule (transaction type, condition on amount, party, department or
custom field, approver role, number of approvals required) and an
approval record per transaction. A transaction that matches a rule is
saved unposted with status awaiting approval, appears in an
Approvals screen for anyone holding the approver role, and posts when the
required count is reached; rejection returns it to the author with a note. Sales
invoices join AP and GL, so invoice approval before sending, bill approval before
posting and payment release before the payment file are three rules on one
mechanism. Every approval is an audit-trail row with user and time, which is the
approval trail Advanced advertises.
4Rights by verb
Extend the access list from paths to paths with verbs. An exclusion of
AR--Sales Invoice hides the screen as now; a new form
AR--Sales Invoice:post,delete shows the screen and withholds those
actions, rendering the buttons disabled and refusing them at dispatch. Verbs are
post, delete, print, email, approve, and
the dispatcher maps every action sub to one. The Roles screen gains a verb column per
path. This gives a read-only right at any granularity, and the accountant seat of
chapter 1 becomes simply a role with every verb withheld.
5Data by department
A department_id list on the employee record. When it is set, every
query in the transaction reports, customer and vendor lists, and the order and
invoice screens carries department_id IN (…), and new
transactions default to and are locked to those departments. Warehouses get the same
treatment for stock screens. Implemented once in the shared query helpers rather than
per screen, so the restriction cannot be forgotten by a new report. This is
Advanced’s sales-by-location restriction extended to purchasing and stock,
which Advanced does not offer.
6Point-in-time restore and company copies
Two operator features made self-service on the panel. Continuous archiving of the PostgreSQL write-ahead log per cluster gives point-in-time recovery for every dataset; the panel offers Restore to… with a date and time in the past thirty days (longer on request), restores into a new dataset alongside the live one, and lets the user compare and then swap, so nothing is lost by restoring. The same machinery gives Copy this company: a sandbox dataset, clearly marked, with its own login, expiring in thirty days unless kept. What is restored is the whole database, including the audit log, budgets and stock, which is the sentence to put on the comparison page.
7Spreadsheet round-trip
Three parts. A read-only PostgreSQL role per dataset with a guide to opening it
from Excel and Sheets, so reports refresh in the sheet without any add-in. A set of
reporting views (v_gl, v_ar, v_ap,
v_stock) that present the ledger in the shapes a spreadsheet wants.
And Export for editing on the customer, vendor, part, service and chart
lists and on GL transactions: a CSV with the record ids, which the existing importer
accepts back with update semantics when an id is present. That is
Spreadsheet Sync’s bulk-edit path without the thousand-record cap or the
add-in.
8Combined statements across datasets
For an account that owns several datasets, a panel report that runs the balance sheet, income statement and trial balance across a chosen set, converts each to a reporting currency at a chosen rate, aligns them by account number, and prints them side by side with a total column. Elimination entries live in a small table on the panel keyed by period. This is Advanced’s combined report done on the server, and a step short of Intuit Enterprise Suite’s intercompany automation, which is the point at which a group needs a group ledger rather than several.
9KPIs, scorecards, and an Estimates vs Actuals report
A kpi definition (name, numerator query, denominator query, period,
target, direction) seeded with the twenty that matter to a small firm — gross
margin, debtor days, creditor days, stock days, current ratio, revenue per employee,
overdue percentage — each computed from the ledger and shown on the dashboard
as a tile with a twelve-month sparkline and its target. A Scorecard report
lists them by period for the management pack of chapter 1, and the
pack gains a commentary field per section. Expense claims are the last small piece:
the receipt inbox of chapter 1 item 4 gains a claim mode
where an employee’s uploads become one AP transaction against the employee as
vendor, routed through the approval rule of enhancement 3, and paid by the payment
file of chapter 2.
4.4What we will not build
The AI layer. Continuously Clean Books, Invoicing on Autopilot and conversational BI are Intuit’s bet on a different product; the bank rules and receipt OCR of chapter 1 deliver the part of it that keeps books clean.
Change orders and WIP billing. The construction edition is a vertical. If a construction customer arrives, change orders on sales orders and a WIP over/under-billing report on project budgets are a chapter of their own.
US payroll filing and 1099 e-filing. Filing is jurisdiction by jurisdiction and needs a provider; the payroll module produces the figures and the 1099 report produces the totals.
Intercompany automation. Enhancement 8 combines; it does not automate intercompany postings. That is Enterprise Suite territory and a separate product.
4.5Where that leaves the book
Four chapters, thirty-three enhancements. Chapters 1 and 2 are the ones that change what a prospect sees on the first day; chapter 3 adds planning; this chapter adds control and recovery. Done in that order, each chapter’s items build on the last: the scheduler from the reminders carries the depreciation run; the voucher module carries the approval rules; the receipt inbox carries the expense claims; the dashboard carries the KPIs. The ledger underneath was never the gap, and at the end of the book it still is not.
Add a fixed-asset register and deferral schedules, turn vouchers into rules and the access list into verbs, restrict data by department, make restore and copies self-service, open the database to spreadsheets, combine datasets, and put KPIs on the dashboard — and there is nothing in QuickBooks Online, at any tier, that a Ledger123 dataset cannot do.
4.6Sources
Intuit’s help articles for each module; reviewers for the price history and for the limits Intuit’s own pages do not state. Where Intuit and reviewers disagreed (whether disposal journals are automatic, whether cloud-archive backups are scheduled) the text takes the conservative reading.
- Intuit, QuickBooks Online Advanced features — quickbooks.intuit.com/accounting/advanced-features/
- Intuit, Add and manage custom roles — quickbooks.intuit.com/learn-support/en-us/help-article/access-permissions/add-manage-custom-roles-quickbooks-online-advanced/L8Ugph7xl_US_en_US
- Intuit, Use workflows to send reminders and approvals — quickbooks.intuit.com/learn-support/en-us/help-article/feature-preferences/use-workflows-quickbooks-online-advanced-send/L6uaB8H5G_US_en_US
- Intuit, Set up bill approval and payment release workflows — quickbooks.intuit.com/learn-support/en-us/help-article/manage-workflows/set-use-bill-approval-payment-release-workflows/L1IOLL9hv_US_en_US
- Intuit, Set up a revenue recognition schedule — quickbooks.intuit.com/learn-support/en-us/help-article/accounting-standards/set-revenue-recognition-schedule-quickbooks-online/L0edAQ1Eg_US_en_US
- Intuit, Add and manage fixed assets — quickbooks.intuit.com/learn-support/en-us/help-article/fixed-assets/add-manage-fixed-assets-quickbooks-online-advanced/L19788yU0_US_en_US
- Intuit, Spreadsheet Sync FAQ and Combine reports from multiple companies — quickbooks.intuit.com/learn-support/en-us/help-article/accounting-bookkeeping/spreadsheet-sync-faq/L3FiuAq13_US_en_US · …/balance-sheet/combine-reports-multiple-companies-using-sync/L4fqueO4D_US_en_US
- Intuit, Back up and restore your company — quickbooks.intuit.com/learn-support/en-us/help-article/back-data/back-restore-quickbooks-online-advanced-company/L9sTCQn9P_US_en_US
- Intuit, Create and edit custom fields and Learn about usage limits — quickbooks.intuit.com/learn-support/en-us/help-article/purchase-orders/create-edit-custom-fields-quickbooks-online/L56PQNif3_US_en_US · …/intuit-subscriptions/learn-usage-limits-quickbooks-online/L6THMltE4_US_en_US
- Intuit, Compare project cost estimates vs actuals — quickbooks.intuit.com/learn-support/en-us/help-article/manage-projects/compare-project-cost-estimates-vs-actuals-online/L9oxsLKqN_US_en_US
- Intuit, What’s new in QuickBooks Advanced, August 2026 and QuickBooks price changes — quickbooks.intuit.com/r/product-update/whats-new-quickbooks-advanced-august-2026/ · …/quickbooks-price-changes/
- Intuit, Priority Circle — quickbooks.intuit.com/priority-circle/
- Intuit, Intuit Enterprise Suite pricing — erp.intuit.com/pricing/
- Booksla, QuickBooks price history — booksla.com/quickbooks-price-history/
- Certum Solutions, Advanced backup and restore, 2026 update and Reporting after Fathom — certumsolutions.com/library/
- Insightful Accountant, QBO Advanced automated workflows; Construction financial capabilities; The Expense Claims hub — insightfulaccountant.com
- Fondo, Advanced vs Plus — fondo.com/blog/advanced-vs-quickbooks-online-plus
- Ledger123, SQL-Ledger 3.2.12 improvement backlog (doc/todo.md), items 13, 22, 33, 48, 50.