Reaching parity with QuickBooks Essentials
Essentials is where QuickBooks stops being a tool for one person and becomes a set of books for a small firm: three users, proper bills, recurring documents, time and foreign currency. It is also where SQL-Ledger has lived since the beginning. This chapter measures the increment over Simple Start, finds most of it already in place, and sets out the six enhancements that close what remains.
2.1The increment
Everything in Simple Start is in Essentials, so this chapter assumes chapter 1: the eleven enhancements there are taken as done, and only what Essentials adds is measured here. At US$85 a month against $38, Intuit charges $47 for the increment, and it is a short list.
- Three billed users with role-based permissions, plus unlimited time-tracking-only users.
- Full accounts payable: enter bills, track status and due dates, AP ageing, schedule and batch-pay bills, Bill Pay (electronic payment from inside the product), unpaid-bills and vendor-balance reports.
- Recurring transactions: invoices, bills, expenses and journal entries on a schedule.
- Time tracking: employee and contractor hours, billable time pulled onto invoices, QuickBooks Time integration.
- Multi-currency: foreign customers and vendors, home-currency revaluation, a Realised Exchange Gains and Losses report.
- About twenty more reports (forty-plus in all): Business Snapshot, Balance Sheet Summary, P&L Detail, AR and AP Ageing Summary and Detail, Customer Balance Detail, Vendor Balance and Unpaid Bills, Expenses by Vendor, Sales by Customer and by Product Detail, Uninvoiced Charges and Uninvoiced Time, Realised FX Gains and Losses.
- Extras from the 2026 releases: bank-feed batch and inline editing, Intuit Assist payment follow-ups, reputation management and appointment scheduling.
Still not in Essentials: inventory and cost of goods, projects, purchase orders, budgets, classes and locations (the allowance is zero), billable expenses — all Plus, at $140. Batch invoicing, custom roles and an unlimited chart of accounts are Advanced, at $340.
2.2Where our SQL-Ledger stands
Same marks as before: have partial build, with skip for things we choose not to match.
| Essentials capability | Ours | Where it is, or what is missing |
|---|---|---|
| Users | ||
| Three users | have | Unlimited logins per dataset, each with its own preferences, language and number format. |
| Role-based permissions | partial | System → Roles defines named roles as acs exclusion sets and assigns one per employee, merged with the login’s own list. Real, but empty on a new dataset, and enforced only in the menu until chapter 1 item 8. |
| Time-tracking-only users | partial | A login can be restricted to Projects & Jobs → Add Time Card by exclusion, but nothing ties the login to an employee record so a person sees only their own cards. |
| Accounts payable | ||
| Enter bills, due dates, status | have | AP → Add Transaction and Vendor Invoice; due date from the vendor’s terms; Outstanding and Transactions reports. |
| AP ageing, unpaid bills, vendor balances | have | AP → Reports → AP Aging, Outstanding; Vendors → History. |
| Schedule and batch-pay bills | have | Cash → Payments pays many vendors in one pass; Vouchers batch payables and payments for approval before posting — a control QuickBooks has only in Advanced workflows. |
| Bill Pay: send the money from inside the product | build | Payments are recorded, not transmitted. No bank payment file, no payment API. |
| Expenses by Vendor report | have | AP Transactions sorted and subtotalled by vendor, or Vendor History by item. |
| Recurring | ||
| Recurring invoices, bills, expenses, journal entries | have | Any AR, AP, GL transaction, invoice or order can be scheduled; Recurring Transactions lists what is due and posts it, and can email the invoice as it posts. |
| Time | ||
| Record employee and contractor hours | have | Time cards against projects and jobs, with the service and rate; Time Cards reports. |
| Billable time onto invoices | partial | Projects → Generate → Sales Orders turns uninvoiced time into sales orders, which are then invoiced. Two steps where Essentials has one, and no direct “add unbilled time” on the invoice screen. |
| Uninvoiced time report | partial | The Generate screen is the report, but it is a work screen, not something to print or export. |
| Multi-currency | ||
| Foreign customers and vendors, exchange rates on documents | have | Currencies with rates per date; every document carries its rate; receipts and payments in either currency. |
| Revaluation and FX gain/loss | partial | Cash → FX Adjustment revalues open items and posts the difference, but to one combined account, and there is no report of realised gains and losses by period. |
| Reports | ||
| Business Snapshot | partial | Chapter 1 item 6 puts the figures on the dashboard; the Snapshot’s income and expense breakdowns by month are not yet there. |
| Balance Sheet Summary, P&L Detail | have | The statements print at heading level or account level; the GL report filtered by account is the detail. |
| AR/AP Ageing Summary and Detail, Customer Balance Detail | have | Aging with or without the invoice lines; statements per customer. |
| Sales by Customer Detail, by Product Detail | have | Customer History and Goods & Services reports with the invoice lines. |
| Realised FX Gains and Losses | build | Absent; see enhancement 3. |
| Extras | ||
| Bank-feed batch and inline editing | partial | Falls out of the statement import in chapter 1 item 1 if the matching screen is built as a grid with bulk accept. |
| Assisted payment follow-ups | have | Chapter 1 item 3, reminders with escalation, is the same thing without the assistant. |
| Reputation management, appointment scheduling | skip | Not accounting. Not building. |
Of twenty-two capabilities in the increment, we have twelve outright, seven in substance, two are absent, and one we decline. Nothing in Essentials that touches the ledger is missing. What is missing is polish on three workflows — roles, billable time, foreign exchange — and one outward-facing piece, sending payments to the bank.
2.3The six enhancements
1Roles that come ready-made
The mechanism exists: System → Roles holds named acsrole rows,
each an exclusion set, and the employee record points at one. What is missing is
content and teeth. Seed every new dataset with Owner, Bookkeeper
(everything but System and the chart), Sales (customers, quotations, orders,
invoices, receipts), Purchasing (vendors, POs, vendor invoices, payments),
Time only, and Accountant (read-only); let the panel pick the role
when it creates a login instead of leaving it to the employee screen; and have
chapter 1 item 8 enforce the merged list at dispatch. The
Time only role additionally binds the login to its employee so the time-card
screens show only that employee’s cards, which is the Essentials
“time-tracking-only user”.
2Unbilled time on the invoice
An Add unbilled time button on the sales invoice for a customer with open
time cards. It lists the cards by project, date, employee and hours, the user ticks
what to bill, and the lines land on the invoice with the card’s service and rate;
posting marks the cards invoiced (the jcitems.invoice_id link already
exists for the order route). The same selection becomes a printable
Unbilled Time report under Projects → Reports, with the value at rate,
by customer and project, exportable to CSV. The existing Generate → Sales Orders
path stays for firms that want the order step.
3Foreign exchange done properly
Three related fixes. Split the single FX account into FX gain and
FX loss in the defaults (the backlog item), so the income statement shows
them on their own lines. Record, on every receipt and payment against a foreign
invoice, the realised difference between the invoice rate and the settlement rate
as its own acc_trans pair tagged with the invoice — the posting
already happens, but is not distinguishable afterwards. Then a
Realised Exchange Gains and Losses report for a period: invoice, currency,
invoice rate, settlement rate, amount, gain or loss, subtotalled by currency; and an
Unrealised variant that revalues what is still open at a given date without
posting, which is what an accountant wants at year end before deciding whether to
run FX Adjustment.
4Business Snapshot
Extend the dashboard from chapter 1 with the two panels the
Snapshot is known for: income and expenses by month for the trailing twelve, drawn as
bars, and expense breakdown by account for the period, drawn as a ranked list with a
proportion bar rather than a pie. Both come from one query over acc_trans
grouped by month and by account category; both link through to the income statement
for the month or the GL report for the account. Add a who owes me and
whom I owe pair beside them from the ageing queries.
5The report library
Essentials sells a count of reports; ours are fewer, more configurable screens. Prospects compare the counts. A Reports landing page that lists our screens under the names people search for — Expenses by Vendor, Customer Balance Detail, Unpaid Bills, Sales by Product Detail, P&L Detail — each a saved configuration of an existing report (module, columns, sort, subtotal, period), opens the right screen prefilled. Users save their own configurations to the same list. This is the Recall Report feature generalised and given names; it turns the forty-report comparison into a page we win.
6Payment files to the bank
The outward-facing piece. After a payment run in Cash → Payments or a
Vouchers → Payment batch, offer Export payment file in the formats the
banks accept for bulk credits: SEPA pain.001 for the euro area and the
UK Bacs-style CSV most UK banks import, NACHA for the US, and the bank-specific CSV
layouts we meet in Pakistan and the Gulf, each a template over the same payment
records so a new bank is a new template. The vendor record gains bank account fields
(IBAN/BIC, routing/account) with validation. Direct API payment through a provider
is a later step over the same data; the file covers what Bill Pay does for most
Essentials users at no per-transaction fee.
2.4Where that leaves the comparison
With chapter 1 and this chapter done, the hosted install matches Essentials on every accounting capability and exceeds it on the four things a growing firm hits next — unlimited users, purchase orders, inventory and projects — which Intuit sells at Plus and Advanced. The next chapter measures that tier.
Seed and enforce the roles, put unbilled time on the invoice, split and report foreign-exchange differences, finish the dashboard, name the reports, and write payment files — and Essentials is matched, at the price of Simple Start’s enhancements plus six medium items.
2.5Sources
Feature statements are Intuit’s; the Simple Start / Essentials boundary is corroborated by four independent reviewers, whose lists disagree only on whether basic bill entry sits in Simple Start (Intuit now says it does).
- Intuit, Reports included in your QuickBooks Online subscription — quickbooks.intuit.com/learn-support/en-us/help-article/purchase-orders/reports-included-quickbooks-online-subscription/L0s4KrGgr_US_en_US
- Intuit, Learn about usage limits in QuickBooks Online — quickbooks.intuit.com/learn-support/en-us/help-article/intuit-subscriptions/learn-usage-limits-quickbooks-online/L6THMltE4_US_en_US
- Intuit, Are recurring transactions included with Simple Start? — quickbooks.intuit.com/learn-support/en-us/banking/are-recurring-transactions-included-with-quicken-online-simple/00/1282373
- Fit Small Business, QuickBooks Online comparison — fitsmallbusiness.com/quickbooks-online-comparison/
- Fondo, Simple Start vs Essentials — fondo.com/blog/quickbooks-online-simple-start-vs-essentials
- Certum Solutions, QuickBooks Online plans compared and Price increase August 2026 — certumsolutions.com/library/
- Mission Accounting, QuickBooks Online comparison 2026 — missionaccountinghelp.com/customers/quickbooks-online-comparison-2026
- Fourlane, QuickBooks Online pricing changes 2026 — fourlane.com/quickbooks-online-pricing-changes-2026-new-rates-and-fourlane-discounts/
- NerdWallet, QuickBooks Online pricing — nerdwallet.com/business/software/learn/quickbooks-pricing
- Ledger123, SQL-Ledger 3.2.12 improvement backlog (doc/todo.md), items 13, 24, 25, 27.