Reaching parity with QuickBooks Plus
Plus is the QuickBooks tier for a firm that holds stock, buys on purchase orders, runs jobs and wants to know which of them made money. It is the first tier that competes with what SQL-Ledger was built for. This chapter measures the increment over Essentials, finds SQL-Ledger ahead on inventory, purchasing and projects, level on classes, and behind on one thing — budgets — and sets out the seven enhancements that make the match complete.
3.1The increment
Plus costs US$140 a month, $55 over Essentials, for five users and five capabilities that Intuit holds back from the lower tiers. Each one has been a module in SQL-Ledger since the 2.x series, which is why the comparison at this tier turns around: for the first time the question is what QuickBooks lacks.
- Inventory: quantity on hand, cost of goods posted at sale (FIFO, or the moving-average option added in 2026), reorder points with low-stock alerts that raise a PO to the preferred vendor, bundles (up to fifty items sold as one line), quantity adjustments, inventory valuation reports, a physical-inventory worksheet. One stock location; no assemblies or bills of material; no serial, lot or expiry tracking; no units of measure. Since 2026 the lower tiers can buy inventory as a $40 add-on.
- Purchase and sales orders: POs raised and emailed, pulled into a bill in one click, received in part with the balance left open, with open-PO reporting; item receipts (goods in before the bill) and sales orders arrived in 2026, Plus and Advanced only.
- Projects: income, expenses, time and unbilled items gathered by project; a project-profitability report with labour costed at an hourly rate per employee.
- Classes and locations: a class on every line and a location on every transaction, up to forty in total; Profit & Loss and Balance Sheet by class or location.
- Budgets: Profit & Loss budgets by month, optionally by class, customer or location; Balance Sheet budgets; Budget Overview and Budget vs Actuals reports; budgets copied forward with a percentage uplift.
- Also: billable expenses with a default markup passed to the customer, unlimited reports-only users, 1099 contractor reports, and about twenty-five more reports for a claimed sixty-five-plus. Progress invoicing, often listed here, is in fact in every tier.
Held back for Advanced ($340): batch invoicing, custom roles, approval workflows, revenue recognition, fixed-asset accounting, spreadsheet sync, backup and restore, KPI dashboards and forecasting, twenty-five users, an unlimited chart of accounts and unlimited classes — and, since August 2026, bundled payroll and Bill Pay Elite. Not tier-gated but new in 2026: native Shopify, Amazon and eBay connectors that import sales, fees and payouts against inventory SKUs.
3.2Where our SQL-Ledger stands
Marks as before: have partial build skip.
| Plus capability | Ours | Where it is, or what is missing |
|---|---|---|
| Inventory | ||
| Quantity on hand, cost of goods at sale | have | Parts carry on-hand and cost; each sale allocates cost FIFO against the purchase invoices that brought the stock in, and posts COGS. Returns reverse the same layers. |
| Reorder points and low-stock alerts | partial | Every part has a reorder point (rop) and the Requirements and Supply/Demand reports list what is short. Nothing alerts; a person has to open the report. |
| Bundles | have | Kits: sold as one line, printed expanded or collapsed, components relieved from stock. Assemblies go further — a bill of material stocked as a finished good. |
| Inventory adjustments | have | Goods & Services → Stock Adjustment, and Stock Assembly for builds. |
| Inventory valuation report | partial | The parts report shows on-hand and cost, so value is a column away; there is no as-at-date valuation that agrees to the inventory account, and no physical-count worksheet. |
| Multiple locations, serial and lot numbers | have | Warehouses with transfers; serial number, lot and expiry per invoice line. Plus has none of these. |
| Purchasing | ||
| Sales orders | have | Sales orders since the beginning, with partial shipment, consolidation, generation of POs from the order, and the storefront writing straight into them. |
| Purchase orders to bill | have | PO → receive in part or full → vendor invoice, with the balance staying open on the PO; RFQs before the PO; POs generated from sales orders or from requirements. |
| Open purchase orders report | have | Order Entry → Reports → Purchase Orders, open or closed, by vendor, with the outstanding quantity. |
| Projects | ||
| Income, expense and time by project | have | A project on every line of every document; Projects → Reports → Transactions gathers them; Jobs add stores cards and finished goods for manufacturing work. |
| Project profitability report | partial | The Transactions report lists the lines; there is no one-page income-less-cost-equals-margin view per project, and time is costed only if the employee’s rate is on the time card. |
| Unbilled time and expenses by project | partial | Time via chapter 2 item 2; unbilled expenses (a vendor invoice line recharged to the customer) have no path at all. |
| Classes and locations | ||
| Class on every line, location on every transaction | have | Departments, typed as cost centres or profit centres, on every transaction, unlimited; projects serve as the second dimension. Warehouses are the physical location. |
| Location drives the letterhead on the invoice | build | A department chooses nothing on the printed document; a firm with two offices edits the template or runs two datasets. |
| P&L and Balance Sheet by class | have | Every financial statement and most transaction reports filter by department; a side-by-side by department is a loop over that filter. |
| Budgets | ||
| P&L budgets by month, by class or customer | build | Absent. No table, no screen, no report. |
| Balance-sheet budgets | build | Absent. |
| Budget vs Actuals | build | Absent. |
| Also | ||
| Billable expenses with markup | build | Absent; see enhancement 3. |
| Reports-only users | partial | The Accountant role from chapter 2 covers it once roles enforce. |
| Sixty-five-plus reports | partial | The Plus-only names are Inventory Valuation Summary and Detail, Inventory Stock Status, Physical Inventory Worksheet, Open Purchase Order List and Detail, Purchases by Vendor and by Product, P&L and Sales by Class and Location, Time Cost by Employee, Unbilled Time and Expenses, Project Profitability, Budget Overview, Budget vs Actuals, and the 1099 reports. The purchasing and class ones are existing screens under other names; the inventory, project and budget ones are enhancements 1, 2, 4 and 5. |
| Shopify, Amazon and eBay connectors | partial | Our own storefront writes orders into the ledger directly; a marketplace importer for fees and payouts is not built. A candidate for the integrations chapter. |
| Five users | have | Unlimited. |
Twenty-three capabilities: twelve we have, seven in substance, five absent. Four of the five absences are budgeting and recharging — the planning side of the books rather than the recording side — and the fifth is a letterhead. On the recording side SQL-Ledger exceeds Plus at every row: assemblies, warehouses, serials and lots, RFQs, partial receipts, unlimited departments, unlimited users.
3.3The seven enhancements
1Budgets
The one module we lack outright. A budget table (name, fiscal year,
optional department and project) and a budgetline table (account,
period, amount), edited on a grid under Reports → Budgets: accounts down the side,
twelve months across, with fill across, copy last year plus n% and
seed from actuals as the three tools that make a budget take an hour rather
than a day. Budgets for balance-sheet accounts sit in the same table, so a cash or
loan budget is nothing special. Import and export as CSV, because budgets are drafted
in spreadsheets and always will be.
2Budget vs Actuals
Two reports on the same query. Budget Overview prints the budget in the income-statement layout by month or quarter. Budget vs Actuals puts budget, actual, variance and variance-percent side by side for a period, with the same department and project filters as the income statement, year-to-date columns, and a drill from the actual into the GL. Both reuse the income-statement heading tree so subtotals fall where the user expects, and both export CSV.
3Billable expenses
A bill to customer field on every AP and vendor-invoice line (customer,
optional project, markup percent from the customer record), stored on
acc_trans and invoice lines alongside the project. An
Add unbilled expenses button on the sales invoice, next to the unbilled-time
button from chapter 2, lists them and pulls the chosen ones in at
cost plus markup, marking the source lines invoiced. An Unbilled Charges
report shows what is waiting, by customer and project, with its value.
4Project profitability
One page per project: income by item, cost of goods, billable and unbilled expenses, time at cost (the employee’s hourly cost from the HR record, which the payroll module already holds) and at billing rate, margin, and percent complete against the project’s budget if enhancement 1 gave it one. Summary across all open projects with the same columns, sortable by margin. Jobs get the same page with stores cards and finished goods in the cost side.
5Inventory valuation as at a date
A report that walks the FIFO layers — the invoice rows with
allocated less than quantity — as they stood on a chosen date, and
prints quantity, unit cost and value per part with a total that agrees to the
inventory account on that date’s balance sheet, flagging any difference. Add a
Physical Inventory Worksheet: the same list with an empty counted column,
printable by warehouse and bin, whose filled-in counts import straight into Stock
Adjustment.
6Low-stock alerts
The Requirements report already knows what is under its reorder point. Run it nightly under the same scheduler as the reminders in chapter 1, mail the list to the addresses on the warehouse record, and show a count on the dashboard that opens the report. From the report, the existing Generate Purchase Orders takes over, so alert to PO is two clicks.
7Percentage progress billing, and a letterhead per department
The one invoicing shape every QuickBooks tier has that we do not: bill 30% of an
order now, 40% next month, the rest on completion. Add percent to invoice as an alternative
to quantity shipped on the order-to-invoice screen; the invoice takes that share of
each line’s value, the order records the cumulative percent billed, and the
printed invoice shows contract value, billed to date, this invoice and balance. Fits
inside the existing partial-invoicing code path in OE rather than beside
it. In the same pass, let a department carry its own address, logo and bank details
and expose them to the templates as <%department_address%> and
kin, which is what Plus means by “multiple business locations on
invoices”.
3.4Where that leaves the comparison
At Plus the ledger comparison is settled in our favour on everything but planning; the seven items above close planning. What remains beyond is Advanced: batch invoicing (which we have), custom roles (which we have), workflow approvals (vouchers are the SQL-Ledger form of it), revenue recognition, fixed assets and spreadsheet sync, and now bundled payroll. Those are for a later chapter; between them only fixed assets is a module we lack.
Build budgets and the reports on them, recharge expenses to customers, put a margin page on every project, add valuation and count sheets to inventory, mail the low-stock list, and allow percentage billing — and Plus is matched on a ledger that already runs warehouses, assemblies and serial numbers Plus cannot.
3.5Sources
- 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, Set up and track your inventory — quickbooks.intuit.com/learn-support/en-us/help-article/inventory-management/set-track-inventory-quickbooks-online/L22FZLBGN_US_en_US
- Intuit, FIFO used in inventory cost accounting — quickbooks.intuit.com/learn-support/en-us/help-article/inventory-management/fifo-used-inventory-cost-accounting/L1x3hkunE_US_en_US
- Intuit, Reorder inventory and supplies from vendors — quickbooks.intuit.com/learn-support/en-us/help-article/backorder-inventory/reorder-inventory-supplies-vendors/L81iJczdn_US_en_US
- Intuit, Use bundles to group products and services — quickbooks.intuit.com/learn-support/en-us/help-article/list-management/use-bundles-grouping-products-services/L4At7z1OX_US_en_US
- Intuit, Receive inventory with an item receipt — quickbooks.intuit.com/learn-support/en-us/help-article/inventory-account/receive-inventory-item-receipt/L5xIhKRpV_US_en_US
- Intuit, Add purchase orders to expenses, bills or checks — quickbooks.intuit.com/learn-support/en-us/help-article/purchase-orders/add-purchase-orders-expenses-bills-checks-online/L9pRK49uC_US_en_US
- Intuit, Create and import budgets — quickbooks.intuit.com/learn-support/en-us/help-article/taxation/create-import-budgets-quickbooks-online/L7SvmSAsU_US_en_US
- Intuit, Track transactions by class — quickbooks.intuit.com/learn-support/en-us/help-article/class-list/track-transactions-class/L927QQfNV_US_en_US
- Intuit, Set up and send progress invoices (all tiers) — quickbooks.intuit.com/learn-support/en-us/help-article/invoicing/set-send-progress-invoices-quickbooks-online/L0Ymm6WjR_US_en_US
- Intuit, Enter billable expenses — quickbooks.intuit.com/learn-support/en-us/help-article/manage-customers/enter-billable-expenses/L37dCZU5O_US_en_US
- Intuit, Use project profitability reports and Track hourly labor costs — quickbooks.intuit.com/learn-support/en-us/help-article/job-costing/use-project-profitability-reports-quickbooks/L7QByPplv_US_en_US · …/regular-payroll/track-hourly-labor-costs-profitability-project/L9ZxBA4sn_US_en_US
- Intuit, What’s new in QuickBooks Online, January and August 2026 — quickbooks.intuit.com/r/product-update/whats-new-quickbooks-online-january-2026/ · …/whats-new-quickbooks-online-august-2026/
- Intuit, QuickBooks Online Advanced features — quickbooks.intuit.com/accounting/advanced-features/
- Fit Small Business, QuickBooks Online comparison — fitsmallbusiness.com/quickbooks-online-comparison/
- Certum Solutions, QuickBooks Online plans compared — certumsolutions.com/library/quickbooks-online-plans-compared
- NerdWallet, QuickBooks Online pricing — nerdwallet.com/business/software/learn/quickbooks-pricing
- Ledger123, SQL-Ledger 3.2.12 improvement backlog (doc/todo.md), items 14, 32, 40.