What it costs
- Entry price
- From $38 per month
- Pricing model
- subscription
- Card processing
- separate QuickBooks Payments account, rates quoted individually
- Contract
- none, cancel any time
- Detail
- Simple Start is $38/month for one user, Essentials $85 for three users, Plus $140 for five users and adds inventory and project tracking, Advanced $340 for 25 users. Prices rose sharply in August 2026: Plus was $99, Advanced was $200. Frequent promotional discounts apply to new signups.
Pricing checked 11 Aug 2026. Vendor's own pricing page
Where it annoys people
- 01 August 2026 brought a 41% to 70% price rise on the Plus and Advanced tiers with nothing new added to justify it.
- 02 Nothing restaurant-specific out of the box. No recipe costing, no daily sales journal template, no native POS feed. You are building that yourself or paying a bookkeeper who has done it before.
- 03 Phone support is included but the wait times are a known complaint, and Intuit pushes its own bookkeeping add-on hard before you get to a human.
- 04 Multi-location support is class and location tagging inside one company file, not real consolidated reporting across separate entities. That needs Advanced at minimum, more likely QuickBooks Enterprise.
Our take
The reason to pick QuickBooks over a restaurant-specific back office is that your accountant already knows it, and that saves more time than any built-in feature would. It reconciles fine once your POS export is mapped correctly, and the app ecosystem covers most of the gap with third-party connectors for daily sales summaries. It is not built for a kitchen, though, and a single independent site probably does not need to be on Plus or above.