QuickBooks Self-Employed Reviews

Quick Books self employed looks promising but is lacking critical features such as the ability to set recurring transactions, duplicate transactions, time tracking, and most importantly the ability to change an invoice’s status without having to email to a client through the QuickBooks system. I’ve been using FreshBooks which has all of these features (and a cleaner, prettier UI), but wanted to give QuickBooks Self Employed a try since it has the added functionality to estimate quarterly taxes and the ability to export tax info over to TurboTax. I could make everything else work, but forcing users to email an invoice using their interface is very limiting since I need to use PDFs for a specific clients. Not having this basic feature is probably a deal breaker for me - Especially since support’s response is that they don’t currently have plans to implement this feature and there are older support threads with multiple requests to add such a basic feature: to be able to change invoice status when using PDFs. As is, If you do not want to email an invoice through Quickbooks Self Employed, you will not be able to get the invoice out of draft mode and, more importantly, you’ll be unable to mark it as paid and have the payment reflected within the system. Such a shame since I really do like the quarterly tax estimates, integrated tax payments/tracking, and the ability to export everything to TurboTax at years end.

It would be so nice if there was a smooth transition or an option to add payroll on QuickBooksSelfEmployed. I don’t need an enterprise accounting solution and don’t feel like I have the ability to transition to chart of accounts accounting because my business is so small, 2 employees other than myself. I think for businesses that are in transition into becoming larger and beginning to hire employees, seasonally or temporarily, it makes sense that I could use a simple program like self employees but also be able to keep track of my payroll within QuickBooksSelfEmployed or at least be able to classify it as something other than others business expenses’. I may not always have employees and the need for a cumbersome enterprise accounting solution- so something in between this and enterprise would be nice. Something that incorporated payroll accounting and self employed features and simplicity. It’s a great app and great software at a reasonable price but even if it didn’t do payroll per say but could help keep track and account for those amounts sent out between paychecks and withholding it would make tax time easier and give me a better sense of revenues, expenses and better reporting and insight on how to charge the correct price based upon new overhead with employees and without employees. There should be an in between program that doesn’t force you to go to chart of accounts- because that is more accounting than a little business needs or an in between business needs.

UPDATE: After another support ticket getting no response BUT them responding to my review I tried the proposed solution to band aid my missing trips. No luck. Still have the program and it is STILL not logging mileage. Now it’s completely failing all trips. I’m not incompetent when it comes to these things. I’ve built multiple CPU’s; have my home setup for multitudes of automation tasks using IFTTT protocols, etc. I have checked and checked again my setting which are correct. I’ve used the online support and followed the guides given in the reply to my review. Check other reviews. I’m not the only one. If your looking for solid mileage tracking look elsewhere. Flaky at best with absolutely dismal customer service.
ORIGINAL REVIEW: One of the big reasons I got this was for its inclusion of automatic mileage tracking. Well even after reading bad reviews of people saying it didn’t work right I tried it with the 30 day trial. Worked great until a week ago (I’ve since purchased the software). Frustrated I sent an email via the embedded support tab/button. No response in two days and mileage tracking is still only picking up 1 of 3 trips or so. Can’t recommend a product that is that inconsistent and has no customer service to back it up when there’s problems. It appears my support email is either ignored or is backlogged by over 2 days which would suggest many others are having problems as well. BUYER BEWARE

This software is useless without the capacity to upload tracked expenses/receipts to an invoice. Who out here doesn't have billable expenses with receipts? None! We all need to track and show our costs to our customers. This, in a previous software revision was available, but was removed recently and seriously hinders my ability to bill my customers effectively and with complete transparency. To have to jimmy rig my invoices to show my costs incurred is not only ineffective but unprofessional!
Also, now it appears to incorrectly address the uploaded receipts on date, name of company, and amount. And it does it randomly. This now is taking up all my time, rather than making more efficient use of my time. I have contacted support multiple times and they have said they are working to improve this function but have no timeline to fix this. They offered me one months credit but never applied the credit. Can’t call someone because they don’t give a number and I have asked for a call and they said they can’t call me.
I have called other numbers not related to self employed and they directed me to the email process. I have submitted comments to the software engineers and have not received a productive answer other than we are working on it.... if you had it working in the past, how hard is it to fix it and put it back in if it was never a problem?!?

No one has ever explained what was the issue.

Don’t try to get help unless you have 2-3 hours to spare(and considering it’s a business app, who does?). To get an agent to call you, you must click on help and request one. Except if you click on help, nothing appears. If you try to chat with an agent, you must fill a form with your name, e-mail and reason, then you get a random agent asking for that info again. In my case, the agent couldn’t help me, so he provided a link which took me to the same form. The third time, and about 25 minutes later, I was nearly in tears and told the agent so. He gave me another link and told me to close the window with him first. So I followed it and never connected to anyone. So back to the form, and two more rounds of links to the same form. I found a contact number, so I called it and a recorded message told me to click on help and request a callback. I started at 6:48 EST, and finally was able to get a call at 8:40. The very helpful lady tried to resolve my problem, but it wasn’t working, so she had me on the line until 9 EST and told me merchant services were closing at that time. She did promise to call tomorrow to try to help, but as of yet, my problem (which is about being able to take online payments when I send an invoice-pretty basic) is still unresolved.

I’m just trying out QuickBooks. The interface is very nice. Intuitive one might say. When reviewing transactions I see a nice button that says “Create rule” so I hit it. In a very helpful way it asks, would you like to automatically categorize all transactions from vendor A as category Z. I hit confirm, then save my transaction. I then see a little notification that says X number of transactions were automatically categorized, which I’m very excited about because it seems to be making my life easier, yay! Then, to my horror, I see that all the X number of transactions are reviewed as “uncategorized” and even the first item I reviewed and based the rule on has a completely different category than the one I selected and saved. And this wasn’t just a fluke, I had been going along like this for several transactions, vendors and categories until I noticed they were all screwed up. The very basic function of this software, the flagship software of the industry, the function of sorting your transactions for tax purposes, is completely broken. So I look for a help option in QuickBooksSelfEmployed to report the problem, don’t see one, only an option to leave a review. And here I am, warning the next fool to stay away from this very nice looking but completely broken app.
P.S. I found the help, it’s an AI chatbot. It had to forward my problem to its humans, they’ll get back to me.

QuickBooksSelfEmployed is one of the easiest to use and for the most part meets my needs; however, I’m one of those business owners that actually has 2 different small businesses. QuickBooksSelfEmployed currently doesn’t allow for me to identify expenses and/or income for each company individually and appropriately throughout the year. This leaves me having to spend hours dividing everything out at the end of the year prior to filing my taxes. If there was an option to allow business owners to enter more than one company, that would be huge!
Also, I currently operate both businesses out of a home office. This is mostly because I’m not large enough to need other accommodations at this time, but now with the COVID Pandemic, I personally think our society will be changed forever. With that being said, I feel we could use some additional (more descriptive) categories under “Business” such as those in the “Personal”. For example, I provide equine therapy services, so I’d love to see (all) the categories under “Personal” made available for selection under “Business.”

Thank you,
Small Louisiana Business Owner

Update: Mileage Tracking still HIGHLY unreliable !! No fixes. No communication from the developer. It takes more work to double check everything. Ugh. And I’m paying for this?

In the past few months I’ve noticed that entire trips aren’t tracking. There is a manual tracking option, but I’m paying money to have it automatically track. I’m a roofing contractor and drive A LOT. Every time this happens I have to pour over my calendar and consider every customer, every supply run, every inspection, etc that I have. Then I have to map each of those drives myself to determine the miles. Only then to enter it manually. At this point it is costing me actually money AND costing me valuable time.

I’ve already selected the mileage tracking troubleshooter in QuickBooksSelfEmployed and confirmed all my settings are correct. It has all the checkboxes checked off. I’ve confirmed that QuickBooksSelfEmployed is open and running in the background each morning. I’ve emailed customer service with a couple examples. And reading some other complaints here, it seems I’ll have to do more of the developers job by not only tracking down each trip, but now I’ll have to catalog them all and send in to a different customer service person. Why am I doing the developers job checking for bugs on an app that I’m paying for?

I have been using QuickBooksSelfEmployed for transactions for two years. Recently I started to track my mileage. According to their advertising QuickBooksSelfEmployed allows you to create rules for frequent drives. THIS FUNCTION DOES NOT WORK!! Buyer beware!!!

I just got done with a chat conversation to solve this and the tech support said, and I quote, “As of the moment, Mileage rules are not applicable to past drive mileage.” When I expressed my confusion because this feature is clearly present on QuickBooksSelfEmployed they said, and again direct quote, “I checked with the team and Rules are no longer applicable to Mileage Trips.” They literally display features on their application that are absolutely fake.

They are knowingly providing a feature on their app that is non-functional. I have spent hours and hours trying to make this feature work, setting up rules, deleting rules and re-setting them up. They even have forums with directions as to how to create mileage rules...ALL LIES! Now I have to manually go through thousands of drives hundreds of which that I thought were being automatically categorized. This is unacceptable and I will be reporting this company to the BBB and any other authorities I can think of. Shame on this developer for doing this to its customers.

I run a very small business with only 5 clients. The self employed Quickbooks app has been helpful in allowing me to send invoices and receipts, track income and business expenses, and project my tax deductions but there are some features I wish were better.

Most important change I would like to see is option for landscape mode. I use an iPad Pro with the magic keyboard as my personal and business “laptop.” If I need to use quickbooks with my keyboard like when prepping invoices, I literally have to turn my head sideways while typing. Very frustrating to be spending $25/month for a high quality, reputable app that doesn’t have an important basic feature.

I also wish there were more options when you want to “create a rule” for transactions or milage besides apply all. For example I started my business in July so transactions/trips from Jan-June 2020 for the same places were not business related. Additionally I wish there was a filter and better sort for business transactions, like sorting by certain accounts, types of business, dates, money amounts, location, ect...

I used to use the basic service from joist. And yes it did a lot for free but when you get to a certain place with your business, having all your ducks in a row the easiest way possible means a lot and is worth it’s weight in gold. For me, QuickBooksSelfEmployed seriously has changed my business for the better and has given me piece of mind come tax season because literally it’s one button click and all your expenses etc are transferred to turbo tax. Which is great for me since I don’t need an accountant at this stage in my business adventure. Thanks quick books I’ll be a customer for life as long as QuickBooksSelfEmployed is here. One thing I would really love to see improved with QuickBooksSelfEmployed is a estimate tab where I can create , get clients to sign off on, and email estimates. Currently I’m running QuickBooksSelfEmployed with joist and there’s no integration on the estimate side so I’m having to manually transfer estimates from joist to self employed in order to invoice.

I subscribed to the service the day I downloaded QuickBooksSelfEmployed . I’ve been tracking all my miles, expenses, income, etc ever since. I tried logging in today and got “your free trial is over please subscribe” so I click to subscribe, cause maybe there’s an issue with my subscription? I click on subscribe and it tells me I’m already subscribed. Yet I can’t get into my account because it keeps telling me to subscribe!!!! Canceling this and getting my $ back. I’ve got well over a month of mileage, expenses and income now to recreate.

Update: after being told they would help me get back into my account, and after days of back and forth emails, I was told by their tech support that I have an expired free trial. I responded with all the info (via screenshots) showing I paid for QuickBooksSelfEmployed for the past 2 months, and since I had to now go without using the features and have to manually record all of my mileage, expenses and income, and can’t get to ANY of the data I input for the 2 months I WAS able to login, I requested and received a refund from Apple, I never heard a peep from this company again. ABSOLUTELY HORRIBLE customer service and tech support!!!! I lost every bit of data I put into QuickBooksSelfEmployed, and they could care less. Do yourself a favor and just say no.

I wish someone had told me to use some other app to track my freelance expenses when I was first starting out. At this point it would be a huge undertaking to change to another system, but QBSE is SO GLITCHY. Not worth what you pay for it AT ALL, and when I’ve raised issues with the support team, they’ve literally never been able to offer a solution. Auto-categorization “rules” I’ve created never work, and when I try to re-categorize something it missed, it says I already have a rule to that effect (I KNOW—then how come you didn’t categorize it?!). Different accounts will just stop syncing even though the system says they’re synced. For an independent contractor, missing a month or so of work expenses can make a big impact on my taxes due, so this is really a problem. Nobody at QB wants to solve these issues, or even offer a refund of a month’s subscription, they’re just happy to take your money and never speak with you. And for the invoicing feature, even when a customer pays by ACH/direct deposit, it takes a week for the funds to reach you. Embarrassingly bad app, I’d caution freelancers and independent contractors to stay away and find a different system.

Been using QuickBooksSelfEmployed for 5-6 years now. Has several great features for small businesses/ independent contractors, like mileage tracking, quarterly tax estimation, and is a quick way to see your P&L snapshot. BUT for the last year or so QuickBooksSelfEmployed has become frustratingly difficult to use due to lagging and slow touch response. Also would be greatly improved by the addition of a batch edit (even just batch exclude) function for transactions. Even the ability to make a rule to exclude certain transaction types would help, but you can only choose business or personal, not to exclude. If it’s going to continue taking 10 seconds for QuickBooksSelfEmployed to recognize I even tapped a button, batch edit at this point is a necessity. Have reported the issue through the in-app feedback, but still not fixed. Also requires attempts at categorizing some transactions multiple times for them to move from “unreviewed” to “reviewed.” For a paid app charging as much as it does, it’s unacceptable that these issues have been present for a year or more.

The only gripes I have with this program is that invoicing doesn’t allow the option to mark invoice as paid until I send the client an email first. It seems odd to send two emails to get the receipt to the customer. Adding the option to mark invoice as paid without sending would be nice. The other issue is the option to accept credit card transactions does allow you to charge fees to the customer. I make mostly larger transactions and that can get into our profit margins and telling the customer after the fact looks really bad. Most of my work is bid and I use DocuSign to send proposals and mostly use this program to provide client with a receipt. Also adding the ability to scan multiple receipts for each total would help out. My suppliers receipts don’t come as standard receipts. They only put like 10 items per page and it usually around 2-3 pages. Over all great program and fairly easy to use. This program really is a time and life saver and I hope updates are coming to address these issues.

I appreciate the ability to differentiate spending , I travel for work LONG distances ,I interviewed and choose a pet/house sitter . It costs me about 700 a month to make sure they are taken care of ( is otherwise be able to do it myself )
please let me know if I should be doing anything at all, all I have is a picture of her I’d and ss# she agreed sign stub ment🙏🏼if needed of rage of pay start sayy ,was through day of and day after returnwill be paying 40/day plus tip to insure respectful but fearful tactics. I’ve been a supervisor before a mix of fear and love will get you a fAr way
ILOVE questbooks selfenployed. Snow and jbgs I would not know I do , it’s help netwoand move on the direction of my life I CHOOSE not told to go🥂even if if doesn’t last I know today I will wake up with more money In my account than when I fell asleep but I work hard and QB helps me delegate finances so I am forever grateful 🤞🏼

*****Update*****the problem I was experiencing below has been fixed. No longer crashing when switching to miles. Still only 4 stars as there are some things I would love to see added or improved.
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I was loving QuickBooksSelfEmployed but a few days ago every time I try and access the mileage tab QuickBooksSelfEmployed shuts down. I’m not sure whether to delete and reinstall or wait and see if they fix it. I don’t want to lose the trips that are in there waiting to be processed.

I’ve read through their responses to everyone else with the same problem and it’s quite disappointing they aren’t understanding the problem. QuickBooksSelfEmployed is tracking the trips and miles, I can see the number of trips going up BUT when you click on mileage to view the trips QuickBooksSelfEmployed CRASHES. You can’t access the mileage portion on QuickBooksSelfEmployed . It’s broken! Obviously with so many people reporting the same thing the problem is with the update. Please take action to fix this.

Its been months and i have sent multiple emails to their support team and havent heard a single thing back (keep in mind this is a PAID service and im receiving 0 replies to anything i send them for help). QuickBooksSelfEmployed wont update on its own. I have to manually uninstall QuickBooksSelfEmployed and reinstall it in order to update it which means i have to reconfigure it everytime which is sort of often since they keep pushing out updates every few days. Im not sure why this started happening but when i click update the icon goes grey and it sits for days and days doing nothing. No part of the icon loghts up like all of my other apps do when its partially updated or running through the update process. It literally sits greyed out the entire time. Im on an iphone xs and this happened with every one of the ios updates so i dont think os version matters anymore. I cant be the only one having this problem can i?? How does every other app i have install and update perfectly fine but this one refuses to update?? I restored my phone back to factory stock as well and that didnt resolve a single thing. Wth am i paying for at this point??

Overall this is a great app for me and my business needs especially since I'm traveling to customer locations. I have the ability to bill them, collect payment from them, manage income and expenses all from QuickBooksSelfEmployed. A major plus is my ability to scan my receipts or email them in and have QuickBooks input them to my expenses so I can just approve them saving me time and money, great job on this feature! BUT I have noticed that the mileage tracker is not great, sometimes it pickups my drive sometimes it doesn't. I've been forced to use MileIQ for my mileage tracker which is annoying to say the least paying two separate companies when QuickBooks advertised the Mileage Tracker. Another downside is that QuickBooksSelfEmployed is only available on the phone, not the iPad. I know I can run iPhone apps on the iPad, but it don't look as professional and clean especially when presenting estimates to customers. With times evolving and more business using tablets I would say it's about time that QuickBooks looked into getting their app updated for Tablets.

QuickBooksSelfEmployed has potential but really lacks much. It constantly kicks out my banking information so several times a week I have to re-verify my account as quickbooks tells me that my information is incorrect when it's actually correct. It is incredibly annoying. As far as the tracking. It's good at picking up the start of a journey but horrible at detecting the stops. As a delivery person I make several stops and then go to a pickup. This makes all of it one trip. I can only imagine using this for Uber or Lyft as it would make your entire day one trip. This doesn't even give you the option to force stop like you could do with Mile Iq or Hurdlr and those are free apps. I would expect more from a company who wants money from me on a monthly basis. I gave two stars because it has potential because of the ability to set rules for your purchases to make it easier to categorize purchases but at this point I'm not going to continue to use this as a free app and I definitely wouldn't use this as a paid app. If you are someone who drives constantly this isn't QuickBooksSelfEmployed for you.

Absolute garbage no support unless its a chat bot . Bank transaction duplicated never repaired work around delete them one at a time your self loss of classification reclassify them yourself. One by one . Milage lost oh well. No fix its just gone promise to call to straighten this out oh I SEE you did not get called please keep your phone open for a call this week. All these. Things I pay for QuickBooksSelfEmployed to do. It does not work it fails then last straw connecting to bank multiple times causes a security lock down on bank account forcing 8 time password change in 3 days. Bank has to completely reset the link to change the password for the bank intermittently vanished . It’s not a good app in fact it is worthless. One thing they do well though. They take their money out religiously even when your having issues. Best support is on FACEBOOK writing this got a response. I was a long time quicken turbo tax user from the beginning. Seeing an app from. Quicken I figured the best . I was wrong they triple billed when i dropped the turbo tax feature they billed for with turbo tax and without on same bill causing over drafts. Not surprised by this. Companies lately have the uber model for customer service as in none.

I am incredibly frustrated! I downloaded QuickBooksSelfEmployed yesterday and added my account information for it to track. Cool. Today I signed on and it asked me to enter my name and occupation. The problem is the occupation. I’m a Real estate investor but it would not acknowledge any occupation outside of mining, ranching, farming, or animal breeding. It would not let me continue until I picked one of those occupations. I went ahead and picked mining just so I can move on and thought I would go back and edit the occupation.

I can’t find anywhere on QuickBooksSelfEmployed to make that edit, nor can I find any help support on QuickBooksSelfEmployed . I logged online and was still unable to find my occupation to add it in Settings. I’ve called, I’ve emailed, I’ve tried reading through the questions answered by the community to no avail concerning my questions and I have not been able to get any support. I’ve spoken to two different Support operators but neither of them could help me with self-employed question. They just re-directed me back to the webpage. And here I am now frustrated and no where to ask for help. There’s no way I want to subscribe and pay for an app with no tech support.

QuickBooksSelfEmployed it self is good but not being able to add a PO number to my invoices is a hassle because a lot of big companies require PO’s to send payments to vendors like myself. Also the limitation on the invoice notes for the client makes it difficult to send an invoice with detail about what work was done so the client has a written document of all the work that was accomplished for future reference. Another thing I would really like to see is an option to allow clients to make partial payments because some money is better than no money when a client can’t afford to pay the entire sum of a bill because then I have to create a brand new invoice and adjust the old every time. One last improvement I would really like to see would be the ability to send a quote through QuickBooks that I can turn into a invoice with a contract section and ability to E-sign the contract for the client and contractor. All of those would be great addition that would make my decision on keeping QuickBooksSelfEmployed a whole lot easier

QuickBooks self-employed has a great, simple ideology behind it, but I think that QuickBooks is either intentionally throttled some functionality to force users to pay for more premium products, or that they have gone so minimalistic that it has gone too far.

The ability for customers to pay partial payments on invoices as one of the most simple, easy things that any business in the service industry has ever thought of. But QuickBooks self-employed does not allow you to do that. It’s ludicrous to think that the majority of customers using QuickBooks self-employed are in the service industry, and for the majority of that industry companies require a 50% down payment. It’s really annoying that QuickBooks doesn’t have this feature, because if I want to get a down payment from somebody, I have to create two separate invoices which looks very unprofessional.

Without this feature, I will definitely be switching away from QuickBooks as soon as I can find a better alternative.