An accounting software system designed by Intuit for startups and small organizations.

Product Overview

QuickBooks Desktop Premier is an accounting software offering inventory management, job costing, donation tracking, and advanced reporting. Its versatility is enhanced by the ability to manage multiple company books, making it ideal for businesses with diverse accounting needs. It supports up to five users and offers both on-premises and cloud-based capabilities.

Pros

  • Built on QuickBooks Pro
  • Customer support community
  • Includes IRS Form 990 tools
  • Industry-specific features for NPOs
  • Many 3rd party applications

Cons

  • Bank reconciliation issues
  • Limited flexibility in reporting
  • Limited inventory control
  • Requires on-premise deployment
  • Yearly pricing structure

Target Market

Small to medium-sized businesses, especially those requiring specialized industry features. Ideal for sectors like manufacturing, wholesale, retail, contracting, professional services, and nonprofits.

About QuickBooks Premier

QuickBooks Premier builds on the sound foundation of QuickBooks Pro giving you additional industry specific features. The system is available in a General Business Edition. However, it is also available in several Editions that provide customized features based on your company type. QuickBooks Premier has Editions that are specifically designed with special features:

  • General Business
    • Easily manage inventory items - Quickly locate items and complete inventory related tasks all in one place using the Inventory Center in QuickBooks.
    • Track your balance sheet by class - Use this built-in, easy-to-access report to track financial data separately by location, department, or profit center.
    • Bill clients progressively by job phase - Track and bill clients by time & material, job phase, or percentage completion, whatever works best for your unique business.
  • Contractors
    • Create ‘Jobs by Vendor’ report - Organize your job costs by vendor, and see which vendors still need to be paid.
    • Create job estimates and track change orders - As a job changes simply enter change orders into the estimate to keep track of the changes and their impact on your bottom line.
    • Analyze job profitability - Customized job cost reports allow you to see a job’s profitability on a detailed, task-by-task level.
  • Manufacturing & Wholesale Companies
    • Track inventory reorder point by vendor - Track inventory and set optimal inventory levels. Run a report showing items that need reordering.
    • Track profitability by product - Keep track of your biggest moneymakers so you’ll know which products to promote and keep in stock, and which to drop from your line.
    • Easily prioritize which orders to fulfill - See all open sales orders and prioritize them how you want. Instantly see which orders can be shipped and which can’t.
  • Non Profits
    • Create end-of-year donation statements - See who your biggest donors are and track their contributions.
    • Create Form 990 (Statement of Functional Expenses) - Identify your expenses for presentation to your board, major donors, and the IRS
    • Run donor contribution summary reports - Track each donor’s contribution total as needed.
  • Professional Services Companies
    • Track unbilled time and expenses - See all clients with unbilled time and expenses by employee, project, client or service on a single screen. Easily send an invoice in just a few clicks.
    • Set different billing rates by employee, client, and service - Pay and get paid the right amount by quickly and easily setting different billing rates.
    • Analyze profitability by project and client - Reports like Billed vs. Proposal by Project, Cost-to-Complete by Job, and Job Costs by Job and Vendor help you stay on top of which projects are most profitable.
  • Retailers
    • Easily track sales results - Track sales accurately and flexibly with the Sales Summary Form. Enter total payments and taxable/non-taxable sales for the day, week, or any time period you choose.
    • Stay on top of inventory and costs - Easily track inventory and set reorder points.
    • Run a profit and loss report - Easily compare one month’s profit and loss against another.

Accountant Tools - Accountant’s Edition

QuickBooks Premier for Accountants will give you everything you need to manage your clients and run your business. The system allows you to exchange account files with cleints, assuming they are using a QuickBooks program. The system will allow you to review balances, adjust entries and enter workpaper references in one screen.

You are able to find and fix any client entry errors. From a single screen you can find errors and make corrections to find and cleanup GL account balances, client changes to QuickBooks lists, open items in AP and AR and sales and payroll tax accounts. All changes are documented in the audit trail for further reference.

Accounts Payable

QuickBooks Premier is your complete solution to helping you track your expenses and payables. This will allow you to easily see the money you’re spending on overhead, cost of goods sold, etc. Plus, QuickBooks helps you fill out your sales tax form in minutes and make sure your sales tax balance is accurate and up-to-date.

The system will also allow you to easily create and print checks. By using a batch processing method you can print all of your checks at once, and have them tracked for ultimate control of your money.

QuickBooks Premier will help ensure that all of your financial obligations are met on time. To ensure that you don’t incur costly late fees, QuickBooks has a reminder feature that will allow you to record bills as they come and set a reminder to pay them before they are due.

Accounts Receivable

QuickBooks Premier gives you the ability to create a central data repository, containing all customer contact and transactional data. This allows you to easily track and follow up on past-due accounts and answer all customer requests more efficiently. Using QuickBooks Merchant Services you can even accept customer credit card payments directly right in QuickBooks.

Since, QuickBooks Premier doubles as a central data repository for all your customer information, you can easily create invoices and track receivables. Using the data that has already been entered in QuickBooks (i.e. customer contact info & products/services) to create invoices in seconds. Invoices can be created from over 100 pre-designed templates; you can even customize invoices to show your company logo and tag line.

Bills of Materials - Manufacturing & Wholesale Edition

The Bill of Materials (BOM) functionality available in QuickBooks Premier Manufacturing & Wholesale Edition provides you with many industry specific features to meet your needs in tracking the costs and raw materials associated with assembled products. The system gives you the flexibility to include both material and non-material costs in the costing of your assembled products. For example, you can include costs such as labor and overhead, along with raw material costs in your Bills of Materials (BOMs). This functionality ensures that your costs are accurately discovered and your product prices properly reflect those costs.

Furthermore, when products are in the assembly process, QuickBooks Premier Manufacturing & Wholesale Edition will automatically deduct the raw materials used in the assembly from inventory volumes. When an assembly is complete, the final product is added to your finished goods inventory. The BOM functionality available in QuickBooks Premier Manufacturing & Wholesale Edition will ensure that all of your inventory is properly accounted for, down the smallest nut or bolt.

General Ledger

The General Ledger found in QuickBooks Premier will allow you to stay on top of your business’ financial status. This provides you with a consolidated view of who owes you money, who you owe money to, important reminders, and income/expense performance metrics.

QuickBooks Premier uses the transactional history found in the general ledger to provide you with over 150+ pre-designed reports. Unlike Pro, QuickBooks Premier gives you access to 150+ industry specific reports. A few of the reports available include:

  • Profitability by Product for manufacturing and wholesale businesses
  • Job/ Project Costs for professional services firms & contracting businesses
  • Donor Contribution Summary for nonprofit organizations
  • Sales Tax Liability for retail businesses

Each report is adjustable, allowing you to gain useful insight into your business. Within each report you can click on any number to see the details behind it. Any report in the system can be exported to Microsoft Excel.

Using recent spending history, the system will allow you to create a working budget automatically. The budgeted amounts are then fully adjustable either individually or across line items. This allows you to later refer back to the budget to see how your actual spending compares to your original budget.

Inventory

QuickBooks Premier provides you with the same ability to easily track your inventory as found in QuickBooks Pro. This will allow you to avoid overbuying and backorders. As is the case with Pro, Premier allows you to setup reorder points that will automatically alert you as to when you should reorder a product.

To help you address your more complex product and inventory management needs, QuickBooks Premier will allow you to track both raw materials and finished goods. Additionally, you are able to adjust your inventory as you create Bills of Material and even receive inventory in one unit of measure while selling in another.

Job Costing - Contractor Edition

QuickBooks Premier Contractor Edition is full of job costing features specifically designed for contractors, ensuring that your business is as profitable as is physically possible. A construction or contract company’s profitability is directly reflective of the profitability of each job. QuickBooks Premier Contractor Edition will give you a customizable job cost report showing you the profitability of each job and even each task in that job. This in turn allows you to see the projected cost to complete each job, which can be used to create Estimates.

The projected costs of each job can be used as a quote or estimate. With a few steps you can easily convert your estimates into invoices and purchase orders as your jobs progress. This seamless interface ensures that you don’t waste your valuable time re-typing information into the system.

What’s more, the Job Costing Center found in QuickBooks Premier Contractor Edition gives you an instant snapshot of the status of all your jobs. The Job Costing Center even allows you to view a summary of all jobs, showing which are most profitable and which are least profitable.

Not every employee at your company has the same skills, nor do they have the ability to perform the same tasks. If one employee has the ability to perform more complicated tasks than another, shouldn’t you charge for that skill accordingly? QuickBooks Premier Contractor Edition, has taken this into consideration and gives you the ability to set a fixed hourly rate for each employee or customize hourly rates based on task performed.

Nonprofit Edition

QuickBooks Premier Nonprofit Edition contains many features that are specifically needed for your non-profit organization. The system will allow you to demonstrate clear financial accountability to your Board of Directors. You can do this with a complete and accurate Statement of Financial Income & Expense and 990 form. The functionality of the non-profit features available in QuickBooks Premier Nonprofit Edition will allow you to give your board an overview of your organization’s financial status.

QuickBooks Premier Nonprofit Edition will allow you or your accountant to easily prepare the IRS Form 990. QuickBooks Premier Nonprofit Edition will organize all your finances according to IRS requirements. The system will simply require you to transfer totals arrived at automatically by QuickBooks onto your 990 form without any manual calculation.

Managing multiple programs can be difficult of any non-profit. Add to that the limited amount of funds available for each program, and you can see why many non-profit organizations choose to setup a budget for each program. The budgets will allow you to compare the to actual amounts to see where you stand. This functionality is accomplished in the report center.

QuickBooks Premier Nonprofit Edition also provides you with a Donor Contribution Summary report that shows you a list of all your donors. This list also includes their annual contributions to date, allowing you to recognize your most loyal donors. At the end of your fiscal year you are able to create year-end donation statements to supply to your donors.

Payroll

The QuickBooks Premier payroll application will allow you to easily pay your staff. The system will use Intuit Enhanced Payroll functionality, an online payroll platform that charges just $2 per employee per month. You will be able to quickly process payroll with appropriate tax deductions. The software is capable of paying employees by direct deposit as well. You can have the system automatically populate and print 1099s for independent contractors. QuickBooks Premier contains every tool you need to pay your employees.

Purchase Orders

QuickBooks Premier will allow you to better track your purchases. The system gives you the ability to quickly create purchase orders. The only thing required of you is selecting the appropriate vendor from a list of vendors and selecting an inventory item to order. Upon receiving the inventory, QuickBooks Premier recognizes the products and matches it to the appropriate PO. Meaning when you enter inventory items, the correct corresponding PO is automatically reconciled. At that point the items will be automatically be added to your inventory.

Sales Order - Manufacturing & Wholesale Edition

The sales order functionality available in QuickBooks Premier Manufacturing & Wholesale Edition provides you with many industry specific features to meet your needs. When you enter a sales order the information is tracked in the Sales Order Fulfillment Worksheet. When you open your Sales Order Fulfillment Worksheet you will see a consolidated list of all your open sales orders. Your staff members are capable of changing the status of an order, so you will be able to see which orders can be shipped and which can’t based on your inventory. This application will ensure that your orders are fulfilled as fast as possible, ensuring your customers are as happy as possible. As a manufacturer or distributor/wholesaler, your business relies on the timely fulfillment of your orders. QuickBooks Premier Manufacturing & Wholesale edition can ensure that you are informed of the status of all your orders, ensuring you provide the best service possible.

Sales Tracking - Retail Edition

QuickBooks Premier Retail Edition will provide you with many of the features you need to track and reconcile your sales, calculate sales tax liability, and analyze sales trends. The system will allow you to track your sales results accurately and easily. You simply need to enter total payments and taxable/nontaxable sales for any time period you specify. The results will then be stored in the system for informative purposes use later down the road.

QuickBooks Premier Retail Edition will also automatically calculate your sales tax liability, ensuring you always pay your taxes to the fullest without over-paying. The system will also reconcile your end of day sales total making it easy to spot any cash drawer over/under discrepancies.

Time & Expenses - Professional Services

QuickBooks Premier Professional Services Edition features a Time & Expenses application to track your employee time and associate hours with projects properly. The system provides you with a single view of all your clients with unbilled time. To create an invoice for this time all you need to do is select a client and select a project, which will quickly create an invoice for those services. As is the case with QuickBooks Pro, with a subscription to Time Tracker for QuickBooks you are able to allow your offsite staff members to remotely enter their time.

QuickBooks Premier Professional Services Edition allows you to collaborate the time worked by several employees to the same project. This allows you to have employees with different skill sets all collaborating on the same job. The reports available in this system allow you to track unbilled time as well as analyze the profitability of projects. These reports include, but are not limited to:

  • Billed vs. Proposal by Project
  • Cost-to-Complete by Job
  • Job Costs by Job and Vendor
  • Access Billed/Unbilled Hours by Person
  • Unbilled Expenses by Project
  • Expenses Not Assigned to Projects

Time Tracker

With QuickBooks and its integrated time tracking functionality you will be able to properly track your employees’ time to avoid under-billing your customers. To ensure all billable hours are billed for, the system will alert you when creating an invoice if there are any outstanding time or expenses on that customer’s accounts. Easily bring over both item descriptions and notes to invoices, so customers can clearly see what you are billing them for.

The system allows you to track time by employee, service, and customer. This is done by using timesheets. If you are creating an invoice, QuickBooks automatically alerts you to any unbilled time and expenses.

With a subscription to Time Tracker for QuickBooks Pro and Premier, you will give your staff the ability to enter their time in a easier and more efficient manner. The Time Tracker allows you to enter and record billable and non-billable hours into QuickBooks remotely. This will ensure accurate invoicing, payroll and reporting. Your employees or sub-contractors will only need an Internet connection to enter their timesheets directly into QuickBooks.

Starting Price
$75 /month
Price Range Learn More
   $     $     $     $     $   
   $     $     $     $     $   

Product Overview

Related Products

  • Sage 50cloud Accounting
    A full accounting software system designed by Sage for small businesses in the United States. Formerly Peachtree by Sage.
  • QuickBooks Online
    A web-based accounting software system designed by Intuit for startups and small organizations.
  • QuickBooks Pro Desktop
    An accounting software system designed by Intuit for startups and small organizations.
  • Sage 50c Accounting - Canada
    An accounting software system for startups and small organizations based in Canada. Formerly Simply Accounting.
  • FreshBooks
    A cloud accounting and billing solution developed by FreshBooks.

User Reviews of QuickBooks Premier

★★★★★
★★★★★
Submitted on January 25th, 2021 by Anonymous

Enterprise is easy to use but it does NOT post accurate COGS to the P&L. It uses “average cost” instead of Bill of Materials total. For a manufacturing company that turns it’s inventory components multiple times annually, average cost is not an accurate reflection of the true cost for all build assemblies.

The Good…

Easy to move around the platform.

The Bad…

Inaccurate accounting for manufactures with high inventory turn.

★★★★★
★★★★★
Submitted on June 3rd, 2019 by Anonymous

The software is sufficient from an accounting stand point but in terms of construction, it is not able to handle management of larger projects and multiple projects at one time

★★★★★
★★★★★
Submitted on May 7th, 2019 by Anonymous

The reporting is too stagnant, with little room for manipulation or change.

★★★★★
★★★★★
Submitted on December 10th, 2018 by Anonymous

I don’t like that you have to drill down into the system to find anything associated with the non profit.

★★★★★
★★★★★
Submitted on November 27th, 2018 by Anonymous

For accounting, it is great. It’s probably a 4 or 5 out of 5. For other functions like bill of materials or material resource planning, it is probably a 1.

★★★★★
★★★★★
Submitted on November 26th, 2018 by Anonymous

Quickbooks is not a project management software. It’s hard to track job to job and profit loss

★★★★★
★★★★★
Submitted on November 19th, 2018 by Anonymous

I love Quickbooks. I use an older version so I am shopping around for new options to see what else it out there compared to Quickbooks, but I have always been quite happy with it.

★★★★★
★★★★★
Submitted on November 16th, 2018 by Anonymous

The solution is ok for basic accounting but it does not handle industry specific options for my trucking company. I need to determine fuel costs and if we are profitable on some of these trucking jobs. I am not an accountant so I do not know how to customize the program easily.

★★★★★
★★★★★
Submitted on November 13th, 2018 by Anonymous

Quickbooks Premier is not user friendly. We want to be able to track everything on a project by project basis and work up to roughly 500 projects annually varying in size and scope.

★★★★★
★★★★★
Submitted on November 6th, 2018 by Anonymous

Generally speaking, someone here in our office is usually helpful enough to handle a QB error and we don’t need phone support. That was a huge deciding factor for us to purchase this software as other software providers charged a lot for phone support.

★★★★★
★★★★★
Submitted on October 19th, 2018 by Anonymous

Quickbooks really does not do well with fund accounting and is very slow

★★★★★
★★★★★
Submitted on October 11th, 2018 by Anonymous

The solution doesn’t allow us to do any kind of forecasting for material or budgets

★★★★★
★★★★★
Submitted on July 16th, 2018 by Anonymous

Using Premier Manufacturing. Doesn’t do a good job when we want to manage inventory for the different jobs we are doing. Quickbooks is great when you want to do large job costing, but when you try and drill down into a specific job, it doesn’t do a great job of unifying the information on a single job basis

★★★★★
★★★★★
Submitted on May 22nd, 2018 by Anonymous

Functionally the program is good but I dislike the reporting. As a nonprofit, the reports are generic and don’t allow for customization which makes it difficult when generating P/L and cash flow statements to show categories for grants.

★★★★★
★★★★★
Submitted on May 11th, 2018 by Anonymous

Does what its meant to do and attractive price tag

★★★★★
★★★★★
Submitted on May 4th, 2018 by Anonymous

Been using nonprofit version. Total pain to use, it doesn’t give us any flexibility in terms of reporting especially within restricted donations. We need something that can truly create sub sections within the chart of accounts

★★★★★
★★★★★
Submitted on March 14th, 2018 by Anonymous

For what I do, it’s great, but truth is I use this because my accountant uses it. It’s easy enough to put in all the financials, export and send then to my accountant and not have to worry about it for a few days.

★★★★★
★★★★★
Submitted on March 9th, 2018 by Anonymous

Great for accounting

★★★★★
★★★★★
Submitted on March 7th, 2018 by Anonymous

Our company owner always has an issue with the billing. We have retainage of 10% not shown on the invoice at all and we can’t do that currently with Quickbooks.

★★★★★
★★★★★
Submitted on March 7th, 2018 by Anonymous

Everything works fine with Quickbooks but it’s not e-commerce friendly and not a good format for entry for information, given that everything else is good. I wish a customer could view my inventory and have better customer integration

★★★★★
★★★★★
Submitted on March 7th, 2018 by Anonymous

Easy to use solution

★★★★★
★★★★★
Submitted on March 7th, 2018 by Anonymous

I love Quickbooks Premier and would not change a thing about it. I’ve used it for years and find it very easy to use and learn.

★★★★★
★★★★★
Submitted on February 26th, 2018 by Anonymous

There isn’t much that I don’t like about it, but I know that it is old and been around forever and there is something more up to date available, a lot of people don’t like change though

★★★★★
★★★★★
Submitted on February 26th, 2018 by Anonymous

I want the system to be more complex where I can have everything in 1 system, the solution is too basic, it can handle 9 entities but it is too basic. Quickbooks is really friendly and I recommend it for a small company

★★★★★
★★★★★
Submitted on February 26th, 2018 by Anonymous

To be honest I hate Quickbooks Premier. I dislike almost everything about it but mostly the payroll. I also need multiple company reporting which it isn’t able to do.

★★★★★
★★★★★
Submitted on December 11th, 2017 by R.

Its a great tool to use for Construction

The Good…

the price and the ease of use for each module

The Bad…

it could be a little more detailed regarding customizing your reports

★★★★★
★★★★★
Submitted on December 11th, 2017 by Anonymous

Had already used QB and upgraded to Premier to handle our job costing. We still just use a regular spreadsheet for our job costing. The functionality showed to us by the vendor did not work out the way we wanted. We will continue to look at outside job costing solutions that integrate in with QB rather than try to have the program handle it ourselves.

★★★★★
★★★★★
Submitted on December 11th, 2017 by Anonymous

Reasonable priced, but it has it’s limitations.

The Good…

My provider was at least helpful and able to teach me about Excel spreadsheet work-arounds. It’s easy to use and I’ve used it for 12 years, so I am an old user.

The Bad…

I hate the cashflow projections. It sucks, and it is not useful. It is pointless. That is the main thing. I need to do cashflow projections 6-8 months ahead. I am in construction and we work on long timeframes. That is what I mostly wanted to find in a different program but I can’t find anything out there.

★★★★★
★★★★★
Submitted on August 15th, 2017 by Scott

Love the product but the lack of service and constant updated without fixing everything is driving me away from INTUIT

The Good…

Accounting works good

The Bad…

Constant upgrading needed and the cost associated with that

★★★★★
★★★★★
Submitted on January 1st, 1900 by Anonymous

Total pain to use, it doesn’t give us any flexibility in terms of reporting especially within restricted donations. We need something that can truly create sub sections within the chart of accounts