Choosing an edition
QuickBooks Desktop for contractors and construction
You bill by job, not by month — and you need to know which jobs made money before the year ends.
Construction accounting has one demand that general bookkeeping does not: everything has to be attributable to a job. Labor, materials, subcontractors, change orders, retainage. If the software cannot hold that shape, you end up rebuilding it in a spreadsheet.
QuickBooks Desktop tracks costs and income against jobs, which is why it has stayed in this trade long after other businesses moved to browser-based tools.
What you are likely to need
Costs attached to jobs
Materials, hours and subcontractor bills recorded against the job they belong to, so a finished project can be compared against what it was quoted at.
Invoicing in stages
Progress billing against a schedule rather than one invoice at the end, and the ability to see what has been billed against what has been earned.
Subcontractors and 1099s
Payments to subcontractors tracked through the year so the paperwork in January is a report rather than an archaeology project.
Working offline
Site offices, trailers and bad connections. The file lives on your machine and the software does not need to be online to open it.
What we would sell you
Recommended
QuickBooks Desktop Pro Plus 2024
For most contractors the constraint is people, not features. Pro Plus carries the full double-entry accounting, invoicing, bills and over 100 built-in reports. You only need Enterprise if your inventory is genuinely complex — locations, serial numbers, pricing rules — or if four or more people must be in the file at once.
How many seats
An owner and a bookkeeper is two seats. Add an office manager entering supplier bills and it is three, which is where Pro Plus stops. At three seats Enterprise is only $1 more and carries on to five, so if you expect to grow past three, start there. How to count yours
Before you order
If you run payroll for crews through Intuit Desktop Payroll, read the service-life note below before you buy. That is the part of a 2024 license with an end date on it.
Whichever edition you take, the license never expires — but Intuit ends the connected services for the 2024 release, payroll and bank feeds included, on 31 May 2027. What that means