What appliance installers need from their software, from sources outside QuickBooks and outside Nexa:
QuickBooks covers the money side of an installer's business well. It has bank feed reconciliation, comprehensive reporting, 800+ app integrations, and accountants know it. Plus adds project profitability, inventory tracking and up to 40 classes and locations, which could label jobs as gas or electric, install or repair. Those are labels, though. Nothing in QuickBooks' listed features records a job's license and permit status, the point where appliance installation ends and plumbing or gas fitting begins, who recovered refrigerant from a hauled-away unit and when, or a technician's EPA Section 608 certificate. Those are the records this trade has to keep.
Nexa covers the front office and job flow: estimates that convert to invoices, a client pay portal through your own Stripe account, jobs with costing and profit per job, crew assignment, today's stops sent to Google Maps, time tracking, and bookkeeping with bank reconciliation, profit and loss, and sales tax tracking. Its simple stock count per product is not full inventory management. Like QuickBooks, nothing in its feature list is built for license and permit status, refrigerant recovery paperwork or certification records. It has no sync or import with QuickBooks, so moving books over means starting fresh, and it does not run payroll. Its automated emails send only while Nexa is open on one of your devices. Nexa is software you own and run yourself, with no hosted support desk or vendor-run onboarding.
Over three years QuickBooks at $38 a month is $456 a year, or $1,368. Nexa is $279 once, or $458.64 over three years if you add Cloud Sync at $4.99 a month. If your accountant works in QuickBooks, keep it for the books. If you only need invoicing and job tracking and have no accountant depending on QuickBooks, Nexa is the cheaper way to do that part. Either way, keep the compliance records (license and permit status per job, refrigerant recovery documentation, your certificate) in a tool built for them. Don't expect either product to hold them.
Our read for appliance installers: Neither product has records for license and permit status, refrigerant recovery paperwork or technician certification, so an installer needs field-service or compliance-records software for that, and can keep QuickBooks or Nexa for the books.
Read on each linked page in October 2026. Check them again before you decide; vendors change plans often.
QuickBooks costs appliance installers $456/year at today's list price. Nexa is $279 once for invoicing, scheduling, CRM, time tracking and accounting in one suite — so after 7.3 months it has cost less than QuickBooks, and you own it after that. What it is not: hosted-for-you software with a support desk and a roadmap you can lobby. That is the trade, and the rest of this page is the detail behind it.
Nexa is $279 once, about $23 a month over its first year. Its Drain Guard reads your expenses (from a linked bank, an imported statement, or ones you type in), finds the charges that repeat, and adds them up by the month. Keep or Cut then walks you through them one at a time. Cancel $23 a month of charges you'd forgotten about and Nexa has paid for itself inside the first year, before you count the QuickBooks bill you'd stop paying.
It depends on what you find and what you cancel, so we don't promise a number. In our demo data, Drain Guard finds 5 subscriptions adding up to $110.13 a month. That is sample data, not a customer's.
The verdict for appliance installers: Neither QuickBooks nor Nexa is the main system for this work; start with software built for it. Nexa only makes sense beside it, at $279 once against $1,368 for QuickBooks over three years.
Time tracking, invoicing, job tracking and the books are the pieces of that day. Some tools rent you each piece separately. A few — Nexa among them — bundle the lot into something you buy once. The sections below price both routes honestly.
None of that is a software problem you can buy your way out of in one click — it is why the tool you pick matters more than what it costs. QuickBooks solves some of it. So does Nexa. The difference is what you are left holding in three years.
Today's list price is $38/month — $456 a year, from QuickBooks's own pricing page. Every figure below is that price, multiplied. Nothing is projected.
Nexa: $279 once (or 3 × $99). Over the same three years, that is $1,089 less.
If QuickBooks raises its price, the three-year cost goes up; if it cuts it, the cost comes down. We don't guess which. Add-ons, extra seats and card-processing fees are not included, on either side.
Today's sticker price only tells you what a subscription costs today. These are dated changes, each linked to the announcement or report it comes from. Tap one for the numbers.
For renewals on or after February 1, 2026, Pro Plus and Mac Plus went from $999 to $1,149 a year for one user, and each extra seat from $200 to $230.
Source: SWK Technologies, Insightful Accountant (Dec 2, 2025)
From July 1, 2025: Simple Start $35 to $38, Essentials $65 to $75, Plus $99 to $115, Advanced $235 to $275 a month.
Source: Woodard Report (May 27, 2025)
After September 30, 2024, new US customers can no longer buy these Desktop editions. Existing subscribers can keep renewing.
Source: Intuit
Only changes we can link to a vendor announcement or a named publication are listed. Plans, add-ons and discounts vary, so check the vendor's current pricing page before you decide.
| Feature | QuickBooks | Nexa |
|---|---|---|
| Invoicing | ✓ | ✓ |
| Scheduling | ✗ | ✓ |
| CRM | ✗ | ✓ |
| Time Tracking | — | ✓ |
| Full Accounting | ✓ | ✓ (SIMPL) |
| Task Management | ✗ | ✓ |
| Works offline | — | ✓ |
| Price | $38/mo | $279 once or 3 × $99 |
| 3-Year Total | $1,368 | $279 |
| You own it? | No — stop paying, lose access | Yes — forever |
✓ and ✗ for QuickBooks come from its own published feature list. — means the feature isn't in that list, which is not the same as QuickBooks lacking it: check with them. Three years is at today's price.
Straight from QuickBooks's own feature set. If one of these is the reason you pay them, that reason does not disappear because Nexa is cheaper.
QuickBooks is the better call if you need industry standard - accountants know it specifically, or if your team is large enough that per-seat pricing still beats buying software outright.
QuickBooks Online is aimed at freelancers and new businesses, small and mid-size businesses, product-based businesses, and nonprofits. Larger or more complex operations are pointed to Desktop Enterprise (up to 40 users) or Intuit Enterprise Suite (multi-entity). (quickbooks.intuit.com)
What people outside QuickBooks and outside Nexa say:
Read on each linked page in October 2026. Check them again before you decide; vendors change plans often.
Software doesn't do the actual work — it automates the business around it. And that part is the same for every appliance installer: find the work, manage it, bill for it, get paid. Each step has a tool — and the right single tool runs the whole loop, so the handoffs are automatic and you get back to the actual work. Tap a step to see what gets automated.
A lead, a call, a referral — and a quote or estimate that turns it into a booked job.
The part you actually get paid for — with the time, materials, add-ons, and tasks tracked as you go, not guessed at later.
The work becomes the invoice — the hours, the add-ons, the materials, the deposit credited — totaled and sent, instead of re-typed at 9pm.
Paid by card or link, the deposit credited, and what's overdue chased — without you doing it by hand.
You can stitch four separate subscriptions across these four steps, or run one tool that does the whole flow so a booking becomes a job becomes an invoice becomes a payment without re-typing. Either way the goal is the same: less time on the business of the business, more on the actual work. (Nexa is built to be the one — but the honest options for each step are above and below.)
QuickBooks plus whatever else you're paying for:
Email yourself this comparison?
The median appliance installer earns $55,000/year. At $456/year, QuickBooks is a recurring slice of that — paid again every year, whether the year was good or not. Owning the same jobs outright is $279 once, and the slice stops.
Nexa is $279 once. Invoicing, scheduling, CRM, time tracking, accounting — all connected, built for appliance installers. You own it like you own your appliance dolly with stair-climber straps.
An honest fit check — because the wrong tool is worse than no tool.
The honest fit: if you're a solo or small appliance installers business that owns its tools and is sick of renting software, Nexa replaces your whole stack for $279 once. If you're scaling past a handful of crews, a fleet platform may fit better — and we'd rather tell you that now than sell you the wrong thing.
Year-round construction in SoCal. Fire season (June-November) drives restoration demand. Drought impacts landscaping. Earthquake retrofitting is ongoing market.
Extreme summer heat drives HVAC demand. Hurricane risk on Gulf Coast. Year-round construction. Rapid population growth in DFW, Austin, Houston, San Antonio creates sustained demand. Freeze events (like 2021) create emergency plumbing/HVAC surge.
Hurricane season June-November creates massive restoration demand. Snowbird season November-March boosts service volume 30-40%. Year-round construction. Pool service is year-round industry. Pest control peaks in summer humidity.
Harsh winters in upstate, moderate in NYC. Construction limited in winter upstate. NYC market is enormous but hypercompetitive. Brownstone/pre-war building maintenance is specialized trade. NYC licensing is notoriously complex.
Time tracking, invoicing, job tracking and the books are the pieces of that day. Some tools rent you each piece separately. A few — Nexa among them — bundle the lot into something you buy once. The sections below price both routes honestly.
An appliance install looks simple on the work order and rarely is. The day is a route of deliveries, and at each stop the first thing you do is measure the path before you measure the appliance — a 36-inch fridge does not care that the front door is 35 and a half, and you'd rather find that out on the porch than wedged in the hallway. You and a partner walk it in on the stair-climber dolly, blankets down to protect the floor, pivoting it through turns that look impossible. The hookups are where the surprises live: the dishwasher's supply valve is seized and weeps when you touch it, the dryer outlet is an old three-prong and the new dryer came with a four-prong cord, the gas range's flex line is the wrong length and the shutoff is corroded. Each one is a judgment call about whether you can safely make it right or have to call it. You level the range so a pan of oil doesn't pool to one side, strap the anti-tip bracket so a kid can't pull it over, flare and leak-test the gas with the sniffer, run the dishwasher a cycle to prove no leaks before you sign off. Then there's the old unit to haul out and the fridge that needs proper refrigerant disposal. The job isn't done until it runs, it's level, it doesn't leak, and you've left the floor exactly as clean as you found it, because the callback you fear is a slow leak under a new dishwasher.
Real appliance installers near you who run their business on Nexa — book directly, no platform fee. Are you an appliance installer? Post your business and get found in your area — $2.99 one-time. Or browse every appliance installer on Nexa →
The tools of the trade — each a one-time buy that earns its keep for years.
Here's the bar that matters: you spent $580–$1,980 on tools that last for years, and never thought twice. So why should the software cost more than your whole kit — every single year? Hold it to the same standard as a good tool: $279, once.
We build an appliance installer's guide the same way every time, and we'd rather you trust it than take it on faith. Nexa is our product, so the test we hold ourselves to is simple: a tool only "wins" a job here when it genuinely does that job better for an appliance installer — and where something free, open-source, or buy-once does it better, we say so and link you to it. Where Nexa falls short (payroll is the honest example), we name the alternative outright.
Found something out of date? Prices change and we don't catch every move the day it happens. This guide is published and maintained by the Nexa team; if a figure here is wrong, tell us and we'll fix it — getting it right matters more to us than the sale.
For solo appliance installers and small teams, yes. invoicing, scheduling, CRM, time tracking, task management, and full accounting — all for $279 once. QuickBooks may be better if you have a large team (10+) or need enterprise-specific features.
QuickBooks has features like Industry standard - accountants know it and 800+ app integrations that some businesses rely on. For most solo appliance installers, these aren't dealbreakers.
At $38/month, Nexa pays for itself in 7.3 months. After that: $456 saved every year.
Yes. Nexa is $279 as a one-time payment, or 3 payments of $99 ($297 total). Either way it's a one-time purchase — no subscription, no recurring fees ever.
Own your tools. Stop renting your software.
Get Nexa — $279 Once