What auto electricians need from their software, from sources outside QuickBooks and outside Nexa:
QuickBooks handles the money side of this trade well. It does invoicing, expense tracking (including tool purchases for owner-operators), bank feed reconciliation, reporting and sales tax, and accountants know it. The plan that does the core job is $38 a month. It also has 800+ app integrations, phone support on paid plans, and inventory tracking on Plus. What it does not give you, from the features listed, is anything shaped to a repair shop. It has no diagnostic minimum or separate diagnostic rate. It has no flat-rate versus actual-time labor setting. It has no place for EPA Section 609 certification or recovered-refrigerant records, which must be kept for 3 years. It has no flag for customer approval of added work or for parts the customer asked to keep.
Nexa covers more of the quoting and job side. Estimates convert to invoices, and clients can sign estimates and pay by card through your own Stripe account. It also has jobs with costing and profit per job, time tracking, expenses with receipt scanning, sales tax tracking, and a simple stock count per product. It works offline. It does not cover the trade's specific rules either. It has no diagnostic minimum or separate diagnostic rate, no certification or refrigerant record keeping, and no state-specific estimate or invoice format. It does not run payroll and has no full inventory management. It cannot import from or sync with QuickBooks. If you use its automated emails or reminders, they send only while Nexa is open on one of your devices. It is software you run yourself, with no hosted support desk.
Over three years QuickBooks at $38 a month comes to $1,368 ($456 a year). Nexa is $279 once, or $458.64 with the optional $4.99 monthly Cloud Sync for three years. Without sync it runs on one device. If you are already on QuickBooks and your accountant relies on it, stay for the books. Nexa would mean re-entering data by hand, because it cannot import. A solo technician who wants simple estimates, invoices and expense tracking at a lower cost could reasonably use Nexa. Neither tool handles the diagnostic billing, refrigerant records and added-work approvals that a shop actually needs. For that you need auto repair shop management software, with QuickBooks or Nexa kept for the bookkeeping.
Our read for auto electricians: Neither QuickBooks nor Nexa covers diagnostic billing, refrigerant certification records or added-work approvals, so shops need auto repair shop management software and can keep either tool for the books.
Read on each linked page in October 2026. Check them again before you decide; vendors change plans often.
QuickBooks costs auto electricians $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 auto electricians: 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.
Invoicing, time tracking, 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 auto electrician: 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 Auto Electrician earns $48,000/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 auto electricians. You own it like you own your Digital multimeter for voltage drop and continuity testing.
An honest fit check — because the wrong tool is worse than no tool.
The honest fit: if you're a solo or small auto electricians 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.
Invoicing, time tracking, 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.
The first job is a no-start that cranks but won't fire, and the owner swears it's the starter even though it spins fine. You start at the battery with the multimeter, check voltage drop across the grounds, and trace power through the relays before the scan tool even comes out. Electrical work is the one trade where the diagnosis is the whole job, and you spend the morning explaining to a skeptical customer that finding the fault is the labor, not the part. After lunch you get a parasitic draw that's killing a battery overnight, so you pull fuses one at a time watching the meter, hunting the circuit that won't go to sleep. Somewhere in there you open a harness and find a rat's nest of scotch-locks from whoever wired in an aftermarket amp years ago, and now you're cutting all of it out and soldering proper splices. An intermittent dash light won't reproduce no matter how you wiggle the connectors, and you tell the customer to bring it back the moment it acts up. You close out a job that took three hours to find and twenty minutes to fix, and the customer questions the bill because the broken wire was so small.
Real auto electricians near you who run their business on Nexa — book directly, no platform fee. Are you an auto electrician? Post your business and get found in your area — $2.99 one-time. Or browse every auto electrician 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 $730–$4,080 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 auto electrician'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 auto electrician — 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 auto electricians 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 auto electricians, 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