What classic car restorer need from their software, from sources outside QuickBooks and outside Nexa:
QuickBooks covers the money side of a long restoration well. Its bank feed reconciliation, reporting and 800+ integrations hold up over a 12-month Corvette job or a 24-to-30-month XKE job, and accountants already know it. Phone support comes with a paid plan. The higher tiers add project profitability and inventory tracking, which suit a parts-heavy shop, but those cost more than the $38 plan priced below. What QuickBooks does not list is the legal paper trail: a running estimate against actual charges, a recorded customer consent for each overrun, and storage terms with a completion notice on file. State repair law turns on those records. The Iowa shop that billed hourly with no fixed estimate collected nothing further, not even its storage charges. Colorado limits the lien to the estimate plus a small margin unless the customer consents further. A shop on QuickBooks has to keep that paperwork in its own forms, whatever tool it uses.
Nexa covers some of the estimate and authorization side that QuickBooks leaves out. Estimates and proposals convert to invoices, and clients can sign estimates through the pay portal, which is a written authorization on record. Payment plans and recurring invoices can follow a monthly billing cycle. Jobs carry costing and profit per job, and photos taken on the phone stay with the job record. It also has the books: expenses, bank reconciliation, profit and loss, balance sheet and sales tax tracking. The gaps matter for this trade, though. Nexa has no import or sync with QuickBooks, so years of history would be re-entered by hand. It has no full inventory management, no job templates and no task dependencies, so a multi-year build with ordered phases gets only one level of sub-steps. Job photos are not sent to the customer as a report, so progress updates stay manual. It has no hosted support desk or vendor-run onboarding, since you own and run it yourself. Any automated emails go out only while Nexa is open on one of your devices.
Over three years QuickBooks at $38 a month is $456 a year, or $1,368. Nexa is $279 once, or $458.64 with the optional $4.99 Cloud Sync for all 36 months. That gap is real but secondary, because neither tool gives you a per-overrun consent log or a storage notice. A shop with an accountant, existing QuickBooks books, parts to track, or a need for phone support should stay and add a signed authorization form with a maximum price and written storage terms. A one-person shop with no accountant dependency could use Nexa's signed estimates and monthly itemized invoices. It should start with new jobs only, since nothing carries over from QuickBooks.
Our read for classic car restorer: Keep QuickBooks for the books, accountant access and parts tracking, and put estimate, consent and storage paperwork in signed forms, because neither tool logs per-overrun consent.
Read on each linked page in October 2026. Check them again before you decide; vendors change plans often.
QuickBooks costs classic car restorer $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 classic car restorer: Stay with QuickBooks if the needs in our read above apply to you. If they don't, Nexa covers the core invoicing, scheduling and books for $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 classic car restorer: 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 Classic Car Restorer 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 classic car restorer. You own it like you own your MIG and TIG welders for sheet-metal patch panels.
An honest fit check — because the wrong tool is worse than no tool.
The honest fit: if you're a solo or small classic car restorer 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.
A restoration is measured in months, sometimes years, so my day is one slow chapter of a very long story. I might spend the whole morning fabricating a single floor-pan patch because the reproduction piece doesn't quite fit the way the factory stamped it in 1968, and I'm shrinking and stretching metal until the contour is right. Rust is the thief that steals my timeline; I open up a rocker expecting surface scale and find the structure gone, and now I'm calling the owner to have the hard conversation about scope. A lot of hours go into the hunt for parts, NOS trim, correct fasteners, a date-coded carburetor, because for these cars correctness is the whole point to the people who own them. I keep the factory manuals open and photograph every assembly before I take it apart, because in eighteen months I will not remember how that wiring loom routed. There's welding, blasting, block-sanding, and endless test-fitting. The reward is rolling a car out that hasn't run since the Carter administration and hearing it idle. But the business pressure is real: long timelines mean money trickles in, and an owner who loses steam can leave a half-built car sitting on my rotisserie taking up a bay for a year.
Real classic car restorer near you who run their business on Nexa — book directly, no platform fee. Are you a classic car restorer? Post your business and get found in your area — $2.99 one-time. Or browse every classic car restorer 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 $2,000–$8,700 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 a classic car restorer'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 a classic car restorer — 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 classic car restorer 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 classic car restorer, 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