What elevator inspectors need from their software, from sources outside QuickBooks and outside Nexa:
Full disclosure: the publisher of this page makes Nexa, so weigh this read accordingly. The licensing duties below come from the Wisconsin and Missouri rules as summarized for this page. Other states differ, so check your own licensing authority before relying on them. QuickBooks covers an elevator inspector's billing and books well. It has invoicing, bank feed reconciliation, comprehensive reporting, and a format accountants already work in. It also has 800+ app integrations, and phone support comes with a paid plan. What it does not cover is the license. Wisconsin ties renewal to at least 24 hours of acceptable continuing education before expiry and to evidence of current QEI certification. It also requires a record of each inspection made, with dates and findings. Missouri requires professional liability, errors-and-omissions and commercial general liability coverage, plus a financial disclosure filing due January 31. It treats a falsified inspection report as grounds for revocation. Nothing in QuickBooks' feature list tracks those deadlines or holds findings per unit. An invoice that says an inspection happened is not the inspection record. That is a limit of the category, not a flaw in QuickBooks.
Nexa covers a similar business side: invoices and estimates, jobs with costing and profit, time tracking, expenses, bank reconciliation, profit and loss, 1099 summaries, and a client pay portal that runs through your own Stripe account. It has no continuing-education, certification or insurance tracking. It has no structured inspection record by date and finding, and no unit records. A client has no street-address field, which hurts when each client owns several buildings. You could type a renewal date or a finding into a note or a recurring job, but that is a workaround and not a compliance record. Nexa's automated emails send only while it is open on one of your devices, so do not rely on them for a January 31 filing. It cannot import from or sync with QuickBooks, and there is no hosted support desk because you own and run the software yourself. So Nexa does no better than QuickBooks on the one thing a licensed inspector cannot afford to miss. QuickBooks keeps the edge for anyone whose accountant already works in it.
Over three years, QuickBooks at $38 a month ($456 a year) comes to $1,368. Nexa is $279 once, or 3 payments of $99. Adding optional Cloud Sync at $4.99 a month brings three years to $458.64. If your accountant already works in QuickBooks, stay on it for the books. Nexa cannot import from it, and the savings do not protect your license. If you are starting fresh with simple invoicing and basic books, Nexa costs less. Either way, keep your continuing-education and QEI deadlines, insurance renewals, the annual filing, and dated inspection findings in a dedicated license-and-compliance tracker or inspection-records tool that keeps a report trail.
Our read for elevator inspectors: Neither QuickBooks nor Nexa tracks license renewal, continuing education, insurance or dated inspection findings, so use an inspection-records and license-compliance tracker, and keep QuickBooks only if your accountant already uses it.
Read on each linked page in October 2026. Check them again before you decide; vendors change plans often.
QuickBooks costs elevator inspectors $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 elevator inspectors: 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 elevator inspector: 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 Elevator Inspector 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 elevator inspectors. You own it like you own your QEI certification and the ASME A17.1/A17.2 handbook in the bag.
An honest fit check — because the wrong tool is worse than no tool.
The honest fit: if you're a solo or small elevator inspectors 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.
You meet the elevator mechanic in the lobby because you can't witness a Category 1 test without him operating the car, and the building manager has already warned you the unit can't be down past 10am. Up in the machine room you check the controller, the governor, and the brake, then you run the no-load safety test, timing the governor trip and watching the safeties set on the rails. Down in the pit you inspect the buffers, the travel cables, and the pit stop switch, ducking under the car with the hoistway light. You note the oil buffer hasn't had its five-year stroke test documented and the governor rope is showing wear. At the next building it's a full-load Category 5, so you and the mechanic load the car to rated capacity with test weights and run the brake and safety test under load, which is the one nobody wants to schedule because the car is out of service for hours. You measure door force, check the interlocks open the circuit, and verify the firefighters' service recall. The afternoon is two more annuals where the real work is keeping the units' due dates straight so none of them lapse, and then writing the deficiency reports with photos so the building knows what to fix before you come back to re-inspect.
Real elevator inspectors near you who run their business on Nexa — book directly, no platform fee. Are you an elevator inspector? Post your business and get found in your area — $2.99 one-time. Or browse every elevator inspector 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 $2,750–$18,200 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 elevator inspector'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 elevator inspector — 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 elevator inspectors 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 elevator inspectors, 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