What energy auditors need from their software, from sources outside QuickBooks and outside Nexa:
Disclosure: Nexa's publisher wrote this page, so it gains if you choose Nexa. We have not tested either product against a rater's QA file. Our statements about each product come only from its published feature list. An energy auditor's core need is a compliance record, not bookkeeping. Under RESNET Standard 904, the QA designee file-reviews the greater of one rating or 10% of a rater's annual ratings, rounded up, at least quarterly. Every job needs a complete, retrievable file. Each rater also needs an annual on-site field review by someone who did no part of the testing on that home. The tool must therefore show which completed homes are eligible and keep the reviewer's records apart from your own. BPI certification lasts three years and needs a renewal reminder and a continuing-education log. A 179D claim needs certifiable savings figures, modeling reports and per-building square footage kept with each client. QuickBooks covers the money side well: bank feed reconciliation, comprehensive reporting, 800+ app integrations and an accountant base that already knows it. Nothing in its feature list covers QA files, field-review eligibility, renewal dates or modeling reports.
Nexa covers the business side: invoices and estimates, a client pay portal through your own Stripe account, jobs with costing and profit per job, a CRM with notes and tags, a task board, time tracking, and bookkeeping with bank reconciliation, profit and loss, balance sheet and 1099 summaries. It works offline, which helps on site visits. It has no QA-review records, field-review eligibility tracking, certification renewal reminders, continuing-education log or place to file modeling reports against a client. A client record has no street-address field, so it cannot serve as a per-home rating file. Notes and the task board could hold informal reminders, but they are not a record you could hand to a QA designee. Nexa has no sync or import with QuickBooks and no app marketplace, so an accountant working in QuickBooks would not receive your books directly. Any automated emails, such as reminders, send only while Nexa is open on one of your devices. It is software you run yourself, with no hosted support desk or vendor-run onboarding, and without Cloud Sync it runs on one device.
Over three years, QuickBooks at $38/month costs $456 a year, or $1,368. Nexa is $279 once (or 3 payments of $99), or $458.64 with the optional $4.99/month Cloud Sync for all three years. That difference only applies to invoicing and books, which are not the hard part of this trade, and neither product holds your QA files. If your accountant works in QuickBooks, keep it for the books, because Nexa cannot hand them over. A solo rater with no accountant dependence could run invoicing and books on Nexa for less, accepting the self-run caveats above. Either way, keep QA files, field-review eligibility, BPI renewal dates, continuing-education logs and 179D modeling reports in a records and compliance management tool built for HERS raters and certified energy work. Before you buy one, ask the vendor to show a per-home file with the address, test results and QA review dates. Ask how it separates your jobs from the reviewer's records, and how it produces the files for a quarterly review on request. The IRS page we used gives no 179D termination date, so check current law before relying on any deduction.
Our read for energy auditors: Neither tool holds HERS QA files, field-review eligibility, BPI renewal tracking or 179D modeling reports, so you need a records and compliance management tool built for raters. Keep QuickBooks for the books if your accountant uses it.
Neither product on this page is built for it. These kinds of software are. The examples are not ours and these are plain links, not affiliate links; each goes to the product's own page for that capability.
Read on each linked page in October 2026. Check them again before you decide; vendors change plans often.
QuickBooks costs energy auditors $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 energy auditors: Neither QuickBooks nor Nexa is the main system for this work; start with the specialist software above. 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 energy auditor: 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 Energy Auditor 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 energy auditors. You own it like you own your A calibrated blower door and digital manometer for measuring whole-house air leakage.
An honest fit check — because the wrong tool is worse than no tool.
The honest fit: if you're a solo or small energy auditors 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.
She arrives, walks the perimeter, and starts with the building shell: age, orientation, window types, and obvious gaps. Inside she sets the blower door and runs the house to fifty pascals, logging the air changes per hour, then walks each room with the thermal camera while it's depressurized so the missing insulation glows on the screen. She tests every combustion appliance with the analyzer, checking draft and CO under worst-case conditions, and runs the duct blaster to see how leaky the system is. She photographs everything, because the report and the rebate both live on evidence. Lunch is in the car, scrolling readings to make sure she didn't miss a field the modeling software will need. The afternoon is a second home across town with a damp basement, where the moisture meter changes her recommendations. Back at the desk the real work begins: feeding numbers into the model, ranking the retrofits by payback, and writing a report a homeowner will actually read. She emails it, then follows up with the two from last week who haven't booked the insulation crew she recommended, knowing the audit only matters if the work happens.
Real energy auditors near you who run their business on Nexa — book directly, no platform fee. Are you an energy auditor? Post your business and get found in your area — $2.99 one-time. Or browse every energy auditor 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 $6,700–$19,800 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 energy auditor'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 energy auditor — 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 energy auditors 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 energy auditors, 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