What handmade jewelry makers need from their software, from sources outside QuickBooks and outside Nexa:
QuickBooks covers the money side of this trade well. It has bank feed reconciliation, comprehensive reporting, 800+ app integrations, and it is the tool accountants already know. Those matter for a maker who must match marketplace and payment-app payouts against their own sales records, and for one who may receive a Form 1099-K. The plan at $38 a month does the core bookkeeping job. Plus adds inventory tracking at a higher price. What neither tool's listed features show is a place to record each piece's base metal, gold fineness and gold thickness for vermeil, or the silver purity behind a sterling mark. Nothing listed tracks which purchases were made under a resale certificate or flags materials later kept or given away that owe use tax. A maker would need a separate product spec sheet or notes for those records, and should check what a given plan allows before relying on it.
Nexa covers invoicing, expenses, bank reconciliation, profit and loss, balance sheet, sales tax tracking, receipt scanning, 1099 summaries and a simple stock count per product. It also does job costing, with profit per job. Card payments go only through the maker's own Stripe account. It does not offer full inventory management, with no valuation or reorder points. It has no app marketplace or integration library, and no sync or import with QuickBooks, so existing books would not carry over. It is software you own and run yourself, with no hosted support desk or vendor-run onboarding. Like QuickBooks, it shows no fields for metal fineness or plating thickness or for resale certificates.
Over three years, QuickBooks at $38 a month is $456 a year, or $1,368. Nexa is $279 once, or 3 payments of $99, and stays $279 if one device is enough. Adding Cloud Sync at $4.99 a month brings it to $458.64. A maker who already uses QuickBooks, works with an accountant, or reconciles marketplace payouts through bank feeds and integrations should stay. A solo maker on one device, with simple books, who wants a low one-time cost and can run without integrations, could reasonably start with Nexa. Either way, the metal-purity and resale-certificate records need to live in a separate system.
Our read for handmade jewelry makers: Stay with QuickBooks if you rely on bank feeds, integrations or an accountant; neither tool covers vermeil or silver spec records or resale-certificate tracking, so keep those separately.
Read on each linked page in October 2026. Check them again before you decide; vendors change plans often.
QuickBooks costs handmade jewelry makers $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 handmade jewelry makers: 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.
The books and job tracking 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 handmade jewelry maker: 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 Handmade Jewelry Maker earns $32,000/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 handmade jewelry makers. You own it like you own your a jeweler's bench with a flex-shaft rotary tool and bench pin.
An honest fit check — because the wrong tool is worse than no tool.
The honest fit: if you're a solo or small handmade jewelry makers business that owns its tools and is sick of renting software, Nexa replaces your whole stack for $279 once. If you're scaling into a large team with dedicated admin staff, a bigger platform may fit better — and we'd rather tell you that now than sell you the wrong thing.
The books and job tracking 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 bench gets the best light, so soldering and stone-setting happen in the morning when the eyes are fresh. A pair of earrings from yesterday's batch gets pickled, tumbled, and polished, then photographed in the light tent before the listing goes live. A custom commission needs attention: the client wants to swap the sapphire for a moissanite and move the setting up a finger size, which means re-sketching the design and re-quoting the metal weight. Email and DMs pile up with sizing questions and shipping requests, and a wholesale account wants to reorder a line that uses a discontinued chain, so a substitute has to be sourced. Lunch is at the bench. The afternoon is production: cutting and forming wire for a batch of stacking rings, keeping count of how much sterling is consumed so the next order to the metal supplier is right. A craft fair is three weeks out, so booth inventory gets tallied and gaps get noted. Packaging the day's online orders means hand-wrapping, including a care card, and printing labels. The last hour is the worst part: trying to price three new pieces by adding up wire weight, stone cost, and an honest count of bench hours, then second-guessing whether anyone will pay it.
Real handmade jewelry makers near you who run their business on Nexa — book directly, no platform fee. Are you a handmade jewelry maker? Post your business and get found in your area — $2.99 one-time. Or browse every handmade jewelry maker on Nexa →
The tools of the trade — each a one-time buy that earns its keep for years.
You paid for these once because good tools last. That's the bar your software should clear too — priced like a tool you own, $279 once, not a subscription that costs more than your kit every year.
We build a handmade jewelry maker'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 handmade jewelry maker — 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 handmade jewelry makers 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 handmade jewelry makers, 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