What heat pump installers need from their software, from sources outside QuickBooks and outside Nexa:
Disclosure first: this page is published by the maker of Nexa, so weigh it accordingly. QuickBooks covers the money side of this trade well. It has bank feed reconciliation, comprehensive reporting, 800+ app integrations, and phone support with a paid plan. Accountants know it. Plus adds project profitability and inventory tracking. The trade's compliance needs are a different matter, and nothing in QuickBooks' feature list addresses them. Those needs are: EPA Section 608 certification details for each technician, per-job refrigerant recovery records (required for systems with 5 to 50 lbs of charge), rebate reservation status, and equipment QPIN or QMID numbers. For rebates, California's HEEHRA program funds only projects with an approved reservation, and rebates are not retroactive. A job that starts before approval can lose the rebate. QuickBooks also has no listed support for license tracking by jurisdiction or emergency-call scheduling.
Nexa covers more of the job side. It has quotes and estimates that convert to invoices, jobs with costing and profit per job, crew assignment with a view of each person's own jobs, and today's stops sent to Google Maps in time order. It also has time tracking, a payroll CSV of hours x rate, bookkeeping with bank reconciliation, and a simple stock count, and it works offline. It has no certification records, refrigerant recovery logs, rebate reservation status, or equipment ID fields as features. Those would live in free-form notes, with no alert if a reservation is missing. It also has no dispatch board, no route optimization, no QuickBooks import or sync, no integration library, and no payroll taxes or pay stubs. Its automated emails send only while Nexa is open on one of your devices. It is software you run yourself, with no hosted support desk or vendor onboarding.
Over three years, QuickBooks at $38/month is $456 a year, or $1,368. Nexa is $279 once, or $458.64 with optional Cloud Sync at $4.99/month. Price is not the deciding factor here, because neither tool covers the compliance work. If you already use QuickBooks and your accountant depends on it, keep it for the books. Nexa has no import or sync, so switching means re-keying your history. For the compliance side, use a field-service tool built for HVAC. At minimum it should hold each technician's 608 certification, a recovery record per job, a reservation-approved flag that blocks scheduling until it is set, and QPIN or QMID numbers on invoices. A shared spreadsheet is a stopgap until you have one. Nexa can be a lower-cost way to run quotes, jobs and crews. It does not replace that compliance record.
Our read for heat pump installers: Neither tool tracks 608 certifications, refrigerant recovery, rebate reservations or equipment ID numbers, so use an HVAC field-service and compliance-tracking tool for those, and keep QuickBooks for the books if you already use it.
Read on each linked page in October 2026. Check them again before you decide; vendors change plans often.
QuickBooks costs heat pump installers $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 heat pump installers: 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 heat pump installer: 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 Heat Pump Installer 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 heat pump installers. You own it like you own your A micron vacuum gauge and a two-stage vacuum pump for evacuation.
An honest fit check — because the wrong tool is worse than no tool.
The honest fit: if you're a solo or small heat pump installers 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 roll up to a heat-pump changeout with the new condenser and air handler on the truck and a plan to have the house on heat by dinner. You recover the old refrigerant legally, pull the dead system, and set the new outdoor unit on a pad, leveling it and routing the line set through the wall. Brazing the connections, you flow nitrogen through the lines so you don't scale the inside of the copper, then pressure-test with nitrogen and watch the gauge hold. The unglamorous, decisive part comes next: you pull a deep vacuum down to 500 microns and let it sit, because skipping this is how you create a callback in January. While the pump runs you find the problem the day always hides, an electrical panel with no room for the new circuit, and you call the homeowner to talk through the added cost. You weigh in the refrigerant charge to spec on the scale, power up, and measure airflow and static pressure to confirm the existing ducts aren't choking the system. Once it's heating you walk the homeowner through the thermostat and the filter. The evening is the modern half of the trade: assembling the SEER2 and HSPF2 documentation for the utility rebate and tax credit, invoicing the completion balance, and prepping equipment for tomorrow's install.
Real heat pump installers near you who run their business on Nexa — book directly, no platform fee. Are you a heat pump installer? Post your business and get found in your area — $2.99 one-time. Or browse every heat pump installer 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 $1,610–$7,150 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 heat pump installer'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 heat pump installer — 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 heat pump installers 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 heat pump installers, 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