What herb growers need from their software, from sources outside QuickBooks and outside Nexa:
QuickBooks covers the bookkeeping side of this trade well. A herb grower's core records are sales totals to compare against the FSMA Produce Safety Rule threshold, sales split by buyer type to support a qualified exemption, and seed or plug costs tracked by crop and year for Schedule F. QuickBooks is the tool most accountants already know, and that matters for cash-method farm returns. Its reporting and bank reconciliation are solid. It has no herb-specific or FSMA features, though. Splitting sales by buyer type or costs by crop means setting up your own structure, and the 40 classes and locations that make that easier come on the higher Plus tier, not the $38 plan.
Nexa has the general small-business pieces: invoices, expenses, bank reconciliation, profit and loss, balance sheet, cash flow, 1099 summaries, a CRM with tags, and job costing with profit per job. It works offline and has a Spanish interface. It does not have anything built for FSMA thresholds or Schedule F, and it cannot import from or sync with QuickBooks, so moving means re-entering your history. It has no full inventory management and no integration library. 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-run onboarding.
Over three years, QuickBooks at $38 a month ($456 a year) comes to $1,368. Nexa is $279 once, or $458.64 over three years if you add Cloud Sync at $4.99 a month to use it on more than one device. Nexa is cheaper, but the savings don't outweigh what a grower on QuickBooks gives up: the accountant familiarity and the existing records. If your accountant already works in QuickBooks, stay. If you are a one-device grower just starting out, keep simple records, and don't need an accountant working in your books, Nexa is a reasonable lower-cost choice. In either case, record sales by buyer type and keep crop-and-year cost records yourself.
Our read for herb growers: Stay with QuickBooks if your accountant already uses it for your farm return; Nexa is a fair, cheaper option mainly for new one-device growers without that tie.
Read on each linked page in October 2026. Check them again before you decide; vendors change plans often.
QuickBooks costs herb growers $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 herb growers: 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, 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 creative work — it automates the business around it. And that part is the same for every herb grower: 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 creative work. Tap a step to see what gets automated.
An inquiry becomes a proposal becomes a signed project — with the scope and the deposit locked in.
The work itself — tracked against the project: hours, milestones, revisions, and expenses, so nothing bills late or goes uncounted.
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 creative 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 Herb Grower earns $35,000/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 herb growers. You own it like you own your greenhouse or high tunnel with potting benches.
An honest fit check — because the wrong tool is worse than no tool.
The honest fit: if you're a solo or small herb growers 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.
Invoicing, 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.
She walks the high tunnel at first light checking which herbs are at peak, because basil cut a day too late or held a day too long is a chef's complaint. Morning harvest is for the restaurant accounts: she shears basil, cilantro, mint, and thyme, bunches and bands them, dunks them in the wash tank, and gets them into the cold room fast because the clock on cut herbs is brutal. She portions each kitchen's order from the night's texts, one wants a pound of basil and a half-pound of chives, another swapped tarragon for dill this week. Out front she's also running a retail line of live potted herbs for the nursery customers, a totally different rhythm of potting up plugs, watering benches, and pricing by the pot instead of the bunch. Midday she delivers to three restaurants and drops potted rosemary at a garden center on consignment. She knows holiday sage demand is coming and isn't sure she planted enough. Back home the week's restaurant orders need invoicing and she's behind, so two chefs are unbilled. She checks the misters, sows a tray of basil plugs for the next cutting, and notes the mint's getting leggy. Seed and soil receipts pile on the potting bench.
Real herb growers near you who run their business on Nexa — book directly, no platform fee. Are you a herb grower? Post your business and get found in your area — $2.99 one-time. Or browse every herb grower 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 herb grower'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 herb grower — 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 herb growers 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 herb growers, 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