What kitchen exhaust cleaners need from their software, from sources outside QuickBooks and outside Nexa:
QuickBooks covers the money side of this trade well. It has invoicing, bank feed reconciliation, comprehensive reporting, and an industry-standard format that accountants know. It also offers 800+ app integrations, and phone support comes with a paid plan. Nothing in its feature list covers what a kitchen exhaust cleaner has to document. That includes a per-site service schedule by cooking type (monthly, quarterly, semiannual or annual), storage of licence and technician registration numbers, tracking of insurance and registrations, a next-service date for the label, or a completion and deficiency report for the owner. Those needs would have to come from one of its integrations or from paper and spreadsheets.
Nexa also covers the business side, and it costs far less. It has quotes and estimates that convert to invoices, recurring invoices, recurring jobs with costing and profit per job, job assignment to crew members, and today's stops sent to Google Maps. It also has expenses, bank reconciliation, profit and loss, and a client pay portal that runs through your own Stripe account. But it lacks the same compliance pieces. A client record has no street-address field, there are no job templates, and nothing produces a deficiency report or stores licence and technician numbers. It has no QuickBooks sync or import, no payroll, and no support desk or vendor onboarding, because you own and run it yourself. If you use automation, its automated emails send only while Nexa is open on one of your devices.
Over three years QuickBooks at $38 a month comes to $1,368 ($456 a year). Nexa is $279 once, or $458.64 over three years if you add optional Cloud Sync at $4.99 a month. If your accountant relies on QuickBooks, keep it for the books. Nexa is not a drop-in replacement and cannot exchange data with it. Neither product handles the fire-code paperwork, so a shop that needs service labels, due dates and deficiency reports should add a tool built for that.
Our read for kitchen exhaust cleaners: Neither product tracks per-site service intervals, licence and technician numbers, or deficiency reports, so you need inspection or field-service software built for fire-protection trades, and QuickBooks can stay for the books.
Read on each linked page in October 2026. Check them again before you decide; vendors change plans often.
QuickBooks costs kitchen exhaust cleaners $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 kitchen exhaust cleaners: 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 kitchen exhaust cleaner: 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 Kitchen Exhaust Cleaner 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 kitchen exhaust cleaners. You own it like you own your Hot-water pressure washer with degreaser injection.
An honest fit check — because the wrong tool is worse than no tool.
The honest fit: if you're a solo or small kitchen exhaust cleaners 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.
This is a night trade. I show up after the last cover is fired, usually near midnight, because you can't pressure-wash a hood while a wok line is screaming. First thing is containment: plastic over the cookline, grease bags hung under the hood, because the degreaser and the runoff have to go somewhere that isn't the prep table. I scrape the hood baffles, then run the hot-water washer up through the duct to the rooftop fan, and the standard I'm cleaning to is bare metal, because that's what the NFPA 96 sticker certifies and what the owner's fire-insurance audit checks. The fights are always about frequency: a high-volume wok or charbroil line is on a quarterly cycle, and owners want to stretch it to save money, so I keep the cooking-volume rationale handy. Old buildings are the curse, with access panels rusted shut or never installed, so half the night is making an opening I can actually clean through. I service the fan belt while I'm on the roof. When it's clean I sign and date the sticker inside the hood, and that signature is my certification on the line, so if there's a grease fire that sticker had better be honest. I leave before the morning prep cook arrives, photos in hand for the insurance file.
Real kitchen exhaust cleaners near you who run their business on Nexa — book directly, no platform fee. Are you a kitchen exhaust cleaner? Post your business and get found in your area — $2.99 one-time. Or browse every kitchen exhaust cleaner 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 $4,830–$18,400 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 kitchen exhaust cleaner'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 kitchen exhaust cleaner — 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 kitchen exhaust cleaners 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 kitchen exhaust cleaners, 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