What lightning rod installers 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, invoicing, and 800+ app integrations. It is also the system most accountants already know. Plus adds project profitability, so you can see margin per job. The trade's own record-keeping needs are not in its feature list. That includes each crew member's LPI certification number and annual renewal date, and the UL Master Label application, inspection and certificate status for each job. It also lacks roof-area estimating with complexity adjustments, and quote re-pricing when copper and aluminum prices move. You would be keeping those in spreadsheets or notes.
Nexa covers the general business work. It has estimates and quotes that convert to invoices, jobs with costing and profit per job, and crew assignment with a crew view. It also has a CRM with notes and tags, time tracking, expenses, bank reconciliation, profit and loss, and a client pay portal through your own Stripe account. It has no certification tracking, no Master Label workflow, no roof-measurement estimating and no job templates. It also cannot sync or import with QuickBooks. It does not run payroll, and there is no hosted support desk or vendor-run onboarding. If you used its automated emails or reminders, they send only while Nexa is open on one of your devices.
Over three years QuickBooks at $38 a month is $1,368 ($456 a year). Nexa is $279 once, or $458.64 with optional Cloud Sync at $4.99 a month over the same period. Nexa is the cheaper way to run jobs, invoices and books, but it does not solve the trade-specific problems either. If QuickBooks already works for your bookkeeping and your accountant, keep it. If you are choosing between the two for the first time, price is the main difference. What a lightning protection business needs most is a contractor or field-service tool with custom fields for certifications and per-job compliance records, plus roof-based estimating. Neither product is that tool.
Our read for lightning rod installers: Neither QuickBooks nor Nexa tracks LPI certifications, UL Master Label status or roof-based estimates, so look for a contractor job-management tool and keep your current books where they are.
Read on each linked page in October 2026. Check them again before you decide; vendors change plans often.
QuickBooks costs lightning rod 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 lightning rod 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 lightning rod 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 lightning rod 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 lightning rod installers. You own it like you own your copper and aluminum air terminals.
An honest fit check — because the wrong tool is worse than no tool.
The honest fit: if you're a solo or small lightning rod 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.
Most days start on a roof someone is genuinely worried about — a hilltop farmhouse, a horse barn, a church steeple that took a hit last August. You walk the ridgeline first, marking air terminal spots no more than twenty feet apart and at every high point and chimney, because the code spacing isn't a suggestion. Then comes the part nobody sees: routing two down-conductors on opposite corners, hugging them to the structure with cable so they don't flap, and getting them to ground without an ugly run across the front of a nice house. Grounding is the real fight. You drive the rod and clamp on the megger, and if the soil is dry rock you're not going to read low enough, so you add rods in a triangle or trench in a counterpoise loop. Every connection gets a listed clamp, bronze, no wire nuts. By afternoon you're bonding the system to the panel ground and any roof metal so a strike can't side-flash. The last hour is photos — every terminal, every bond, every ground — because the certifying body and the homeowner's insurer will want proof the system is actually UL-compliant before anyone signs off.
Real lightning rod installers near you who run their business on Nexa — book directly, no platform fee. Are you a lightning rod installer? Post your business and get found in your area — $2.99 one-time. Or browse every lightning rod 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 $2,080–$9,700 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 lightning rod 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 lightning rod 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 lightning rod 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 lightning rod 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