What water damage restoration need from their software, from sources outside QuickBooks and outside Nexa:
We make Nexa, so weigh this accordingly. The core need in water damage restoration is evidence behind the invoice. That means dated moisture readings taken at the start and during the job and compared with a dry standard, equipment records, and photos and notes on the claim file. It also means line items an adjuster can check against a price-list estimate. The source we rely on calls missing or inaccurate drying logs, or no third-party verification of drying, the biggest challenge in the trade. It is a contractor-written roundup, so check its state licensing details with the state agency. Mold work adds licensing in Florida, Louisiana, New York, Tennessee, Texas and Washington, D.C., and general contractor thresholds vary by state. QuickBooks covers none of this evidence work. It has no moisture log, equipment record, license tracker or estimate comparison. It does the money side well: bank feed reconciliation, comprehensive reporting, 800+ integrations, phone support on paid plans, and an accountant who almost certainly knows it. Plus adds project profitability and up to 40 classes and locations, which can keep each loss site separate in the books.
Nexa has the same gap on the core need, and we are not claiming otherwise. It has no drying logs, moisture readings, equipment records, license tracking or comparison against an adjuster's estimate, so it cannot back up a carrier invoice. What it offers is general office tooling: estimates that convert to invoices, jobs with costing and profit per job, crew assignment, time tracking, expenses, bank reconciliation, profit and loss, and a client pay portal. It also works offline. Several limits count against it here. A client record has no street-address field, and every restoration job is at a loss site. It has no job templates and no sync or import with QuickBooks. It has no app marketplace, so there is no built-in way to connect a documentation tool. It does not run payroll, and support is self-service with no hosted help desk or vendor-run onboarding. Its automated emails send only while Nexa is open on one of your devices, and without the optional $4.99/month Cloud Sync it runs on one device.
Over three years QuickBooks at $38/month costs $1,368 ($456 a year). Nexa is $279 once, or $458.64 over the same three years with Cloud Sync. The saving is real, but it does not change what the carrier requires, because neither product produces the drying paper trail. If you already use QuickBooks, keep it for the books. Add restoration job-documentation software for readings, equipment, photos, license tracking and price-list line items, and confirm it exports cleanly to your accounting. Nexa's lack of any QuickBooks import makes it a poor replacement for a shop with years of history there. Only a very small shop with little insurance work should consider Nexa for the office side. That shop would need to be comfortable keeping its drying records elsewhere and supporting its own software.
Our read for water damage restoration: Keep QuickBooks for the books, because neither product covers drying logs, moisture readings or license tracking, and the gap needs restoration job-documentation software rather than a switch.
Whichever of the two you keep for the books, neither is built for this part of the work. These kinds of software are. The examples are not ours and these are plain links, not affiliate links; each goes to the product's own page for that capability.
Read on each linked page in October 2026. Check them again before you decide; vendors change plans often.
QuickBooks costs water damage restoration $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 water damage restoration: 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.
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 water damage restoration technician: 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 Water Damage Restoration Technician 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 water damage restoration. You own it like you own your A truck-mount or portable extractor for pulling standing water out of carpet and pad.
An honest fit check — because the wrong tool is worse than no tool.
The honest fit: if you're a solo or small water damage restoration 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.
A call comes in early: a supply line let go overnight and a finished basement is under an inch of water. He's on site fast because every hour standing water sits, the loss grows and mold gets closer. He extracts the standing water first, then pulls the soaked pad and uses the moisture meter and IR camera to map how far the water wicked up the drywall and under the LVP. He categorizes the loss, sets the drying plan, and stages air movers and dehumidifiers by the math, not by feel, because the insurer will check. He logs the starting moisture content of every wall and the room's grains per pound, because that first reading is the proof the drying worked. Midday he's at a different house doing a daily monitoring visit, re-reading every wall, adjusting equipment, and updating the drying log. An adjuster calls disputing how many air movers are running, and he walks through the affected square footage line by line. The afternoon is a Cat 3 sewage backup that needs containment and antimicrobial. He ends the day reconciling which jobs hit dry standard today and can have equipment pulled, and which need another night running.
Real water damage restoration near you who run their business on Nexa — book directly, no platform fee. Are you a water damage restoration technician? Post your business and get found in your area — $2.99 one-time. Or browse every water damage restoration technician 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 $5,480–$23,800 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 water damage restoration technician'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 water damage restoration technician — 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 water damage restoration 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 water damage restoration, 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