A QuickBooks alternative when you only need the statement

Keep using QuickBooks if

• — You want to see where the business stands every month, not once.
• — You send invoices, or you want the same system to handle invoicing and payments.
• — You run payroll and want it in the same place as the books.
• — Your accountant already works in QuickBooks and wants your file there.
• — You are willing to categorise transactions as they arrive, or to pay somebody to.

This is for you instead if

• — A lender, a landlord, or a preparer asked for a P&L and gave you a deadline.
• — The months in question are already over and nothing was recorded as they went by.
• — You do not want to connect a bank account to anything.
• — You need one document, not a system to run.

Side by side

The difference is a system versus a document

Almost every comparison in this category is written as though the two products do the same job at different prices. They do not do the same job. QuickBooks is infrastructure: it earns its cost by being there every month, catching things as they happen, and being ready when somebody asks. If that is what you want, its price is not the interesting part and neither is ours.

What we do is narrower on purpose. Somebody has asked you for a Profit & Loss covering a period that is already over. The evidence for that period exists — it is sitting in your bank statements. The work is reading those statements, sorting what is in them, and producing a document you can hand over. That is a job with an end.

This is why the pricing shapes differ. A subscription is the right shape for something you need every month. A one-time charge is the right shape for something you need once. Neither is generous; they are just fitted to different jobs.

QuickBooks has a free tier, and it may be enough

Intuit publishes a no-cost plan that runs a profit and loss report, alongside its paid tiers. If you are starting from today and willing to categorise as you go, that is a real option and it costs nothing, and we would rather say so than let you find out later.

It does not solve the problem this product solves. A free plan still assumes the bookkeeping happens — that somebody records the months as they pass. It does not read the twelve statements sitting in your email for a year nobody recorded. Starting a file today does not produce a statement for last year.

If you use QuickBooks and are simply behind

This is common enough to say out loud: plenty of people have a QuickBooks subscription and months of uncategorised history in it, because life happened. If a lender's deadline is the reason you are reading this, the fastest path to the document is not necessarily finishing the catch-up first.

You can produce the statement from the bank statements themselves, hand it over, and sort the file out afterwards on your own schedule. The two are not in competition — one has a deadline attached and the other does not.