QuickBooks Online Advanced: The Complete Guide
What QuickBooks Online Advanced Actually Adds Over Plus
Plus runs $99/month. Advanced runs $235/month — $1,632/year more. Advanced earns that price for businesses with 5–50 employees, $3M–$50M revenue, and reporting needs beyond what the standard P&L and Balance Sheet can answer.
What Advanced adds: 25 users (vs. 5), batch invoicing, workflow automation, custom roles and permissions, custom fields, custom report builder, revenue recognition, employee expense claims, tasks management, the Performance Centre dashboards, dedicated account team, and on-demand training.
Most upgrades come from one of three pressures: hitting the 5-user limit, needing ASC 606 revenue recognition, or batch invoicing to save 5+ hours/week. If none apply, stay on Plus. We have $4M-revenue clients on Plus who don’t use any Advanced-only feature. See our QBO bookkeeping pillar for the plan comparison.
Setup and Rollout: Migrating to Advanced
The Plus → Advanced upgrade is one click, but configuring custom roles, custom fields and training takes 2–4 weeks for a clean rollout.
Phase 1: subscription change. Gear icon → Subscriptions and billing → Upgrade to Advanced. Prorated billing applies immediately. All existing data, chart of accounts, bank feeds and reports continue working.
Phase 2: roles and permissions. Plus uses fixed roles. Advanced lets you build custom ones — “AP clerk who can enter bills but not approve them,” “Sales manager who sees customer data but not vendor data.” Build these BEFORE inviting team members so users land in the right role on day one.
Phase 3: custom fields. Decide what extra data points you want — project codes, sales rep, region, deal source. Each becomes filterable and reportable. Don’t go overboard. Five well-chosen fields beat fifteen.
Phase 4: workflows. Set up the approvals that matter — bills over $5,000 require manager approval, invoices over 30 days past due trigger reminders. Workflows live in Settings → Manage Workflows. Start with two or three. Add more once the team uses them.
Custom Roles and Permissions for Real Teams
This is where Advanced earns its keep for growing businesses. Plus’s fixed roles force you into one of four boxes. Advanced lets you build exactly the role you need.
The role builder is at Settings → Manage Users → Roles → Add Role. Each role can be granted view, view+edit, view+edit+delete, or no access on each section: Customers, Vendors, Bank, Reports, Payroll, Settings, etc. The granularity is finer than most companies bother with — most clients end up with four or five well-defined roles (e.g., AP Clerk, AR Clerk, Bookkeeper, CFO View, Owner).
One practical example: a 15-person construction firm we work with built a “Project Manager”. Role that sees project profitability, customer info, and time tracking but NOT vendor cost data or payroll. The PM can run a project P&L without seeing salaries. That permission combination doesn’t exist in Plus’s fixed roles. The IRS doesn’t care about role design but your finance team will. Internal controls — segregation of duties between bill entry and bill payment — are a core part of any clean books. Custom roles enforce them automatically.
Custom Fields, Custom Reports, and the Performance Centre
Three features that work together. Custom fields add data points to transactions. Custom reports query those fields. The Performance Centre displays custom reports as dashboards.
Custom fields live at Settings → Lists → Custom Fields. Add fields to transactions (invoices, expenses, bills, etc.) or to customer/vendor records. Examples that pay off: “Sales Rep”. On every invoice (who closed the deal), “Region”. On every customer (where they’re based), “Job Code”. On every transaction (which project it relates to). Each field becomes filterable and reportable.
Custom reports use the Advanced report builder — drag fields onto a grid, set filters, group by any dimension. The reports are far more flexible than the standard QBO reports. We use this for clients who want monthly P&Ls by region or by sales rep or by project — slices the standard report can’t produce.
The Performance Centre (Settings → Performance Centre) pins custom reports to a dashboard. Build a dashboard with revenue by region, expenses by department, AR aging, cash flow, and project profitability. Open one screen to see the whole business. Most owners use this 2–3 times a week. The Performance Centre is genuinely useful and almost reason enough to be on Advanced by itself.
Workflows: Approval Flows and Automation
QBO Advanced workflows automate routine accounting tasks. They live at Settings → Manage Workflows. Each workflow has a trigger and action. Trigger = a transaction event (invoice created, bill entered, payment received). Condition = optional rules (amount over $X, vendor matches Y). Action = notification, approval request, or status update.
The four workflows we set up for most Advanced clients: (1) bill approval over $5,000 — sends to controller before payment; (2) overdue invoice reminders at 7, 14, 30 days; (3) expense claim approval routing; (4) deposit received notification to AR.
Workflows can chain: bill enters → manager approval → AP for payment → vendor notification. The chain replaces three or four manual handoffs. For 50+ bills/month, this saves real hours.
Caveat: workflows log in the audit trail, but the approval is a click, not a signed document. For SOX-grade compliance, workflows are a starting point — you still need written approvals or a third-party tool.
Tasks, Project Management, and Team Coordination
QBO Advanced added Tasks as a finance team coordination tool. It’s not a full project management replacement — Asana or Monday still do that better — but for accounting workflows, Tasks tied to QBO transactions is useful.
Tasks live at Settings → Tasks. Each task has an assignee, due date, transaction or customer reference, and description. Tag a customer’s invoice with “Follow up on payment”. And assign to the AR clerk. Tag a vendor bill with “Verify line items”. And assign to a bookkeeper. The task shows up in the assignee’s queue.
The integration with QBO records is what makes Tasks worth using. A task linked to invoice #1024 opens that invoice directly. A task linked to a customer pulls up the full customer record. Most external task managers can’t do that without manual lookups.
For month-end close, we set up recurring tasks: reconcile bank accounts (assigned to bookkeeper, due 10th of each month), review P&L for variances (CFO, due 15th), close prior period (controller, due 20th). The team sees their assignments without separate emails.
Expense Claims: Employee Reimbursements at Scale
Expense claims is the feature that lets employees submit out-of-pocket expenses for reimbursement, with approval flow and direct deposit. Plus has no equivalent — Plus users send PDF expense reports back and forth via email.
Setup: enable expense claims at Settings → Expense Claims. Define expense categories that match your chart of accounts (Meals, Travel, Office Supplies, etc.). Set approval rules — claims under $100 auto-approve, claims over $500 require manager approval, claims over $2,000 require CFO approval.
Employee submission: the QBO mobile app captures receipts via phone camera. OCR extracts vendor, date, amount. Employee categorizes, adds notes, submits. Approver gets a notification, reviews, approves or rejects. On approval, the expense posts to QBO as a regular bill, and reimbursement happens via payroll direct deposit or a separate ACH.
The IRS requires substantiation for any business expense over $75 (Publication 463). Expense claims keeps the receipt attached to the QBO transaction permanently — that’s audit-ready documentation. For businesses with 5+ employees submitting expenses, the time savings on receipt collection and reimbursement is substantial.
Reclassify Transactions: Bulk Cleanup Tool
Reclassify Transactions is an accountant-tier tool that lets you move large batches of transactions between accounts, classes, or locations in one operation. It’s very useful for cleanup work and end-of-year adjustments.
Access: switch to accountant view (or have your CPA access via QBOA), Accountant Tools → Reclassify Transactions. Set filters — date range, account, class, customer, vendor. The tool returns every matching transaction. Select all or some, pick the destination account/class/location, click reclassify. Done.
One real cleanup case: a client had 18 months of vendor payments mis-categorized to “Office Supplies”. Instead of “Subcontractor Costs” — about 240 transactions totaling $61,000. Reclassify Transactions moved them all in 90 seconds. Doing it transaction by transaction would have taken 4 hours.
Caveat: reconciled transactions are locked. You can’t reclassify a reconciled transaction without first unreconciling it. That’s a feature, not a bug — it prevents accidentally breaking a closed period. Plan reclassifications before reconciling the affected periods, or unreconcile-reclassify-rereconcile if you need to fix a closed period.
Revenue Recognition for Subscription and SaaS
This is the feature that justifies Advanced for many software and subscription businesses. QBO Plus books revenue when the invoice is paid (cash basis) or when the invoice is issued (accrual). Neither matches ASC 606 — the GAAP standard that requires revenue from a 12-month contract to be recognized monthly, not all at once.
QBO Advanced revenue recognition: at invoice time, mark the invoice line as “deferred revenue”. With a recognition schedule (e.g., $12,000 annual contract recognizes $1,000/month for 12 months). QBO automatically posts the monthly recognition entries — debit Deferred Revenue, credit Recognized Revenue. Your P&L shows the correct $1,000/month and your Balance Sheet shows the remaining Deferred Revenue liability.
For SaaS businesses raising venture capital or running audit-track financials, ASC 606 compliance is non-negotiable. Without revenue recognition, your reported revenue looks like a hockey stick (all $12K hits when invoiced) instead of smooth monthly recognition. Investors notice. Auditors require the correction. QBO Advanced handles it natively.
The setup takes some thought: define which products/services are subscription vs. one-time, define standard contract terms, set the recognition method (straight-line, milestone, percent-complete). Once configured, every new invoice flows through automatically. See FASB ASC 606 guidance at the FASB site.
Backup and Advanced Payroll
QBO Advanced includes automated daily backups (Plus doesn’t). Backups run at 2 AM ET nightly and retain 30 days. Restore is point-in-time — pick a date, restore to a sandbox first, verify, then restore to production. We’ve used this for clients who needed to reverse a month of misposted entries. The restore took 20 minutes vs. days of manual reversal.
The restore process: gear icon → Online backup &. Restore → Pick restore date → Sandbox restore → Verify → Promote to production. Once promoted, the restore overwrites everything after the restore date. Use sparingly.
QBO Payroll on Advanced gets some upgrades: Elite tier becomes accessible (24/7 phone support, tax penalty protection, HR advisor access), and the payroll runs are tied into the workflow engine for approval flows. For a 30-person company, Elite-tier payroll is genuinely useful — the penalty protection alone has paid for itself for one of our clients who had a state filing error and Intuit covered the penalty.
For NYC employers, payroll on Advanced still requires the same compliance work: NYS-45 quarterly, NYC MCTMT if applicable, NY paid family leave, federal Forms 941 and 940. QBO Payroll handles the filings automatically, but the underlying setup (FEIN, state IDs, employee W-4s) has to be right. Our Bookkeeping service includes payroll oversight for clients on Advanced.
Related Services from The Reed Corporation
Sources & References
Frequently Asked Questions
what does QuickBooks Online Advanced actually do that regular QuickBooks Online doesn’t?
QuickBooks Online Advanced is Intuit’s top-tier cloud plan, sitting above Simple Start, Essentials, and Plus. It supports up to 25 users, compared to Plus’s cap of 5. You also get batch invoicing, custom user permissions down to the field level, and access to Spreadsheet Sync — which lets you pull live QuickBooks data directly into Excel or Google Sheets without exporting CSV files manually.
What most small business owners miss is the workflow automation piece. Advanced lets you build multi-step automated workflows — think: auto-send a past-due notice when an invoice hits 30 days, then escalate to a different email at 60 days. You also get priority customer support with a dedicated account team, which regular QBO plans don’t include. The reporting library in Advanced is substantially deeper too, with revenue recognition tools that matter if you’re accrual-basis and dealing with deferred income under ASC 606.
If you’re weighing whether Advanced justifies the higher monthly cost — currently around $235/month — it really depends on your transaction volume and how many people touch your books. At Reed Corporation, we help clients map their workflow before they commit to a tier change, so they’re not paying for features they’ll never open. A quick books review usually takes under an hour and saves clients from a year of the wrong plan.
is QuickBooks Online Advanced worth the cost for a small business in NYC?
QuickBooks Online Advanced runs approximately $235 per month at full price, though Intuit frequently offers 50% off for the first three months for new subscribers. For a business doing under $500,000 in annual revenue with one or two bookkeepers, that price point is hard to justify unless you’re using the advanced features consistently. For companies between $1M and $10M with multiple departments, the ROI tends to be clear.
Here’s the edge case that trips people up: if you’re in a highly regulated New York industry — construction, healthcare, legal services — the project profitability tracking and class/location reporting in Advanced can directly affect how you allocate overhead for tax purposes. Under IRC Section 263A, certain businesses must capitalize overhead into inventory costs, and having clean job-costing records in QuickBooks makes that calculation significantly less painful at year-end. Businesses that skip this often overpay their accountant in cleanup fees.
New York City businesses also deal with the city’s Unincorporated Business Tax and the general complexity of combined state returns, so having clean, audit-ready books isn’t optional — it’s the baseline. At Reed Corporation, we often do a mid-year QuickBooks review with clients to flag whether their current plan is producing the data their tax return actually needs. That’s usually where we catch gaps before they become problems.
how do I set up class tracking in QuickBooks Online Advanced?
Class tracking in QuickBooks Online Advanced lets you tag transactions by department, location, product line, or any other segment that matters to your business. To turn it on, go to Settings → Account and Settings → Advanced, then enable ‘Track classes.’ You’ll also see an option to warn users — or require users — to assign a class on every transaction. Requiring it is almost always the right call if clean segmented reporting is the goal.
The common mistake is confusing classes with locations. Locations track where a transaction happened — useful for multi-site retail or service businesses — while classes track what type of activity it represents. You can run both simultaneously in Advanced, but if you mix the two up during setup, your Profit and Loss by Class report will be meaningless within 90 days. Also worth knowing: QuickBooks limits class names to 31 characters, and sub-classes count against your plan’s list limits, so naming conventions matter from day one.
Getting class tracking right from the start saves a lot of painful reclassification work later. At Reed Corporation, we typically spend 30 to 45 minutes with a new client mapping out their class and location structure before they start entering transactions — because fixing six months of miscoded data is nobody’s idea of a good time. If you’re mid-year and things are already messy, we can help untangle it and build a clean chart of accounts going forward.
can QuickBooks Online Advanced handle payroll and 1099s together?
Yes, QuickBooks Online Advanced integrates with QuickBooks Payroll (sold separately) and has native 1099 tracking built in. For 1099-NEC purposes, you need to flag vendors as ‘1099 eligible’ in their contact record, and QuickBooks will track payments to them throughout the year. At the $600 threshold required by the IRS under IRC Section 6041A, the system flags those contractors automatically for 1099 filing. You can e-file directly through QuickBooks or export the data to a third-party filing service.
What trips up a lot of business owners is the contractor vs. employee classification question — and QuickBooks doesn’t police that for you. If someone should be a W-2 employee under the IRS’s 20-factor test but you’re paying them as a 1099 contractor, the software will happily process those payments without a warning. The IRS and New York State Department of Labor treat misclassification seriously; penalties under IRC Section 3509 can include back payroll taxes, interest, and penalties that add up fast, especially for multi-year misclassification.
We see this issue regularly with clients in construction, consulting, and creative services — industries where the line between contractor and employee gets blurry fast. At Reed Corporation, we typically review contractor classifications during the onboarding process and again at year-end before 1099s go out. Getting that call right before the IRS makes it for you is always the better path.
what reports should I be running in QuickBooks Online Advanced for tax time?
Before you hand anything to your CPA, you’ll want to pull at minimum five reports from QuickBooks Online Advanced: the Profit and Loss (accrual and cash basis), Balance Sheet, Accounts Receivable Aging, Accounts Payable Aging, and the General Ledger. If your business carries inventory, add the Inventory Valuation Summary. These reports cover the primary data points your CPA needs to prepare a Schedule C, Form 1120, or Form 1065 — and catching discrepancies between accrual and cash P&L is often where we find unclaimed deductions.
The report most people skip is the Transaction Detail by Account, which lets you drill into any general ledger line and verify that nothing’s miscoded. A single miscoded transaction — say, a $15,000 equipment purchase expensed as office supplies — can create a material difference on your return and raise flags under IRS automated matching. If you’re a C-corp or S-corp, your QuickBooks balance sheet also needs to reconcile to the balance sheet on your Form 1120 or 1120-S, down to the dollar. Discrepancies there are one of the first things an IRS agent looks at during a correspondence exam.
At Reed Corporation, we ask clients to share a read-only QuickBooks login at least 30 days before their filing deadline so we can run these reports ourselves and flag anything that needs cleanup before we start the return. It’s a simple step that consistently shortens the back-and-forth and avoids last-minute extension requests.