Best QuickBooks for Contractors Leaving Sage BusinessWorks

Short answer: QuickBooks Online Plus is the right destination for most contractors leaving Sage BusinessWorks, because Plus is the lowest tier that includes Projects, which is the QuickBooks feature that does what BusinessWorks Job Cost did. Choose Advanced instead if you bid work and need estimate versus actual reporting. Choose QuickBooks Enterprise only if job costing is the core of your business and you can live on Windows.

Last updated September 2026.

The BusinessWorks Job Cost module is the reason this decision is harder for contractors than for anyone else moving off the product. A retailer leaving BusinessWorks picks a QuickBooks plan on seat count and inventory and is done in five minutes. A general contractor who has been costing jobs in BusinessWorks for fifteen years is being asked to give up a module that works, and the wrong QuickBooks tier will leave them worse off than they started.

Why the tier choice matters more for contractors

Job costing in QuickBooks Online lives in a feature called Projects, and Projects is not in every plan. It requires QuickBooks Online Plus at minimum. Simple Start and Essentials do not have it at all, so a contractor who buys either one has bought a system that cannot answer the only question that matters, which is whether a given job made money.

This trips people up because the seat count looks like the deciding factor. Simple Start includes one billable user, Essentials three, Plus five and Advanced twenty five. A two person office looks at that list and picks Essentials on price. Then the first job closes and there is no way to see its profitability, and the upgrade happens anyway, three months later, after someone has coded a quarter of transactions without job assignment.

Two other Plus gated features matter to contractors specifically. Class and location tracking starts at Plus, which is how you separate divisions, crews or job sites in reporting. Inventory tracking also starts at Plus. QuickBooks Desktop has classes in every edition, so if you are used to classes on a Desktop product this is an easy thing to assume travels with you. It does not.

QuickBooks Online Plus or Advanced for a contractor

Plus covers job costing properly. You turn Projects on, assign income and costs to a project, and get profitability by job. For a contractor doing time and materials work, or working from fixed price contracts you already know the margin on, that is genuinely enough and you should not pay more.

Advanced earns its price on one thing for this audience: cost estimates. In QuickBooks Online Advanced you can set up project estimates and track estimate versus actual on the project dashboard and in reports. If you bid work competitively and your business rises or falls on whether the bid held, that is the feature you are buying, and comparing what you estimated against what it actually cost is exactly what a BusinessWorks Job Cost user expects to be able to do.

Advanced also has two things worth knowing even if you do not need them today. Fixed asset tracking is Advanced only in QuickBooks Online, which matters if you carry equipment. And the twenty five billable users at Advanced come with no additional per seat fees, which changes the arithmetic once a field crew needs access.

The honest summary is that most contractors under about twenty employees belong on Plus, and the ones who should pay for Advanced know why within about thirty seconds of reading the previous paragraph. If you cannot articulate a reason, buy Plus.

Is QuickBooks Desktop or Enterprise still an option?

Enterprise is, the rest is not. Intuit stopped new sales of QuickBooks Desktop Pro, Premier and Mac Plus in September 2024. The 2024 release is the final non Enterprise version and its support runs only to 30 September 2027. QuickBooks Enterprise is still sold and still supported, but it is Windows only.

Enterprise remains the strongest job costing product Intuit sells, and for a contractor that is a real argument rather than a nostalgic one. If job costing is not a report you run monthly but the thing your entire operation is organized around, look at Enterprise honestly before defaulting to Online. Two caveats. It costs considerably more than a BusinessWorks maintenance plan, which is a shock for companies that have been paying BusinessWorks pricing for a decade. And it is a desktop product, so you are choosing the same architecture you are supposedly leaving, which is worth being deliberate about rather than accidental.

The date that should decide it for anyone hesitating: buying into the 2024 non Enterprise line now means buying a product with support ending in under a year. That is not a migration, it is a delay.

Does BusinessWorks Job Cost data actually convert?

Not field for field, and you should plan around that rather than hope. BusinessWorks Job Cost and QuickBooks Projects are different data models, so conversion services generally bring job history across as summary journal entries rather than as costed transactions inside a project. Open jobs are the part worth doing by hand.

The practical approach that works: pick a cutover date, close out everything you can before it, and set up only the genuinely open jobs as Projects in QuickBooks with costs to date entered as a single opening entry per job. Historical closed jobs stay in BusinessWorks, which you keep installed and read only. Nobody re opens a job from 2021, and rebuilding three years of job detail inside a new system is weeks of work that produces a report you will never run.

Be equally realistic about what else does not survive. Conversion services consistently exclude custom reports and forms, budgets, bank reconciliation history, estimates, sales orders, purchase orders, price levels, attachments, recurring transactions and memorized reports. Accounts receivable and payable payment application detail is the exclusion that causes the most pain after go live, because balances can total correctly while every invoice shows as unpaid and every payment as unapplied.

Getting the transaction history in

This is where the plan choice stops mattering and the file format starts. Whichever tier you buy, bank and credit card history has to arrive somehow, and Intuit has no supported conversion path from BusinessWorks. The route that works is exporting from BusinessWorks as CSV and converting to .qbo before importing.

One BusinessWorks specific detail saves an afternoon. When you preview a report, the toolbar offers two Excel buttons. The left one exports with the company header and column headings. The right one exports raw data in a column format. Use the right one, because the company header block sits in the first several rows above your data and every importer that reads row one for column names will either reject the file or map the columns wrong. Then save as CSV (MS-DOS) from Excel.

Why convert rather than upload the CSV directly? Duplicate protection. Every .qbo transaction carries a FITID that is unique within the account, and QuickBooks skips FITIDs it has already seen. A CSV has no transaction identifier at all, so re running an import after you spot a mapping mistake gives you every row twice. During a migration you will re run imports. The full mechanics are covered in the Sage BusinessWorks to QuickBooks conversion guide.

If you land on Enterprise rather than Online, converting is not optional. QuickBooks Desktop cannot import a bank CSV in any version or edition. The Import Excel and CSV Toolkit that ships with it handles four list types only: customers, vendors, items and chart of accounts. For transactions your choices are a .qbo file through Web Connect or an IIF file, and IIF posts straight to the ledger with no review queue and no undo. See importing CSV into QuickBooks Desktop for the full picture.

What to do in the first month

Run both systems only until the first full month closes in QuickBooks, then stop entering into BusinessWorks entirely. Parallel running feels safe and is the most common way migrations go wrong, because two ledgers receiving the same transactions drift within weeks and reconciling the drift costs more than the reassurance was worth.

Before you trust the new file, tie out three reports as of the same date in both systems: the trial balance, aged receivables and aged payables. If a period will not reconcile, three diagnostics narrow it quickly. A difference that divides evenly by nine is transposed digits. A difference equal to exactly twice a transaction is a sign flip. A difference matching one transaction is a row that did not convert or one that was accepted twice.

Watch Opening Balance Equity too. It is a placeholder and should be zero once setup is finished. A sole proprietor clears it to Owner's Equity, a partnership to Partner's Capital, an S or C corporation to Retained Earnings. If subcontractor bill volume is what actually makes your month end painful, that is a workflow problem rather than a ledger problem, and it is worth solving separately with accounts payable automation instead of expecting a new general ledger to fix it.

The short version

Buy QuickBooks Online Plus if you cost jobs and want to know which ones made money. Buy Advanced if you bid work and need estimate versus actual. Buy Enterprise only if job costing is the center of the business and Windows is fine. Do not buy Simple Start or Essentials, because neither has Projects and you will upgrade within a quarter.

Then handle the data separately from the plan decision. Export from BusinessWorks with the raw data Excel button, convert the bank and card history to .qbo so duplicate protection works, and rebuild only the open jobs. Accountants handling several client conversions at once should start with CSV to QBO for accountants, and anyone weighing a different source system can compare the Sage 100 to QuickBooks conversion route, since Sage 100 is where Sage itself steers BusinessWorks customers.