BD Financial IQ is the QuickBooks Online alternative built for businesses with jobs, segments, or multiple entities. Three-track job costing (Materials, Labor, and Subcontractors). Side-by-side P&L by location or division. Multi-entity consolidation. At every price tier.
QuickBooks Online has raised prices about 15% per year since 2023. Existing subscribers absorb every increase.
Worse: the reports that would actually help you run the business — job costing, class tracking, side-by-side segment P&L — are gated behind tiers most small businesses don't subscribe to. QBO Plus is $115/month for 5 users. Class tracking and job costing only live there or higher.
And if you have two legal entities? QBO doesn't consolidate them at all. Intuit pushes you to Intuit Enterprise Suite — a separate, much pricier product.
You started a business to do the work. Not to fight your accounting software for a report.
Solopreneur and Simple Start don't have class tracking, job costing, or multi-entity reporting. Essentials doesn't either. To get job costing and segment reports, you have to climb to Plus.
QBO pricing verified May 2026 on quickbooks.intuit.com/pricing/. Prices shown are full retail — Intuit promotional discounts (50% off 3 months) expire and full price kicks in. See our full QBO comparison.
Job costing isn't a Plus-tier feature. Multi-entity isn't an Advanced-tier feature. Segment P&L isn't a sales-call feature. They're how BDFIQ works.
Materials, Labor, and Subcontractors as three distinct cost buckets on every estimate, invoice, dashboard, and variance report. QBO has no native subcontractor cost type — subs distort your margin reports. BDFIQ doesn't.
Side-by-side P&L by location, division, store, region, branch, department, or service line. See which segment is making money on one screen, not by exporting twelve reports.
Two companies. Three. Five. See the consolidated P&L AND per-entity P&L without spreadsheet hacks or "Enterprise" upcharges. The cheapest QBO option doesn't exist; the cheapest Zoho option is $150/mo. BDFIQ includes this.
If you also use BDB Project Tools, your jobs, estimates, invoices, receipts, and labor hours flow into BDFIQ directly. No QBO middleman, no sync bugs, no duplicate customers. The closed-loop story other field-service + accounting pairs can't match.
Other platforms compete on price or surface features. These are structural differences in how BDFIQ is built.
QuickBooks Online has no native Subcontractor item type. Anyone running sub-heavy jobs in QBO pushes subs as Service items — which distorts margin reports. BDFIQ treats Materials, Labor, and Subcontractors as three distinct cost tracks everywhere they belong: estimates, invoices, dashboards, variance reports.
QBO gates class tracking to Plus ($115/mo) and up. Multi-entity consolidation isn't in QBO at all. Zoho Premium ($150/mo) is the cheapest legit multi-entity option in the market. BDFIQ includes both at every tier.
Transaction categorization, voice-to-text, document parsing — all run on BDB's own infrastructure (Whisper + Ollama). No third-party LLM API costs. No customer data crossing to OpenAI or Anthropic. The cost savings stay in your pricing, not someone else's GPU bill.
If you use BDB Project Tools, your jobs, estimates, invoices, receipts, and labor hours flow directly into BDFIQ. No QBO sync layer to break. No duplicate customers. No "undeposited funds" trap. One company, one platform, one system of record.
BD Financial IQ comes from Best Decision Business Inc. — the team behind BDB Project Tools (live, in production) and Best Decision Bookkeeping (CFO services). We've been doing real businesses' books for years. We know exactly where QBO breaks down.
Class-tracking gaps. Subcontractor-as-Service items distorting margins. Two-entity owners running parallel files and manually consolidating in Excel. We know the patterns. We're designing around them.
BDB Project Tools is live today — field service software with QBO integration, used by contractors in production. BDFIQ uses the same infrastructure, same hosting, same backup posture. We're not figuring out how to ship as we go.
US-based team. Not selling to private equity. No "growth at all costs" investor pressure. Built to be the accounting software we want for our own bookkeeping clients — and to be sold standalone to anyone who wants the same thing.
Behind the Books is Best Decision Business's weekly show for small business owners who want to understand their numbers — not just hand them to an accountant. Episodes cover the QBO traps, the job-costing math, and the segment reports your accountant probably hasn't shown you yet.
Founder's pricing is announced when we launch. Waitlist members get the locked Founder's rate. No credit card. No commitment.
We'll email you when BDFIQ opens for early access. Watch for a confirmation from hello@bestdecisionbusiness.com.