Just Use QuickBooks Solopreneur for Freelance Taxes

Your first quarterly estimated tax payment is due and you have no idea what you owe. You’ve been depositing client payments into your personal checking account, writing off your home office with a sticky note on your monitor, and logging miles in your head. This is the exact situation QuickBooks Solopreneur was designed to fix — and it fixes all of it for $20/month.

Just use QuickBooks Solopreneur.

Why QuickBooks Solopreneur Is the Pick

QuickBooks Solopreneur is the only bookkeeping tool in this price range that handles the three things that make self-employment taxes hard: logging miles automatically, sorting expenses into Schedule C categories, and calculating what you actually owe each quarter. Everything else you’d consider either skips one of those or costs significantly more.

Mileage tracking is GPS automatic. Open the app, drive, done. The mobile app logs trips in the background and multiplies your total business miles by the current IRS rate to calculate your deduction. No separate app like MileIQ, no manual spreadsheet, no reconstructing your year in March. For freelancers who drive to client sites, co-working spaces, or supply runs, this alone is worth the $20.

Quarterly estimates live inside the product. As you categorize income and expenses throughout the quarter, QuickBooks Solopreneur tallies what you owe and surfaces it before the deadline. The estimate is based on your actual categorized numbers — not a generic calculator. If you’ve been Googling “how to calculate estimated taxes freelancer” every April, June, September, and January, this ends that.

Expense splitting is built for W-2 + freelance hybrids. Connect one bank account — even a personal one you use for both — and swipe transactions left or right to mark them business or personal. The tool segregates your books without requiring double-entry accounting knowledge. If you went fully self-employed mid-year or still have a day job alongside your freelance work, this workflow was built for exactly your situation.

Pricing is straightforward: $20/month after the promotional period, or $10/month for the first three months if you sign up as a new user. There’s no per-seat fee because Solopreneur is a strictly single-user product — and that’s fine, because you’re a one-person operation.

The honest limitations: QuickBooks Solopreneur doesn’t do bank reconciliation the way a full accounting product does, and it won’t generate the kind of P&L statement a lender wants to see. It also won’t support a second user if you ever bring in a bookkeeper to review your books — they’d need QuickBooks Online for that. For tax cleanliness and quarterly compliance, it’s the right tool. For anything beyond that, you’ll eventually need to step up.

Why Not Wave

Wave is the obvious alternative because Wave’s Starter plan is free. If you’re pre-revenue, invoicing fewer than 20 times a month, and not yet dealing with quarterly tax payments, Wave Starter is where you should start — see our Wave free bookkeeping article for that case.

But once self-employment tax complexity enters the picture, Wave stops being sufficient. The core gap: Wave has no quarterly tax estimate feature. You run that math yourself, manually, every quarter. That’s not a minor inconvenience — for most freelancers, it’s the exact thing they’re trying to avoid. There’s also no mileage tracking and no Schedule C automation. You get unlimited invoicing, double-entry accounting, and basic expense tracking. That’s a solid foundation; it’s just not a tax compliance tool.

Wave Pro at $19/month adds automatic bank transaction imports and receipt scanning. That’s a real upgrade from Starter, and it makes Wave Pro a credible option if your bookkeeping is genuinely simple: few transactions, no deductible mileage, and you’re comfortable calculating quarterly estimates in a spreadsheet or with your CPA’s help. One caution worth noting: Wave has recently moved transaction-level CSV export behind a paywall without clear disclosure — if your CPA needs detailed transaction records to file your taxes, verify that you can get them out of your plan before committing.

At $19/month, Wave Pro costs $1 less than QuickBooks Solopreneur. For that $1 in savings, you lose GPS automatic mileage tracking, quarterly tax estimates, and Schedule C automation. For any freelancer who drives and pays estimated taxes — which is most freelancers — that trade is wrong.

Why Not the Rest

QuickBooks Online Simple Start — Simple Start is now $38/month as of August 1, 2026 (it moved from $30 to $35 effective May 1, 2026, then to $38 on August 1). At nearly double the price of Solopreneur, you get bank reconciliation and full P&L statements. Those are legitimate additions, but they’re additions a freelancer without employees or a bookkeeper doesn’t need yet. On mileage: Simple Start records mileage via manual start/end address entry — it does not offer background GPS automatic trip detection. That puts it behind Solopreneur on the feature that matters most for Schedule C deductions. Solopreneur handles your actual problem — tax compliance — for $18 less per month. If you eventually hire a bookkeeper or need to manage a second user on your account, Simple Start becomes the right upgrade path. Until then, it’s overkill at the wrong price.

Xero — Xero is genuinely excellent double-entry accounting software, and it’s the right tool for freelancers whose accountants live in Xero. But it has two specific gaps that rule it out for this problem. First, Xero has no built-in quarterly estimated tax calculation for US freelancers — there’s no equivalent to the Solopreneur tax estimate feature. Second, Xero’s mileage tracking is manual entry only: you type a start and end address into the Xero Me app, and it calculates the distance. That is not GPS automatic trip detection — it’s a manual workflow designed around expense reimbursement, not Schedule C deductions. The Early plan is also capped at 20 invoices and 5 bills per month, which is tight for active freelancers. If your accountant already uses Xero, stay with Xero. If you’re starting from scratch and IRS compliance is your problem, Xero doesn’t solve it.

Zoho Books — Zoho Books is underrated and worth taking seriously. At $20/month for the Standard plan, it connects to your bank, sorts transactions into tax categories, and does calculate estimated quarterly taxes based on your income and expenses. The reason it’s still ruled out here: it is designed as small-business accounting software, not as a self-employment tax tool. The Schedule C workflow and W-2 + freelance hybrid use case that QuickBooks Solopreneur is built around doesn’t have an equivalent in Zoho Books. There’s also no automatic GPS mileage tracking — mileage is manual entry only. Zoho Books is the better pick if you’re running a registered business with employees and multiple accounts; it’s not the pick for a freelancer trying to stay clean with the IRS on $80K of 1099 income.

When to Revisit This Decision

QuickBooks Solopreneur is a single-user product with no payroll, no inventory, and limited financial reporting. If any of the following happen, come back and reassess:

• You bring on a business partner or hire a bookkeeper who needs account access — move to QuickBooks Online Simple Start
• You start managing employees — you need QuickBooks Online with payroll
• Your accountant uses Xero exclusively and insists on it — let your accountant win that argument; the time you save is worth more than the feature gap
• You’re generating over $200K in freelance revenue and need lender-ready financials — that’s a QuickBooks Online or Xero problem, not a Solopreneur problem

Until any of those things happen, QuickBooks Solopreneur at $20/month is the only bookkeeping tool built specifically for your tax situation. It tracks your miles automatically via GPS, estimates what you owe each quarter, sorts your expenses into Schedule C categories, and keeps your books clean without requiring an accounting degree. Stop researching. Just use it.