Search "landscaping accounting software" and Google returns two completely different products on the same page. Xero and QuickBooks sit near the top - real double-entry ledgers. A few results down sit LawnPro, Jobber, Striven and Arborgold - field-service and operations tools, none of which keep your books. The only unsponsored voice on the page, a thread in r/smallbusiness, says the quiet part out loud: QuickBooks is fine for broad utility but struggles on job costing and scheduling.
That split is the whole problem. Most landscapers who go looking for "accounting software" are not actually short a ledger. They are short the job-level numbers that are supposed to go into one. Buying the wrong category costs real money, because the tier where job costing appears is never the tier anybody quotes you.
This post prices all four mainstream ledgers from their own pricing pages, read on 22 August 2026, and shows exactly where the money hides. Every figure below came off the vendor's own page today - no aggregators, no review-site tables.
The two things people mean by "landscaping accounting software"
There is no such product as landscaping accounting software, in the sense of a general ledger built for landscapers. What exists is two layers that have to talk to each other.
- The ledger. QuickBooks Online, Xero, FreshBooks, Wave. Chart of accounts, bank feeds, reconciliation, sales tax, 1099s, the P&L and balance sheet your accountant actually wants. Industry-agnostic on purpose.
- The operations layer. Where the job-level truth lives: which visits happened, what was billed, which client is on which recurring schedule, what the crew spent getting there. Jobber, LMN, Aspire, Service Autopilot, Yardbook - and Landscapey.
Nearly every "best accounting software for landscaping" listicle mixes the two into one ranked list, which is how a landscaper ends up paying for an ERP when they needed a $25 ledger, or paying for a ledger when what they lacked was a schedule. The useful question is not which one is better. It is which layer is failing you right now.
If your books balance but you cannot tell whether the Wilson property makes money, your ledger is fine and your operations layer is missing. If you know your margins by property but tax season is a shoebox, the reverse. Our companion piece on bookkeeping for a landscaping business covers the practice side; this one covers what the software costs.
What the four ledgers actually cost
All four are running a discount right now, and all four headline it as some version of "90% off." The headline is nearly meaningless. What matters is the list price you pay from month four, and how long the discount runs.
| Plan | List price/mo | Promo price/mo | Promo length | Year one |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| QuickBooks Free | $0 | - | - | $0 |
| QuickBooks Simple Start | $38 | $3.80 | 3 months | $353.40 |
| QuickBooks Essentials | $85 | $8.50 | 3 months | $790.50 |
| QuickBooks Plus | $140 | $14.00 | 3 months | $1,302.00 |
| QuickBooks Advanced | $340 | $34.00 | 3 months | $3,162.00 |
| Xero Early | $25 | $2.50 | 6 months | $165.00 |
| Xero Growing | $55 | $5.50 | 6 months | $363.00 |
| Xero Established | $90 | $9.00 | 6 months | $594.00 |
| FreshBooks Lite | $23 | $2.30 | 3 months | $213.90 |
| FreshBooks Plus | $43 | $4.30 | 3 months | $399.90 |
| FreshBooks Premium | $70 | $7.00 | 3 months | $651.00 |
| Wave Starter | $0 | - | - | $0 |
| Wave Pro | $19 | $9.50 | 3 months | $199.50 |
Year one assumes you start today and stay on the plan. The arithmetic is just the promo months plus the remaining months at list.
The same "90% off" is worth twice as much at one vendor
QuickBooks runs 90% off for three months. Xero runs 90% off for six. FreshBooks runs 90% off for three. Identical headline, different denominator:
- Xero: six discounted months out of twelve = 45% off year one.
- QuickBooks and FreshBooks: three discounted months out of twelve = 22.5% off year one.
- Wave Pro: 50% off for three months = 12.5% off year one ($28.50 on a $228 list year).
So the same advertised number is worth exactly double at Xero. Two of these offers also expire: QuickBooks' ends 27 August 2026, Xero's runs until 30 September 2026. If you were going to buy anyway, the deadline is real; if you were not, a 22.5% year-one saving is not a reason to pick a ledger.
One small arbitrage worth knowing: Wave Pro is $19/month or $190/year. Twelve months at the promo rate comes to $199.50, so the annual plan is $9.50 cheaper than the discounted monthly plan - the only case here where taking the promotion costs you money.
The real finding: job costing is never on the plan they quote you
Job costing - knowing what an individual property or contract earned after its costs - is the single feature a landscaping business needs from its books that a freelancer does not. Every ledger gates it behind a much higher tier.
| Vendor | Entry plan | Plan where job costing starts | Multiple |
|---|---|---|---|
| QuickBooks Online | Simple Start, $38 | Plus, $140 (project profitability) | 3.7x |
| Xero | Early, $25 | Established, $90 (track time and costs for projects) | 3.6x |
| FreshBooks | Lite, $23 | Premium, $70 (project profitability) | 3.0x |
| Wave | Starter, $0 | Not offered at any price | - |
Three separate vendors, three separate pricing philosophies, and all three land in the same place: the job-costing tier is three to nearly four times the entry price. The $25 and $38 figures that fill every comparison table buy you a ledger that can tell you the business made money and cannot tell you which lawns made it.
QuickBooks goes one step further: Advanced ($340/month) adds a construction financials solution and enhanced project financials on top of Plus. For a design-build operation running installs with phases and draws, that is a defensible buy. For a maintenance route, it is $4,080 a year of list price for reporting depth you will never open.
Seats: the number that flips the ranking
The three paid ledgers price users on three incompatible models. QuickBooks bundles seats into feature tiers. Xero states plainly that it charges no per-user license fees. FreshBooks includes one user and charges $11/month for each additional team member.
Cheapest plan that gives N people a login, at list price:
| Office logins | QuickBooks | Xero | FreshBooks |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | $38 (Simple Start) | $25 (Early) | $23 (Lite) |
| 3 | $85 (Essentials) | $25 (Early) | $45 (Lite + 2) |
| 5 | $140 (Plus) | $25 (Early) | $67 (Lite + 4) |
| 6 | $340 (Advanced) | $25 (Early) | $78 (Lite + 5) |
At six logins QuickBooks costs 13.6 times Xero, purely because seats six through twenty-five are only sold inside the Advanced tier. This is the same structural trap we found last week pricing operations software, where the cheapest vendor changed identity at 5.83 seats.
But be honest about whether it applies to you. In most landscaping companies, the number of people who need a ledger login is one or two - the owner and whoever does the books. Crew leads do not open QuickBooks. If you have six office staff touching accounting, you are a large enough operation that this table matters enormously; if you are an owner with a bookkeeper, it does not matter at all, and you should ignore the seat column entirely. Plenty of comparison posts use a seat table to declare a winner. It only decides the question for a minority of green-industry buyers.
The invoice-count trap, priced on a real book
Free and entry plans are metered, and the meter is the thing that catches recurring-maintenance businesses. Take a common shape: a solo-to-small operator with 60 recurring maintenance clients billed monthly. That is 60 invoices a month, every month, in season.
| Plan | Meter | Covers | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|
| QuickBooks Free | 2 invoices/mo, 1 estimate/mo | 2 of 60 (3.3%) | Unusable past week one |
| Xero Early, $25 | 20 invoices, 5 bills/mo | 20 of 60 (33%) | Forces Growing at $55 |
| FreshBooks Lite, $23 | 5 billable clients | 5 of 60 (8.3%) | Forces Premium at $70 |
| Wave Starter, $0 | Unlimited invoices | 60 of 60 | Actually free at this size |
Note what that does to the advertised entry price. FreshBooks Plus holds 50 billable clients - one short tier below our 60-client book - so this operator lands on Premium at $70, which is 204% above the $23 Lite price the comparison tables quote. Xero's buyer lands on Growing at $55, 120% above the advertised $25. The QuickBooks free plan covers two invoices out of sixty.
And the sharpest line in the whole category: Wave's free plan includes unlimited invoices. QuickBooks' free plan includes two. Both are called free. For a maintenance route with no job-costing requirement and no payroll, Wave genuinely is the answer, and no listicle sponsored by a software vendor is going to tell you that.
What that means for a seasonal book
Landscaping revenue is not flat, and a northern maintenance operation may bill eight months and idle four. All four vendors publish month-to-month billing, so a seasonal shop can pay monthly rather than commit annually - worth doing deliberately rather than by default, because the annual discounts assume twelve months of use. Wave's $190 annual plan against $228 of monthly payments saves $38, but only if you keep it running through the winter.
Where the job-level numbers actually come from
Here is the part the SERP obscures. Even on QuickBooks Plus at $140/month, project profitability is only as good as what you feed it. The ledger does not know that you visited the Wilson property nine times in July, that two of those were makeup visits after a rain day, or that the crew burned 40 minutes of drive time getting there because the route was built by hand. Somebody has to put that in.
That is the operations layer, and it is where the actual gap sits for most landscapers. The pattern that works:
- Jobs, visits and recurring schedules live in the operations tool, because that is where they are created.
- Invoices are raised from completed work, so billing matches what happened rather than what was planned.
- Invoices and payments sync into the ledger, so the accountant sees one clean set of books.
- The ledger stays the system of record for tax, reconciliation and reporting.
Get that right and a $38 Simple Start subscription can be enough, because the job-level analysis happens upstream. Get it wrong and you pay $140 for a project module you populate by hand, which almost nobody sustains past March.
Where Landscapey fits, and where it does not
To be direct about it: Landscapey is not accounting software. It has no chart of accounts, no bank feeds, no reconciliation, no payroll, no sales tax filing and no balance sheet. If you are shopping for a ledger, buy one of the four above - we do not compete with them and we do not want to.
What Landscapey is, is the operations layer that produces the numbers your ledger is waiting for. Clients, recurring jobs and visits, scheduling and route optimization, quotes, invoices with online card payments, expenses, and a financials view with an accountant CSV export. One plan, $19.99/month at launch pricing against a $29.99 list, or $199.99/year, with a 14-day trial.
On the accounting side specifically, there is a QuickBooks Online integration with two deliberately separate modes:
- Migrate - a one-time backfill, for moving history across when you switch.
- Sync - a one-way push, where invoices raised in Landscapey appear in QuickBooks as invoices, and payments are recorded as QuickBooks payments.
The honest limits of that: the sync is one-way by design. Nothing flows back from QuickBooks into Landscapey, and voids do not propagate - if you void an invoice in QuickBooks it stays as it was on our side, and you fix it in both places. We chose one-way because two-way sync between two systems that both think they own an invoice is how landscapers end up with duplicate revenue at tax time. It is a real constraint, not a feature, and you should know about it before you switch. The mechanics are covered in more depth in our QuickBooks integration walkthrough and in QuickBooks for landscapers.
So the stack a lot of maintenance operators should actually price is $19.99 for operations plus $38 for QuickBooks Simple Start, or $57.99/month - against $140/month for QuickBooks Plus alone. That comparison is honest in one direction and not the other, so here is the other direction: QuickBooks Plus and Advanced pull payroll cost into project profitability, and Landscapey has no payroll. If you want fully labor-loaded job costing computed inside the ledger from real payroll hours, Plus or Advanced is the right purchase and the $140 is not a rip-off. If you want to know which properties are worth keeping next season, the operations layer gets you there for less.
How to choose, in four rules
- Under about 25 clients, no crew, no job costing: Wave Starter, free, unlimited invoices. Revisit when you hire.
- A real maintenance book, one or two office logins, job-level numbers coming from an ops tool: QuickBooks Simple Start ($38) or Xero Early ($25). Do not buy the project tier.
- Job costing must live inside the ledger, with payroll hours loaded in: QuickBooks Plus ($140). Budget for it honestly rather than discovering it in month four.
- Several office staff need logins: Xero, on seat pricing alone, at any tier.
Whatever you pick, price it at list, not at the promo. Three of these four discounts expire inside three months, and the ledger is a ten-year decision.
Frequently asked questions
Is there accounting software made specifically for landscapers?
No - not a general ledger, anyway. Xero publishes a landscaping landing page and QuickBooks publishes industry guides, but the underlying product is the same one a dentist uses. What is industry-specific is the operations layer above it. Anyone selling you a "landscaping ledger" is selling you a generic ledger with a green photo on the marketing page.
Can I run a landscaping business on free accounting software?
On Wave Starter, yes, up to a point - it includes unlimited invoices, estimates, bills and bookkeeping records, and card processing at 2.9% + $0.60 per transaction. The ceilings you will hit are job costing, which Wave does not offer at any price, and payroll. QuickBooks Free is a different proposition: two invoices and one estimate a month, which no client book survives.
Which QuickBooks plan do landscapers need?
Simple Start ($38) if your job-level reporting happens in an operations tool and syncs across. Plus ($140) if you want project profitability computed inside QuickBooks with payroll cost attached. Essentials ($85) is mostly a seat upgrade - it adds users and reporting, not job costing - so if you are considering it for job costing, you are looking at the wrong tier.
Is Xero cheaper than QuickBooks for a landscaping company?
At list, yes, at every comparable point: $25 against $38 at entry, $90 against $140 for job costing, and Xero charges nothing for extra users where QuickBooks bundles them into tiers. The counterweight is ecosystem. QuickBooks has far more green-industry software that integrates with it out of the box, and most US accountants are fluent in it. If your accountant only works in QuickBooks, that is worth more than $15 a month.
Do I need both an ops tool and accounting software?
Most operators past a handful of clients do. They solve different problems, and the failure mode of skipping the ops tool is not that your books break - it is that they balance perfectly while telling you nothing about which properties to keep. See landscaping profit margin for what those numbers look like once you have them, and reading a P&L for the ledger side.
What does an operations tool cost on top of the ledger?
It varies more than the ledgers do - roughly $20/month at the low end to several hundred for crew-based platforms, with enterprise tools quote-only. We broke the range down in what lawn care software actually costs, and the category overview lives on our landscaping software page.
Sources and limits
- Every price here was read from the vendor's own pricing page on 22 August 2026 - quickbooks.intuit.com/pricing, xero.com/us/pricing-plans, freshbooks.com/pricing and waveapps.com/pricing. No aggregator or review-site figures were used.
- Prices change, and two of these promotions are dated. QuickBooks' 90%-off-for-three-months offer is stated to end 27 August 2026; Xero's 90%-off-for-six-months offer runs to 30 September 2026. Check the live page before you buy.
- The year-one column is arithmetic, not a quote. It assumes you start on the promotional rate today, stay on the same plan for twelve months, and add no paid add-ons. FreshBooks team members ($11/mo each), FreshBooks Payroll ($40/mo plus $6/user), Advanced Payments ($20/mo), Xero payroll via Gusto and Xero Inventory Plus are all extra and are not included.
- Payment processing is excluded throughout. Card fees are charged separately by every vendor here and can easily exceed the subscription.
- The seat table compares the cheapest plan that grants N logins, not equivalent feature sets. Xero Early at $25 is metered at 20 invoices a month, so a six-login business would in practice be on Growing or Established.
- The 60-client example is illustrative - chosen because it is a common size for an owner-operator with one crew, not because it is an average. Run the same test against your own client count and billing frequency before drawing a conclusion.
- We sell one of the products discussed. Landscapey is the operations layer, not a ledger, and the QuickBooks sync limits described above are stated as we built them.