Accounting software for a small HVAC business is not one buying decision. It is two. You pick the bookkeeping product that owns invoices, expenses, and reports, and you pick what your field service platform is allowed to hand it. Both of those usually cost one tier more than the price you first looked at.
A sync between the two does not merge them. It carries a finished invoice across and leaves most of the job behind.
Job costing starts on QuickBooks Online Plus
QuickBooks Online lists Simple Start at $38 a month for one user, Essentials at $85 for three, Plus at $140 for five, and Advanced at $340 for twenty five. Accountant access is included on every plan on top of those user counts, and a 50% off for three months promotion was showing on all four tiers.
Project profitability tracking, which is what job costing looks like inside the accounting product, appears only on Plus and Advanced. Inventory tracking starts there too. So job costing begins at $140 a month, not at the $38 tier most shops price first.
Without it you can tell an owner what the shop billed this month, but not whether the Tuesday changeout made money. The version of this that shows up most often is an owner who knows monthly revenue to the dollar and cannot answer that second question, because the answer was two tiers up the whole time. It gets worse when the estimate, the material cost, and the final invoice each live in a different product, the same split running through HVAC estimating software and through how these platforms actually meter you.
Every price in this article came off the vendor’s own page in September 2026, and this category moves. Confirm the current number at the source before you sign anything.
Free has a specific stopping point
Wave’s Starter plan is free and includes unlimited estimates, invoices, bills, and bookkeeping records. The catch is the bank feed. Automatic transaction import, auto-merge, and auto-categorize all sit on Pro, so on the free plan somebody is categorizing by hand. Wave earns on payments instead, at 2.9% plus $0.60 per credit card transaction on Starter. Pro is $19 a month or $190 a year and adds those bank feeds, unlimited receipt capture, and automated late payment reminders.
Zoho Books has a free plan too, at $0 and available indefinitely, but only while revenue for the financial year stays under $50K, and it allows one user plus one accountant. Standard is $20 a month or $15 billed annually for three users, Professional is $50 or $40 for five, and Premium is $70 or $60 for ten. Extra users are $3 a month.
Free is a real answer for a first year, one truck operation. It stops being one on a schedule you do not control, either the week hand categorizing stops being worth the hour or the year revenue crosses Zoho’s ceiling and the plan ends by arithmetic rather than by decision.
Three products, three different meters
Xero’s Early plan is $25 a month, capped at quotes plus 20 invoices and 5 bills. Growing is $55, Established is $90, and Xero charges no per-user license fees on any plan. FreshBooks Lite is $23 a month for five billable clients, Plus is $43 for fifty, and Premium is $70 for unlimited, with additional team members at $11 a month each on every plan.
Read those as three meters, not three prices. Xero charges by feature tier and not by seat. FreshBooks charges by billable client and by team member. QuickBooks Online charges by tier with a user count bundled in. Residential HVAC has a specific shape, hundreds of small customers and two or three office seats, and that shape runs straight into a five client cap and then a fifty client cap while barely noticing a per-user fee.
Worth knowing before you shop: Intuit stopped selling QuickBooks Desktop Pro Plus, Premier Plus, and Mac Plus to new US subscribers as of September 30, 2024, though existing subscribers can still renew. The Desktop setup your old bookkeeper ran is not something a shop starting fresh in 2026 can buy into.
The sync carries a finished invoice, not the business
Housecall Pro’s QuickBooks Online sync runs one way, from Housecall Pro into QuickBooks Online. It carries invoices, payments including service plan payments, new customer information, and new price book items, and fires when a job is marked finished, an invoice is sent, or a job or invoice is marked paid. Its own documentation states plainly that estimates do not push over. It is not on the entry plan either: Basic does not list it and Essentials is the first tier that includes it. Housecall Pro runs $59 a month annually or $79 monthly for one user, $149 or $189 for five, and $299 or $329 for eight.
Jobber’s sync is also one way, and carries more: clients, products and services, timesheets, invoices, payments, refunds, tips, and payouts. Jobber puts the integration on Connect plans and up, not on entry level Core. Month to month, Core is $49, Connect $139, Grow $199, and Plus $499. Its annual prepaid prices were showing a promotion when checked.
Jobber’s invoice rule is the one to write on the wall. An invoice syncs one time. Edit it afterward and you have to make the same edit in both programs, because the only thing that updates after that first pass is the paid status. That is where the tax time surprise comes from, and the pattern is always the same: an invoice corrected on one side only, repeated quietly for six months, and two systems that no longer agree about what the year was. Both vendors also put the sync a tier above entry, the same tier logic that decides which system owns the customer record and which parts of scheduling and dispatch you actually bought.
2026 has two mileage rates
The IRS business standard mileage rate is 72.5 cents per mile from January 1 through June 30, 2026, and 76 cents per mile from July 1 through December 31, 2026. That makes 2026 a split rate year. The log has to break at June 30, and whichever app holds it has to handle a mid-year change instead of applying one rate across twelve months.
The rate is also an election, not a default. The IRS says use of the standard mileage rate is optional and that taxpayers may calculate actual vehicle costs instead. On a leased vehicle, a taxpayer using the standard rate has to stay with that method for the entire lease. On an owned vehicle, the standard rate has to be chosen in the first year the vehicle is available for business use. That is a decision to make when the van arrives, not at filing.
The one number that never reaches the ledger
Everything above is downstream of revenue. Accounting software records the job after it happened. None of it records the call that never became a job, which is why a missed no heat call costs the same whether the books are free or $340 a month.
That is the part Dial 72 covers. It answers in under a second, 24/7, and triages by your shop’s own rules, so no heat or no cool in extreme weather, vulnerable occupants, or medical equipment escalate to your on-call tech while ordinary work books straight into the calendar with the caller still on the line. The summary arrives by text in English or Spanish, maintenance members are recognized as members, and a replacement lead gets flagged as high value with a callback request instead of a price quoted over the phone, which is the handling a replacement lead actually needs. Dial72 pricing is flat at $95, $295, and $495 a month, with no per call and no per seat meter, which makes it the one line here that does not re-price itself as the shop grows. How it works walks the call flow.
Buy the accounting tier by the job costing you need, not by the logo. Buy the field service tier by what its sync actually carries. Split the 2026 mileage log at June 30. And after anyone corrects an invoice, check both systems, because the sync already made its one pass.
