Most small HVAC companies with maintenance agreements and supplier bills do well on QuickBooks Online Plus ($140 a month list) or Xero Established ($97), because both track job costs. Xero Growing ($59) works when jobs are costed elsewhere. The AI layers speed up bank matching and bill capture, but neither is built around maintenance agreements.
Plan limits and job costing decide the shortlist; the AI features rarely do. Xero's Early plan lists 20 invoices and 5 bills, which a firm billing 150 agreements cannot live within, and QuickBooks Simple Start lists no project profitability. Count your own invoices and bills first, then compare plans against those numbers rather than against a feature grid.
Count last month's invoices, bills and jobs before comparing plans
Every sum in this tutorial uses the illustrative firm below, so each plan faces the same workload. Replace its figures with yours from last month's invoice list, supplier statements and job list. That takes about twenty minutes and often rules out a plan before you look at a single feature.
- Four technicians, one office manager and an owner who still quotes replacements.
- 160 maintenance agreements: 100 billed once a year at $199 and 60 billed monthly at $24, each covering two visits a year.
- About 90 repair and diagnostic invoices a month.
- Eight system replacements a month at an average of $9,600, each with a deposit invoice and a balance invoice.
- About 40 supplier bills a month from two parts distributors and one equipment supplier.
| Monthly workload | Count | How it is worked out |
|---|---|---|
| Agreement invoices | 68 | 60 monthly, plus about 8 annual renewals (100 divided by 12) |
| Repair and diagnostic invoices | 90 | Taken from the job list |
| Replacement invoices | 16 | 8 jobs, each with a deposit and a balance invoice |
| Customer invoices in total | 174 | 68 + 90 + 16 |
| Supplier bills | 40 | Counted from distributor statements |
Xero's pricing page footnote says the Early invoice limit applies to both approving and sending, and that transactions started by app partners may count towards it. It gives no time period, so confirm whether the cap is monthly before you buy. At 174 invoices and 40 bills the firm overshoots by a wide margin either way, so Early is out.
User numbers narrow the field further. QuickBooks allows one user on Simple Start, three on Essentials, five on Plus and 25 on Advanced, with accountant seats listed on top. Xero's page says there are no per-user licence fees. If the owner, the office manager and a service manager all need to log in, Simple Start is out as well, and the real contest is Essentials or Plus against Growing or Established.
Recurring invoices for 160 agreements: what each package does
Agreement billing is where an HVAC firm's books differ from a handyman's one-off invoices: 68 near-identical invoices a month, each tied to a customer, a price and a renewal date. Both packages can repeat an invoice. They differ in what happens after the repeat is set up.
| Question | QuickBooks Online | Xero |
|---|---|---|
| Where you set it up | The recurring transactions list, or a recurring option while editing an invoice; the menu path depends on your QuickBooks layout | Repeating invoices for regular customers; Xero fills in the customer's details |
| Draft or sent automatically | Intuit's invoicing page says recurring invoices can auto-send every day, week, month or year; check in a trial whether yours send or wait for review | You choose when and how often to send; the page does not describe a draft step for repeats |
| Charging a card or bank account | Autopay needs a QuickBooks Payments account; without it each customer pays each invoice separately | A Pay now button takes card, bank debit, Apple Pay, Google Pay or Klarna through Stripe and GoCardless; the page does not describe scheduled charging |
| Reminders for late payers | Status updates and reminders listed on the Simple Start card | Automated reminders before or after the due date, stopping once the payment is matched |
| Which plans have it | Not tied to a plan on the pricing or invoicing pages I read | Not listed in the plan feature lists on the pricing page |
Those last two rows matter more than they look. Neither vendor's pricing page ties recurring invoices to a plan, and Xero's does not mention repeating invoices at all, so open a trial of the exact plan you intend to buy and find the recurring screen before you commit.
Monthly members and annual members need different handling
The 60 monthly members make 720 small payments a year. If a card or bank debit is stored with the customer, collection is automatic; if not, the office chases about 60 customers every month. Ask which of the two the package can do with your payment processor, because that single point decides how many hours the office spends on agreements.
The 100 annual members are different. A reminder-style template, where a person confirms the price and terms before each invoice goes out, suits them. It also gives you the moment to apply a price rise, which is awkward to do after an automatic invoice has already gone out at last year's price.
Bill where the visits are scheduled
Where the tune-ups are booked matters more than where the invoice is created. If Jobber or Housecall Pro schedules the visits, bill the agreement there so the invoice and the visit share a record. Housecall Pro's QuickBooks page says invoices, customers, line items and payments push into QuickBooks Online or Desktop, and it does not mention Xero; its pricing page lists the QuickBooks Online sync from Essentials upwards, and recurring maintenance agreements only on Max ($299 a month on annual billing, $329 monthly). Jobber's pricing page says it syncs with QuickBooks Online and Xero, and its Connect plan card lists the QuickBooks Online sync, which the Core card does not.
Neither AI layer creates or renews agreements. Xero's JAX page gives an example of asking for an invoice based on the last quote, and QuickBooks lists bulk invoice creation as a beta feature on Essentials, but a reviewed template remains the dependable route for renewals.
For the mechanics of recurring invoices and reminders inside QuickBooks, this QuickBooks automated invoicing tutorial goes step by step, and the agreement template tutorial covers the contract wording the invoices rest on.
Install deposits and a balance invoice that matches the quote
A $9,600 replacement quote with a 30% deposit produces a $2,880 invoice at signing and a $6,720 balance at completion. The balance must equal the quote minus the deposit actually taken, and your bookkeeper should decide whether the deposit counts as income on receipt or sits in a liability account until the install is done. The software will not make that choice for you.
QuickBooks calls the stage-by-stage route progress invoicing, and Intuit's invoicing page places it on Plus and Advanced, which suits the example firm. You switch it on in the account settings under Sales, and an estimate can then be invoiced by percentage or by amount while the original estimate stays open. The same page mentions collecting deposits ahead of time without naming a plan; on Simple Start or Essentials, a deposit invoice and a separate balance invoice do the job, provided someone checks the balance against the quote. Xero has no separate deposit feature that I could confirm; its Projects page says you can create a quote from a project and raise fixed-price or time-and-materials invoices from project data, and Projects sits on the Established plan.
A realistic mistake shows why the arithmetic needs a human check. The customer adds a $350 duct repair after signing, taking the job to $9,950. An assistant asked for the remaining 70% takes 70% of $9,950 and returns $6,965. The deposit already paid was $2,880, so the right balance is $9,950 minus $2,880, which is $7,070. The invoice would have been $105 short and nobody would have noticed until the month-end job report.
Quote total (original): $9,600
Deposit taken (30%): $2,880
Change order (duct repair): $350
New job total: $9,950
Balance due = new total - deposit paid = $9,950 - $2,880 = $7,070
(Not 70% of $9,950 = $6,965)If customers finance installs through a lender, the payout can arrive net of a fee and on a different day from the install, so the bank feed will not match the invoice amount. Agree the posting rule with your bookkeeper first; neither AI layer can guess it.
Supplier bills: what AI capture reads on a parts-house invoice
Xero's Smart Document Capture is free on every plan, according to its own page. You photograph a bill in the app, email it to your Xero address or drag it in on the web, and the AI reads the document, shows it beside the data-entry screen and creates a draft bill ready for approval. It also cross-references the details with the bank feed and flags a document uploaded twice. Xero says accuracy is high when documents are visually clear and in standard formats, which is a polite way of saying a creased delivery ticket may go wrong.
QuickBooks takes a similar route for receipts: its page says the app pulls the date, vendor, amount and payment method, then matches the receipt to an existing expense or creates a new one. Bill pay is listed from Simple Start, where Intuit's bill-management page includes five standard bank payments a month and charges $0.50 for each one over that; the pricing page says allowances may vary, so check the figure on your plan. Paying 40 bills one by one on a five-payment allowance would add about $17.50 a month, so pay each distributor once for all its open bills. Advanced adds approval workflows through Bill Pay Elite. Xero's bills page lists roles and permissions for who can create and approve bills, repeating bills, and batch payments to suppliers.
Capture reads the printed document. It does not know that three lines belong to job 1187 because someone wrote the job number on the delivery ticket. This illustrative parts-house invoice shows where the work stays with you.
| Line on the invoice | Amount | What capture returned | What you fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| Condenser, 3-ton | $1,720.00 | Read correctly | Assign to project 1187 |
| Furnace | $1,210.00 | Read correctly | Assign to project 1187 |
| Evaporator coil | $550.00 | Read correctly | Assign to project 1187 |
| Capacitors and contactors | $141.00 | Read correctly | Van stock, not a job |
| Credit for returned capacitor | -$14.00 | Read as +$14.00 | Reverse the sign; link to the callback job |
| Freight | $48.00 | Read as a separate line | Spread across the jobs or code to the largest |
| Invoice total | $3,655.00 | Lines summed to $3,683.00 | The $28 gap is the signal to check the credit |
The fix is a habit rather than a feature. Make the purchase order number the job number, ask the counter to print it on the invoice, and compare the captured lines against the printed total before approving. If line items are the pain, Dext's business plan lists $302.50 a year for 250 documents a month and five users, and its line-item extraction add-on starts at $20.50 a month or $0.50 a document. At 40 bills a month, pay-as-you-go would cost about $20 a month on top of the subscription, so work out whether it beats ten minutes of keying per week before you buy it.
On Xero, remember the Early plan's limit of 5 bills: capture is free on every plan, but only Growing and Established list Automate bill entry and track bills. For sibling set-ups, the Xero tutorial for electricians covers van receipts and supplier bills in more detail.
Job costing one install in QuickBooks Plus or Xero Established
QuickBooks lists Track project profitability on Plus, along with inventory tracking and 40 classes and locations. Advanced adds advanced project financials and a Project Management AI that auto-creates projects and allocates costs, which Intuit labels beta on its bill-management page. Xero's Established plan lists Track time and costs for projects, quotes created from a project, a profitability dashboard and a project summary report. Growing does not list projects.
The example install shows what the report should say when the data is right.
| Project 1187 (illustrative) | Amount |
|---|---|
| Revenue: deposit plus balance | $9,600 |
| Equipment from the distributor | $3,480 |
| Line set, pad, disconnect, flue and other materials | $520 |
| Permit | $140 |
| Subcontracted electrical work | $360 |
| Labour: 18 hours at $41 loaded | $738 |
| Gross profit | $4,362 (45%) |
Now the realistic failure. The $3,480 distributor payment arrives through the bank feed, the AI proposes the category Supplies, and the project field stays empty because the feed knows nothing about jobs. The project report then shows costs of $1,758 against $9,600 of revenue, which is an 82% margin. The owner thinks the install pays brilliantly until the month-end review shows general supplies up by $3,480. Nothing was wrong with the software; nothing told it which job the money belonged to.
Two rules prevent it. Every equipment or materials line on a bill carries a project or job number, or goes to van stock. And a weekly list of anything coded to supplies over a set amount, say $300, gets reviewed by a person. Labour is the other gap: QuickBooks lists adding employee time to invoices from Essentials, and Xero's Projects tracks time against a project, but neither captures truck costs, so add a flat hourly vehicle rate if you want honest margins. The markup and margin check on past jobs shows how to test your current pricing against real job costs, and the plumbers' QuickBooks job-costing set-up carries over closely.
Intuit Intelligence and Xero JAX: what each adds for an HVAC firm
Intuit presents its AI as Intuit Intelligence, and its product page labels it beta. The pricing page spreads features across plans: Simple Start shows an AI chat marked limited capacity and beta, plus expense categorisation; Essentials adds Accounting AI for cleaning up books and Payments AI; Plus lists reconciliation, auto-categorisation with verification, anomaly detection and a beta scenario-planning chat. Intuit has said its AI features cannot currently be switched off one by one. Xero's JAX chat is available to all subscribers at no extra charge for now, and Xero says it may change that, while auto-reconcile is part of Growing and above and an optional $5 a month add-on on Early.
| What an HVAC firm needs | Intuit Intelligence | Xero JAX and related features |
|---|---|---|
| Status | Product page labelled beta; chat marked limited capacity | Chat available to all subscribers; Xero kept its auto-reconcile labelled beta in an August 2026 update, so check today's label |
| Bank matching | Reconciliation and verified auto-categorisation on Plus | Auto-reconcile on Growing and above |
| Supplier bills | Receipt capture and matching in the app | Smart Document Capture, free on all plans, creating draft bills |
| Questions about your numbers | AI chat, with capacity limits | Cash flow questions, charts and tables of income and profit trends |
| Understands maintenance agreements | Not described on the pages I read | Not described on the pages I read |
| Assigns costs to jobs | Advanced lists a beta Project Management AI that allocates costs; below that, a person assigns the project | Not described on the pages I read; assign the project yourself |
A fair test uses your own data. In each trial, ask five questions you would genuinely want answered and score each reply 0 for wrong or invented, 1 for right but unhelpful, and 2 for right and useful.
- Which agreement customers have an unpaid invoice older than 30 days?
- What did we spend with each distributor last month?
- Which install jobs have supplier costs but no invoice yet?
- What is the gross margin on project 1187?
- Which bank transactions this week look unusual?
Expect the first answer to be the strongest and the third and fourth to depend on how disciplined your job coding is. That pattern is the useful finding: the AI is only as good as the project and customer fields you fill in. For the prompt limits and add-on pricing around the Intuit chat, see the QuickBooks AI agents and plan limits tutorial.
What each plan costs the example firm over twelve months
These are list prices in USD multiplied by twelve, taken from Intuit's pricing page and Xero's pricing page, before promotions, payroll and add-ons. Both vendors advertise introductory discounts that change often, so quote the list price when you budget.
| Plan | Monthly list | Twelve months | Verdict for the example firm |
|---|---|---|---|
| QuickBooks Simple Start | $38 | $456 | One user and no projects; only with job costing elsewhere |
| QuickBooks Essentials | $85 | $1,020 | Three users and Accounting AI; no project profitability |
| QuickBooks Plus | $140 | $1,680 | Projects, inventory, five users; the default pick |
| QuickBooks Advanced | $340 | $4,080 | Worth it only for approvals and project AI at larger scale |
| Xero Early | $27 | $324 | Fails on invoice and bill limits |
| Xero Growing | $59 | $708 | Good if jobs are costed in the field tool |
| Xero Established | $97 | $1,164 | Projects included; the cheapest route to job costing |
Plus costs $516 more a year than Established. In return QuickBooks is the package Housecall Pro's page names, while Xero charges no per-user fees. Xero's payroll add-on is listed at $36 a month plus $6 per employee or contractor, so price payroll separately for both. Add Dext only if line-item capture proves to be your bottleneck.
A two-hour trial that settles the choice
Run the same afternoon of work in both trials with real data from last month, and time each step. You are looking for the package where the office finishes fastest and the project report ends up right.
- Create five annual and five monthly agreement templates and note whether invoices draft or send. About 25 minutes.
- Capture ten genuine supplier bills, five of them with credits or freight. About 30 minutes.
- Take one install from quote to deposit to balance, including a change order. About 25 minutes.
- Connect a bank feed, accept or reject a week of suggestions, and count the wrong ones. About 20 minutes.
- Ask the five questions above and score them. About 20 minutes.
| Score sheet | QuickBooks | Xero |
|---|---|---|
| Agreement invoices behaved as expected (0 to 2) | ||
| Bills captured without re-keying, out of 10 | ||
| Deposit and balance matched the quote (yes or no) | ||
| Wrong bank suggestions per 50 transactions | ||
| AI question score, out of 10 | ||
| Project margin matched the hand calculation (yes or no) |
Decide before you start what a pass looks like. A sensible bar is that fewer than 5 of the 50 bank suggestions are wrong, all ten bills reconcile to the printed totals after your fixes, and the margin on the test install matches your own sum to the dollar. If both packages pass, pick the cheaper one that your field-service software syncs with.
Three questions to settle with your bookkeeper first
The software choice is the easy part; the set-up decisions underneath it are the ones that keep the books honest. Ask these before you migrate or start a new file.
- Prepaid agreements: should the $199 annual fee be spread across the twelve months, or recognised when it is paid? The answer depends on your accounting method and your adviser's judgement, and either package needs the entries set up once.
- Deposits: which account holds customer deposits until the install is complete?
- Chart of accounts: separate equipment cost from parts and materials, subcontractors and van stock, so a job report can be read at a glance.
A workable starting list is agreement income, service income, equipment sales, equipment cost of sales, parts and materials, subcontractors, van stock and customer deposits as a liability. Your bookkeeper may name them differently, which is fine; what matters is that every bill line has an obvious home and that the AI categoriser has a short, sensible list to choose from. A shorter list also makes its mistakes easier to spot.
If the two-hour trial points to a package you can live with, the next step is cleaning the opening data rather than buying anything further. Start with the agreement list, the customer list and the open supplier bills, because those carry the most dates and amounts. The broader AI guide helps place bookkeeping automation alongside the other jobs an HVAC firm can hand to software, and if you would rather map the whole flow with someone, that is what my AI implementation consultation covers.
HVAC accounting software: quick answers
Can a small HVAC firm run on QuickBooks Simple Start?
Only if job costing lives somewhere else. Simple Start ($38 a month list) allows one user, and Intuit's pricing page lists project profitability from Plus upwards. A firm that invoices and costs jobs in its field-service tool and syncs totals can make Simple Start work, with the field tool or a spreadsheet supplying job margins.
Does Xero cost jobs the way QuickBooks Projects does?
Xero's Established plan ($97 a month list) lists tracking time and costs for projects, with quotes created from a project and a profitability dashboard. Early and Growing do not list projects. The tools differ in detail, so run one real install through each trial and compare the margin each report shows.
Can the AI post supplier bills without my approval?
Treat capture as a draft step. Xero describes capture as creating draft bills ready for approval, and QuickBooks matches receipts to existing expenses when it can. Neither knows which job a part belongs to, so keep an approval step and a total check against the paper bill, especially for credits and freight.
Does Housecall Pro or Jobber replace accounting software?
No. Housecall Pro's QuickBooks page lists invoices, customers, line items and payments pushing into QuickBooks, and Jobber says it syncs with QuickBooks Online and Xero. Supplier bills, payroll, the bank feed and the accountant's reports still live in the accounting package, so you need both.
Further reads
- Xero vs QuickBooks AI: Which Saves More Bookkeeping Time? — A general comparison of the two AI layers for bookkeeping time.
- Roofing Accounting Software: Deposits, Progress Invoices, Job Costing, AI — The same comparison for a trade that takes deposits and stage payments.
- AI Service Plan Reminders for Heating and Cooling Customers — Reminders that bring agreement customers back for their visits.
- Six AI Automations for HVAC Companies, Ranked by Effort — Where bookkeeping automation ranks against other HVAC jobs.
- AI Tools and AI Development: The Complete 2026 Guide — the AI hub, including every tutorial in the AI-for-business series.
Sources: QuickBooks Online pricing, invoicing, bill management, expense-tracking and Intuit Intelligence pages; Xero pricing, invoicing, bills, Projects, JAX and Smart Document Capture pages; Dext business pricing; Jobber pricing; Housecall Pro pricing and QuickBooks pages. All read in October 2026.