← Back to Bead BoardQuickBooks for welding shops vs Bead Board
Every small welding shop has QuickBooks for the books. A few of them are also trying to jam job tracking, quoting, photos, and the clock-in into QB and finding out the hard way that QuickBooks was built for an accountant's desk, not a welder's glove.
Keep QuickBooks. It's not the problem.
QuickBooks is accounting software. Books, taxes, payroll, sales tax, AR, AP. That's what your bookkeeper needs and that's what QB is good at. Nobody's asking you to drop it.
Bead Board is the other half. It's for the welder on the truck and the fabricator on the floor. Job board, quote builder, customer history, photos, clock-in. Everything that happens before the invoice goes out. You build a PDF quote in Bead Board, your customer signs it, and you type the totals into QB when the check clears. That's the whole integration.
Side by side, shop-floor stuff only
QuickBooks Online list prices verified April 2026 at quickbooks.intuit.com/pricing. Simple Start $38, Essentials $75, Plus $115, Advanced $275. Solopreneur and QuickBooks Time not included.
When QuickBooks alone is fine
One-person shop, three jobs going at once, QB Estimates into QB Invoice, everything fits inside QB. Don't bolt anything on. You'd be paying $99 a month for a problem you don't have yet.
Where QB starts hurting
The first crack shows up on the phone. QB mobile wants to help you send an invoice. It does not want to help you add three in-progress photos of a handrail to a job while you're standing next to it with gloves on. You end up texting photos to yourself and never putting them anywhere.
Then it's the customer call. "What did you charge us for that stair last year?" You open QB, search the customer, scroll through a list of invoices with no pictures and no notes, and eventually guess. A welder's customer history lives in photos and notes and line items, not in GL codes.
Then it's the clock-in. QB will happily sell you QuickBooks Time Premium on top of your subscription at another $20 base plus $8 per user every month. Your welders hate it. They stop using it after week two, and you're back to guessing hours per job at the end of the month.
Also worth reading: welding spreadsheet • WeldTrace (code welding) • Jobber (field services) • the whiteboard.