Thank you for choosing QuickBooks as one of your business partners, maydra01.
I'm here to shed a light on how QuickBooks Self-Employed works.
QuickBooks Self-Employed (QBSE) platform is designed with a very specific audience in mind. It's intended for freelancers, solopreneurs, and independent contractors. That said, it only caters to business owners with simple business structures. This means no employees and contractors need to be invoiced. On the other hand, QuickBooks Online (QBO) caters to small businesses and designed to track the transactions of business accounts. It allows you to do basic accounting tasks such as sending invoices and tracking inventory.
QBO uses a customizable chart of accounts in categorizing your transactions while QBSE uses Schedule C categories which is not customizable. In addition, QBSE isn't a double-entry bookkeeping program and does not contain registers. This is the reason why the option to automatically convert or merge the data from QBO into QBSE is unavailable.
People who work for themselves can greatly benefit from QBSE. If you hired employees and planned to grow your business soon, then QuickBooks Online would suit your business needs.
You can visit this article for more information about the import, export, and conversion limitations for QuickBooks Self-Employed.
If you wish to create a company in QBSE, I encourage you to visit this article to be guided in using the program : QuickBooks Self-Employed Overview.
I've also included an article about the difference between QBSE and QBO versions.
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