Purchase orders are not a standard feature of accounting software. They sit behind a plan tier in most products, and the tier is rarely the one you would guess. Xero includes purchase orders on every plan from $25 a month. Zoho Books starts them at Professional for $50. QuickBooks Online does not offer them until Plus at $140, so Simple Start and Essentials cannot raise one at any price. Every figure here was read off the vendor own pricing page in September 2026.
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Accounting vendors market on invoicing, bank feeds and reporting. Purchase orders sit in a comparison table three clicks down, if they are listed at all, and the tier that holds them moves between products. The result is a very common and expensive sequence: subscribe to a mid tier plan, set up the books, then discover in month two that the plan cannot issue a purchase order.
QuickBooks Online puts purchase orders on Plus and Advanced only. Zoho Books puts them on Professional and above. Xero puts them on everything. There is no industry convention here, so the answer has to be checked product by product rather than assumed from price.
While writing this page we found 2026 articles stating that Xero restricts purchase orders to its Established plan at $70 a month. Xero own Early plan page lists purchase orders under features in every plan, and its US pricing page shows Established at $90. Both halves of that claim are wrong.
On QuickBooks Online, purchase orders ship switched off even on Plus. Until you enable them in settings the option does not appear in the New menu, which produces a steady stream of people who upgraded and think the feature is still missing.
Xero Early includes purchase orders and costs $25, but caps you at 20 invoices and 5 bills a month. Purchase orders are uncapped, yet a purchase order becomes a bill eventually, so the constraint arrives one step downstream from where you were looking.
Every plan on this page prices the purchase orders you issue. If customers send you purchase orders as PDFs, or suppliers send back order confirmations, that document is read and retyped by a person on all of these products.
PurchaseOrders is not accounting software and does not replace any product on this page. It reads purchase orders and order confirmations that arrive as PDFs, scans or email attachments and returns the header plus every line as clean columns, so the figures reach whichever platform you chose without being retyped.
The output is a spreadsheet or a JSON payload rather than a connector tied to one vendor, so the same extraction feeds Xero, QuickBooks or Zoho Books. Choosing a capture tool does not lock your accounting decision.
Volume drives the cost, so a small team on a $25 accounting plan is not forced up a tier to handle a busy month of inbound orders. That is the opposite of how the tier gating on this page behaves.
Description, quantity, unit price and extended amount come back per line, which is the granularity a GL account or a tracking category has to be assigned at. Header only capture can total an order but it cannot code one.
A distributor PDF, a scanned order form and a customer purchase order all return the same fields, with no per customer template to build and maintain.
Moving between accounting platforms means re entering the open orders you already have. Upload the folder and get one sheet, rather than keying a quarter of live orders by hand during the switch.
Twenty five pages free with no card, which is enough to run your own worst documents through before committing to anything. That is a faster evaluation than any demo call.
The short answer, and it is the reason this page exists: the cheapest mainstream US accounting plan that can raise a purchase order is Xero Early at $25 a month. The QuickBooks Online equivalent is Plus at $140 a month, because purchase orders do not exist on the two plans below it. Zoho Books sits between them, starting purchase orders at Professional for $50 a month, or $40 billed annually.
Everything below was read off each vendor own pricing page in September 2026. Where a product does not publish something, this page says so rather than repeating a figure from a comparison article.
Xero lists purchase orders in the set of features available on every plan, alongside bank connections, inventory, reporting, files, contacts and sales tax. Early is $25 a month, Growing is $55 and Established is $90. There is no separate purchase order module and no tier gate on the feature itself.
The constraint on Early is elsewhere and it matters. Early caps you at 20 invoices and 5 bills a month, and Xero notes that the invoice limit applies to both approving and sending invoices, and that transactions initiated by app partners can count toward it automatically. Purchase orders are not capped, but a purchase order has a life after it is sent: the supplier delivers, then invoices, and that invoice becomes a bill. Five bills a month is a low ceiling for a business buying often enough to need purchase orders. For most purchasing businesses the realistic Xero plan is Growing at $55, not Early at $25. That is still $85 a month below QuickBooks Plus.
QuickBooks Online offers purchase orders on Plus and Advanced only. Simple Start at $38 a month and Essentials at $85 cannot create one at all. Plus is $140 a month and Advanced is $340. So the cheapest QuickBooks path to a purchase order is $140, and the jump from Essentials is a 65 percent increase in your accounting bill for a single feature.
Subscribing is not sufficient. The feature ships disabled, and you turn it on under Settings, then Account and settings, then the Expenses tab. In the Purchase orders section select the edit icon, turn on Use purchase orders, then Save and Done. Until that is done the Purchase order option does not appear in the New menu at all. While the panel is open, set your custom fields and the default message to vendors, because both are much easier to configure once than to backfill across a hundred issued orders.
Two further limits are worth knowing before you commit. QuickBooks Online has no native purchase order import: you enter them one at a time or push them through the QuickBooks API with a third party app, and there is no spreadsheet upload for purchase order transactions regardless of what a lot of published advice implies. And a QuickBooks purchase order is non posting, so it does not hit your expense accounts until it becomes a bill. QuickBooks Desktop is a different product here and does accept purchase orders through IIF, where the transaction type is PURCHORD and each order is a tab delimited TRNS, SPL and ENDTRNS block rather than a flat row. That path is unforgiving: an IIF import cannot be undone, and an account value QuickBooks does not recognize causes it to create a new account silently. The IIF file purchase order reference covers the block structure and the failure modes in full.
Zoho Books publishes a free plan for businesses whose revenue for the financial year does not exceed $50,000, and that plan does not include purchase orders. Neither does Standard at $20 a month, or $15 billed annually. Purchase orders begin at Professional, $50 a month or $40 billed annually, and continue through Premium at $70, Elite at $150 and Ultimate at $275, with annual rates of $60, $120 and $240.
Zoho Inventory is a separate product with a different logic that suits some buyers better: it prices on order volume rather than seats or feature tiers, and purchase orders are included on every paid plan. Standard is $29 a month billed annually with 500 orders a month, Premium $79 with 3,000, Plus $129 with 7,500 and Enterprise $249 with 15,000. If your constraint is document volume rather than headcount or feature depth, that model fits better than either Xero or QuickBooks.
Work out which of three situations you are in, because each has a clear answer.
You need purchase orders and you have not chosen a platform yet. Xero is the cheaper path by a wide margin, and the feature is not tier gated, so you cannot get it wrong. Budget for Growing at $55 rather than Early at $25 unless you genuinely enter fewer than five bills a month.
You are already on QuickBooks. Pay for Plus knowingly and switch the feature on. Changing accounting platform to save $85 a month is rarely worth the migration if your bookkeeper works in QuickBooks, and the US accountant network around Intuit is much larger. The saving is real but it is not the only cost.
Your actual problem is inbound purchase orders. If the pain is the volume of purchase orders arriving from customers, or order confirmations coming back from suppliers, no plan on this page addresses it. Upgrading your accounting tier will not help, because the tier gates the ability to issue purchase orders, not to read them.
Every product above is built around the purchase orders you originate. None of them reads one that arrives.
For a business selling to other businesses that distinction is most of the work. Customers send purchase orders as PDF attachments and scans, each one has to be read and keyed as a sales order or invoice, and ten orders a week at fifteen lines each is a meaningful fraction of somebody job. It costs the same whether your accounting subscription is $25 or $340 a month, and it is the one line item that never appears on a pricing page.
That capture step is what we do. Reading a document and returning the header plus every line as columns is the job of the purchase order PDF to Excel converter, while teams clearing a backlog rather than a single file use bulk purchase order upload. Because a GL account or tracking category is assigned per line rather than per order, purchase order line item extraction is what makes the output usable in any of these products. From there the data takes the route that matches your books: purchase order to QuickBooks, purchase order to Xero, purchase order to Zoho Books, or JSON through the purchase order API when your own system posts it. If you are weighing a dedicated procurement platform instead of an accounting tier upgrade, the best purchase order software comparison covers that category on published pricing, and the head to head detail on the two products above is in Xero vs QuickBooks for purchase orders.
To be plain about the boundary, because a page comparing other vendors is exactly where it is tempting to overstate: PurchaseOrders is not accounting software. It does not keep a ledger, reconcile a bank feed, create purchase orders, route approvals, hold budgets, run three way matching or post anything to your books. It reads purchase orders that arrive as documents and returns structured data. Whichever plan you pick above, the typing that happens before the data reaches it is the part we remove.
US list prices as published in September 2026, after any introductory discount period. The last column is the detail that changes the decision.
| Plan | Price per month | Purchase orders | The catch to read twice |
|---|---|---|---|
| Xero Early | $25 | Yes | Capped at 20 invoices and 5 bills a month |
| Xero Growing | $55 | Yes | No invoice or bill caps; the realistic purchasing plan |
| Xero Established | $90 | Yes | Adds analytics, multi currency, expenses and projects |
| QuickBooks Simple Start | $38 | No | Cannot create a purchase order at any price |
| QuickBooks Essentials | $85 | No | Cannot create a purchase order at any price |
| QuickBooks Plus | $140 | Yes | Ships disabled; enable under Account and settings, Expenses |
| QuickBooks Advanced | $340 | Yes | Same purchase order behavior as Plus |
| Zoho Books Free | $0 | No | Only for revenue under $50,000 in the financial year |
| Zoho Books Standard | $20, or $15 annually | No | Purchase orders start one tier up |
| Zoho Books Professional | $50, or $40 annually | Yes | The Zoho Books entry point for purchase orders |
| Zoho Inventory Standard | $29 billed annually | Yes | Priced on 500 orders a month rather than seats |
Every figure was read from the named vendor own pricing page in September 2026. Xero was running a 90 percent introductory discount for six months and Intuit runs a rolling offer; the prices above are the standard rates each vendor shows after the promotional period. Sage is not listed because its US purchase order page returned no accessible published price at the time of writing, and this page does not print prices it cannot verify at source.
Do these in order and the tier question answers itself, without a demo call.
The purchase order feature is rarely the binding limit. Count how many supplier bills you enter in a busy month, because that is the number that decides your Xero tier and it sits one step downstream of the order.
Tip: Use a real peak month rather than an average one. Seasonal buying is what breaks a cap two months after you subscribe.
Confirm on the vendor own pricing page that your intended plan lists purchase orders. QuickBooks Essentials looks like a sensible small business plan right up to the week somebody asks for a purchase order.
Tip: On QuickBooks Plus, enable the feature immediately under Settings, Account and settings, Expenses, Purchase orders.
Separately, count the purchase orders customers send you and the order confirmations suppliers send back. No plan on this page prices that work, and for most B2B sellers it is the larger of the two numbers.
Tip: Run a few of those documents through the free tier above before you decide anything. It takes minutes and it sizes the problem honestly.
Xero includes purchase orders on every plan from $25 a month. Zoho Books includes them from Professional at $50 a month, or $40 billed annually. QuickBooks Online includes them only on Plus at $140 and Advanced at $340. QuickBooks Simple Start and Essentials, and the Zoho Books Free and Standard plans, cannot create a purchase order at all.
Xero Early at $25 a month is the cheapest mainstream US accounting plan that can raise a purchase order. The caveat is that Early caps you at 20 invoices and 5 bills a month, so a business buying regularly will need Growing at $55. That is still $85 a month below the cheapest QuickBooks plan with the feature.
Only on Plus and Advanced. Simple Start at $38 a month and Essentials at $85 cannot create purchase orders, so the cheapest QuickBooks route is Plus at $140 a month. The feature also ships switched off and has to be enabled under Settings, Account and settings, the Expenses tab, then Purchase orders, then Use purchase orders.
Any of them. Xero lists purchase orders among the features available on every plan, including Early at $25 a month, with no separate module to buy. The practical choice is driven by the invoice and bill caps on Early rather than by the purchase order feature itself, which pushes most purchasing businesses to Growing at $55.
Yes, from the Professional plan at $50 a month or $40 billed annually. The Free plan, which is limited to businesses with revenue under $50,000 for the financial year, and the Standard plan at $20 a month do not include them. Zoho Inventory is a separate product that includes purchase orders on every paid plan and prices on monthly order volume instead.
No. QuickBooks Online has no native purchase order import. The only routes are entering them one at a time or pushing them through the QuickBooks API with a third party app. QuickBooks Desktop is different and accepts purchase orders through IIF, using the PURCHORD transaction type in a tab delimited TRNS, SPL and ENDTRNS block.
Only if you need requisitions, approval routing, budget checks or three way matching, which accounting software does not do well. If you simply need to issue and track purchase orders, your accounting plan is almost always cheaper. Dedicated platforms with published pricing start around $99 a month flat or $19 per user per month.
Because many repeat older or misread information. Several 2026 articles state that Xero restricts purchase orders to the Established plan at $70 a month. Xero own Early plan page lists purchase orders under features in every plan, and its US pricing page shows Established at $90. Check the vendor own pricing page rather than a roundup.
No. Every product on this page is built to issue purchase orders, not to read incoming ones. A purchase order that arrives as a PDF or a scan is read and retyped by a person on Xero, QuickBooks and Zoho Books alike, which is the step this tool removes regardless of which plan you are on.
Dedicated procurement platforms compared on published pricing.
For the cheapest accounting plan that issues POs.
For Zoho Books Professional and above.
Header and every line as a clean spreadsheet.
Clear a backlog rather than one document at a time.
Line level detail, which is where the GL code goes.
JSON output when your own system does the posting.
The IIF and API detail for getting POs into QuickBooks.
