Xero vs QuickBooks for Purchase Orders: Which Plan You Need and What It Costs

Xero includes purchase orders in every plan, starting with Early at $25 a month. QuickBooks Online does not: purchase orders exist only on Plus at $140 a month and Advanced at $340, so Simple Start and Essentials cannot raise one at all. For the narrow question of issuing a purchase order, Xero is 5.6 times cheaper. The catch sits elsewhere, in what each plan lets you do once that purchase order turns into a bill.

Last updated September 2026

This comparison gets answered badly almost everywhere, and the errors run in both directions. While writing this we found 2026 articles claiming Xero restricts purchase orders to the Established plan at $70 a month. Xero's own Early plan page lists Purchase orders under "Features in every plan", and Xero's US pricing page shows Established at $90, not $70. Both details in that claim are wrong. Everything below was read off Intuit's and Xero's own pages, and where the two vendors describe a limit, the wording is theirs.

What each plan costs and whether it does purchase orders

These are the US list prices as published in September 2026. Xero is running a 90 percent discount for the first six months on purchases made by 30 September 2026, and Intuit runs a rolling introductory offer; the figures below are the standard rates each vendor shows after the promotional period.

Does QuickBooks Online include purchase orders?

Only on Plus and Advanced. Purchase orders are not available on Simple Start or Essentials, so the cheapest QuickBooks Online subscription that can issue one costs $140 a month. This is the single most expensive assumption in the whole comparison, because Essentials at $85 looks like a reasonable small business plan right up to the week somebody asks for a purchase order.

The upgrade path is not painful, but it is a real jump: $85 to $140 is a 65 percent increase in your accounting bill for one feature. If purchase orders are the only reason you are considering Plus, price the alternative first. A dedicated tool that sits alongside a cheaper accounting plan is often less than the difference, which is the calculation the accounting software with purchase orders comparison works through plan by plan.

How do you turn on purchase orders in QuickBooks Online?

Subscribing to Plus is not enough. The feature ships switched off, and you enable it 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 you do that, the Purchase order option does not appear in the New menu, which is why a steady trickle of people upgrade to Plus and then report that purchase orders are still missing.

While that panel is open, set your custom fields and your default message to vendors. Both are easier to configure once than to backfill across a hundred issued orders.

Which Xero plan includes purchase orders?

All of them. Xero's Early plan page lists purchase orders in the set of features available on every plan, alongside bank connections, inventory, reporting, files and sales tax. There is no purchase order specific cap on Early, and no separate module to buy.

That is genuinely unusual in accounting software, and it is the strongest single argument for Xero if purchase ordering is your reason for choosing. It also means the comparison is not really about the purchase order feature, it is about everything downstream of it.

What are the real limits on Xero Early?

This is where the $25 headline needs qualifying. Early caps you at 20 invoices and 5 bills a month. 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, which catches people running a connected store or a payments app.

Purchase orders themselves are uncapped, but a purchase order has a life after it is sent. The supplier delivers, the supplier invoices, and that invoice becomes a bill. Five bills a month is a low ceiling for anybody buying regularly enough to need purchase orders in the first place. The realistic Xero comparison point for a purchasing business is therefore Growing at $55, not Early at $25, and Growing is still $85 a month cheaper than QuickBooks Plus.

Is Xero cheaper than QuickBooks for purchase orders?

Yes on both readings. On the narrowest reading, the cheapest plan that can issue a purchase order is Xero Early at $25 against QuickBooks Plus at $140, a 5.6 times difference. On the realistic reading, where you also need to enter more than five bills a month, it is Xero Growing at $55 against QuickBooks Plus at $140, which is still 2.5 times.

Price is not the only axis, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. QuickBooks Plus includes inventory, project profitability and class tracking, and its US accountant and bookkeeper network is much larger, which matters if you want someone local who already knows your file. Switching accounting platforms to save $85 a month is rarely worth the migration if your bookkeeper only works in QuickBooks. Starting from scratch, the maths favors Xero clearly.

Can you import purchase orders into QuickBooks Online?

No. QuickBooks Online has no native purchase order import. You can key them in one at a time, or push them through the QuickBooks API with a third party app, and that is the complete list of routes. There is no spreadsheet upload for purchase order transactions, despite a lot of published advice that implies otherwise.

QuickBooks Desktop is different: it accepts 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 format punishes mistakes, since an IIF import cannot be undone and an unrecognized account value makes QuickBooks silently create a new one. If you are going down that path, the IIF file purchase order reference covers the block structure and the failure modes. Bank data is a friendlier story, since a CSV export can simply be converted into a QBO file for import, but purchase orders have no equivalent shortcut.

Xero's position is similar. Purchase orders are created in the interface or through the Xero API, and there is no bulk purchase order upload in the product.

What neither one does: the purchase orders you receive

Both platforms are built around the purchase orders you originate. Neither reads the ones that arrive.

If you sell to businesses, that distinction is most of your workload. Customers send purchase orders as PDF attachments, scans and occasionally faxes, and every one of those has to be read by a person and typed into the system as a sales order or an invoice, line by line. If you buy, suppliers send back order confirmations with substituted items and revised pricing that have to be checked against what you ordered. None of that arrives as structured data, and no plan tier on either platform changes it.

This is the part worth costing before you choose. Ten purchase orders a week at fifteen lines each is a real fraction of somebody's job, and it costs the same whether your accounting bill is $25 or $340. Reading those documents and returning the header plus every line as clean columns is what the purchase order PDF to Excel converter above does, and teams working through a backlog rather than one document use bulk purchase order upload instead. From there the data goes wherever you need it: the purchase order to QuickBooks route for Intuit files, purchase order to Xero for Xero, or JSON through the purchase order API if your own system does the posting.

Which one should you actually pick?

Choose Xero if purchase ordering is a core part of how you buy, if you want the feature without a tier jump, and if you are not already tied to a QuickBooks bookkeeper. Growing at $55 is the plan most purchasing businesses will land on, and it costs less than half of the only QuickBooks plan that can do the same job.

Choose QuickBooks Plus if you are already on QuickBooks, if your accountant works in it, or if you need its inventory and project profitability features alongside purchase orders. Pay the $140 knowingly rather than discovering the gap after you have subscribed to Essentials, and remember to switch the feature on.

Choose neither, for this specific job, if what you are really trying to solve is the volume of purchase orders coming at you from customers and suppliers. That is a document capture problem, and no accounting plan on either side of this comparison prices it or solves it.

The short version

• Xero has purchase orders on every plan, from $25 a month. QuickBooks Online has them only on Plus at $140 and Advanced at $340.
• QuickBooks Simple Start and Essentials cannot create purchase orders at all, at any price.
• On QuickBooks Plus the feature ships off. Enable it under Settings, Account and settings, Expenses, Purchase orders, Use purchase orders.
• Xero Early is capped at 20 invoices and 5 bills a month, so a purchasing business realistically needs Growing at $55.
• Neither platform imports purchase orders in bulk, and neither reads a purchase order that arrives as a PDF.