QuickBooks Enterprise vs Sage 300 CRE Compared 2026

Pick the ledger that can carry a job through the close

Construction accounting means every dollar of cost, billing, payroll, and cash is tied to a job, not only to a company-wide profit and loss. A controller at a contractor who searches for QuickBooks Enterprise versus Sage 300 CRE is not shopping for a logo. They are deciding which system will hold the job cost file when the month closes, the bank is reconciled, and someone asks whether the job is overbilled. QuickBooks Desktop Enterprise is still on sale, including a construction industry edition, with published starting prices. Sage 300 CRE is still on sale too, under a longer name, and Sage does not publish a price.

The product in this search is Sage 300 Construction and Real Estate. After four decades under the Timberline name, Sage Timberline Office became Sage 300 Construction and Real Estate, according to Sage (2026). That page lists job cost tracking, change order management, accounting and payroll, estimating compliance, project management, service management, and property management. It is not discontinued. It is also not the same product as Sage 300 without the construction name, not Sage 100 Contractor, and not Sage Intacct Construction. Those are different Sage lines. This comparison stays on Desktop Enterprise and Sage 300 Construction and Real Estate only.

TL;DR: stay on QuickBooks Enterprise when the books already live there, the people who must be in the file at once fit the published user ceiling, and the job-cost reports Intuit lists are enough for the close. Move the evaluation to Sage 300 CRE when you need a construction-built ledger that also covers payroll, change orders, service work, or property management, and you are willing to judge a written quote because no public price exists. Neither product is the system of record for drawings, daily logs, or RFIs.

Key Takeaways

• QuickBooks Desktop Enterprise is a current product with a construction edition. Sage 300 CRE is the current name of Timberline, and Sage still sells it on a quote.

• Intuit publishes starting prices, user ceilings, and payroll add-on fees. Sage's product page says subscription pricing is available and asks the buyer to request it, so the honest Sage price in this guide is Quote-based.

• The decision turns on job cost, committed cost, work in progress, change orders, payroll, retainage, and who can open the file. A one-point gap in a review score does not settle that.

• Desktop Enterprise lists a work-in-progress report and a committed-costs-by-job report. Sage's public pages list job cost and change orders, and they do not publish a module price list a controller can total at a desk.

• Per-employee payroll fees and optional hosting sit outside the starting subscription. A Sage quote has to be opened the same way, module by module, or the comparison is theater.

• Field tools and permit logs still sit outside both ledgers. Someone has to review a job and a cost code before a cost posts.

Who this is for

This is for a controller, CFO, or owner at a contractor who already knows the firm has outgrown a simple checkbook and is choosing the accounting system that will survive the next few years of jobs. You are comparing a familiar desktop ledger with a construction edition against a construction accounting system that started as Timberline. You care about job cost, payroll, draws, retainage, and the monthly close. You do not need a slogan. You need to know what is published, what is a quote, and what neither product will do.

Red flags: you want drawings, daily logs, and RFIs to live as the financial system of record. You have no job-cost need and only want cloud invoicing for a small office. You need a cloud multi-entity consolidation project as the main problem and have not asked Intuit or Sage about their separate cloud suites. In those cases this pair is the wrong shortlist, even before price.

How we evaluated these two ledgers

We weighted what changes a contractor's close, not a generic software score. Job cost, committed cost, and work in progress take 25 of 100 points because a job can look profitable on the profit and loss and still be bleeding once open commitments and percent complete are visible. Billing, retainage, and change orders take 20 because cash on a construction job is a draw schedule, not a stack of retail invoices. Payroll and labor burden take 15 because field labor is often the largest cost and the software fee is not the same thing as the burden rate. The close, multi-company records, and the audit trail take 15. Access to the file, including hosting, takes 10. Published price versus quote risk takes 10, because a number you can read is worth more than a number a blog guessed. Implementation and training take 5, because both products can be learned and both can be installed badly. Points at stake equal the weight. We did not assign either vendor a made-up total.

Factual claims below come from vendor pages or from named review sites we opened. Where a page is silent, the cell says so. Silence is not a feature.

Pricing checked on the vendor pages

Pricing checked October 9, 2026. Gold starting price: $2,210 per year according to Intuit (2026), and that pricing page also lists the Platinum plan at $2,717 per year, the Diamond plan at $5,363 per year on a monthly payment plan only, up to 30 simultaneous users on Gold and Platinum, up to 40 on Diamond, Enhanced Payroll up to $3 per employee per month, Assisted Payroll at $2.50 per employee per pay period, Time Elite at $5 per employee per month, more than 200 built-in reports, and a 60-day money-back window. Read those yearly figures as yearly figures. The Diamond amount is not a monthly rent of $5,363. Hosting is extra, and Intuit does not print a hosting dollar amount on that page, so hosting is Quote-based even when the software price is public. Sage's product page says subscription pricing is available and routes the buyer to a request form. No Sage 300 CRE dollar amount appears there. The Sage price in this guide is Quote-based.

A controller who compares $2,210 with a blank Sage cell has not compared cost. The QuickBooks total still has to add users, the payroll headcount, the number of company files, and hosting. The Sage total has to add modules, support, conversion, and hosting once the reseller writes them down. Third-party sites print Sage dollar guesses. Those guesses are not used here.

Where the two products separate on the close

Intuit's contractor job-costing page lists a Job Costing Center, estimated versus actual cost, expenses not yet assigned to a job, flexible billing rates, change orders, a committed-costs-by-job report, a work-in-progress report, job costs by job, and employee time tracking. The construction industry edition exists beside manufacturing, wholesale, nonprofit, retail, professional services, and an accountant edition. Platinum and Diamond add bill and purchase-order approvals, advanced inventory, and advanced pricing. Gold already lists multi-company management. Platinum adds intercompany transactions. That is a real desktop ledger with a contractor kit, not a generic check register.

Sage's rename page lists job cost, change orders, accounting and payroll, estimating, project management, service management, and property management. Prebuilt report formats: more than 1,400 according to Sage (2026). The same page sells document control through Sage Paperless Construction, field work orders through Sage Field Operations, and an optional link to Sage Construction Management. It does not publish a price for any of those modules. AIA G702 and G703 output, union fringe tables, and certified payroll are not priced or demonstrated on the pages we opened, so a buyer should make the reseller print a sample draw and a sample certified report before signing. The same discipline applies to QuickBooks. Intuit lists progress-style job reports and change orders. It does not, on the pages we opened, name AIA forms or a union fringe table.

What reviewers scored, and what that score cannot do

Analyst score: 65 out of 100 according to SelectHub (2026), against 64 out of 100 for Sage 300 Construction, on a page last updated September 28, 2026. The same page puts user satisfaction at 90% from 20,764 reviews for QuickBooks Enterprise Contractor Edition and 80% from 953 reviews for Sage 300 Construction. The samples are not the same size, and SelectHub says the QuickBooks reviews come from one site while the Sage reviews come from four. A one-point analyst gap is not a reason to switch ledgers. SelectHub also rates tier-1 coverage, meaning support it treats as available without a custom project, at 88% for Sage job cost versus 75% for QuickBooks, 100% versus 40% for document management, 33% versus 100% for inventory, and 0% versus 50% for mobile, according to SelectHub (2026). Read those as SelectHub's model, not as a test we ran.

Software Advice's October 7, 2026 page rates QuickBooks Enterprise 4.5 out of 5 from 20,688 reviews, and 78% of those reviewers recommend it, according to Software Advice (2026). That pool is cross-industry. The other column on that page is labeled Sage Construction Suite, so its rating is not used here as a Sage 300 CRE score. A contractor should trust the feature pages and the quote more than a blended star rating.

QuickBooks Enterprise for a contractor

Best fit: the firm already keeps the books in QuickBooks, the office staff know the file, and the pain is job cost, change orders, committed cost, and work in progress inside that same file. The construction edition is the industry setup of Desktop Enterprise, not a separate discontinued brand. It fits when the number of people in the company file at the same time is within 30, or within 40 if you accept the Diamond plan and its monthly payment plan. It also fits a contractor who stocks materials and will use the advanced inventory tools on Platinum or Diamond.

Limits are specific. The starting price is not the invoice. Enhanced Payroll is up to $3 per employee per month on Gold and Platinum, and Intuit's buy page says each company file incurs that per-employee fee on its own, so two files do not share one payroll meter. Assisted Payroll at $2.50 per employee per pay period is the Diamond offer, and that buy page says Assisted Payroll is not available in Indiana or Wyoming. Time Elite at $5 per employee per month is a Diamond fee on top of the $5,363 starting year. Hosting is a separate monthly service. The desktop file is the product. Cloud access is an add-on, not a new architecture. User licenses are sold separately, in single-user steps from 1 to 10, plus 20 and 30, with 40 only on Diamond. AIA forms, certified payroll, and union fringes were not on the price page or the job-costing page we opened. If those are the reason you are shopping, ask for a printed sample before you treat Enterprise as the finish line. Intuit also markets Intuit Enterprise Suite on the pricing page as a cloud path for more complex multi-entity work, with migration help for Desktop customers. That is a different product. Desktop Enterprise itself was still listed for sale on the pricing page we opened.

Implementation is lighter than a full construction ERP only when the chart of accounts, jobs, and items are already sane. Someone still has to map cost codes, turn on the contractor reports, decide who may approve a bill, and test a work-in-progress report against a spreadsheet the controller already trusts. The 60-day money-back window is real and short. It is not a substitute for a parallel close. Primary pages: Intuit's pricing page, the contractor job-costing page, and the buy page.

Sage 300 CRE for a contractor

Best fit: the firm wants a ledger that was built for construction and property work, and it is ready to buy modules instead of a single published plan. Sage's own rename page aims the product at larger businesses that want job cost, change orders, accounting and payroll, estimating, project management, service, and property management together. A contractor that also runs service agreements or holds properties will see modules QuickBooks Enterprise does not present as its construction story. The report library Sage publishes is large, at more than 1,400 prebuilt formats, which matters if the controller's close is a stack of job, cost, and property reports rather than a handful of standard financials.

Limits are just as specific. There is no public price, so any blog that prints a Sage 300 CRE starting rate is ahead of the vendor. Subscription pricing is offered, and a buyer still has to request it. Total cost will move with modules, user count, Sage Business Care, training through Sage University, data conversion, and whether the file stays on the company's servers or is hosted. SelectHub's mobile tier-1 share for this product is 0%, so a superintendent on a phone is not, on that model, a reason to pick Sage. The review sample is much smaller than QuickBooks. Do not treat a famous Timberline install base as a promise about your union payroll or your owner's draw format. Make the partner show the billing screen, the job-cost inquiry, and the payroll burden on your cost codes.

Implementation is a project. The product is customized by design. Sage tells buyers to define accounting, operations, and procurement the way the company already works. That flexibility is also how conversions stall, when old Timberline files, custom fields, and report tweaks arrive without an owner. Budget partner time, a chart of accounts and cost-code map, and a parallel month. Do not budget a weekend import. Primary pages: the current product page and the Timberline rename page.

A one-year payroll sketch you can check with a calculator

This sketch is illustrative. It is not a client and not a measured result. A firm pays 20 employees every week and is pricing the Diamond plan at the published starting price of $5,363 per year. Assisted Payroll is $2.50 per employee per pay period, so 20 times $2.50 times 52 weeks is $2,600. Time Elite is $5 per employee per month, so 20 times $5 times 12 is $1,200. Adding those published pieces is $5,363 plus $2,600 plus $1,200, which is $9,163 before hosting and before a second company file. A vendor bill in QuickBooks Desktop carries a due date on Bill.DueDate, according to Intuit (2026), so a close review can age open bills from that field instead of a side spreadsheet. Sage's side of the same year is Quote-based. Until the quote lists software, payroll, support, and conversion, the $9,163 figure is only the QuickBooks half of the comparison.

If the firm instead stays on the Gold plan, the starting software line is $2,210 and Enhanced Payroll is an "up to $3" per employee per month, which is a ceiling, not a flat rate. Do not multiply "up to" as if it were a contract price. Ask Intuit what the 20-person payroll line will actually bill, and ask again if a second company file will bill it twice.

Glossary for the job-cost conversation

• Job cost: the cost, billing, and payroll tied to one job, so a profitable company can still be losing money on a single project.

• Cost code: the bucket inside a job, such as concrete labor or electrical materials, that makes a job-cost report readable.

• Committed cost: money you have promised on a purchase order or subcontract that has not all hit the general ledger yet.

• Work in progress: the report that compares cost, billing, and percent complete so overbilling and underbilling show up before the year-end surprise.

• Retainage: the portion of a draw the customer, or you, hold back until an agreed stage of the work.

• Change order: a priced change to the contract that should also change the budget and the cost codes, not only a narrative email.

• Progress billing: billing the job as work advances, rather than sending one invoice when the building is done.

• Company file: the QuickBooks data file for one company. Payroll add-on fees can apply again on each file.

The handoff the ledger will not do by itself

Most contractors already run a second system for the field. Procore, Buildertrend, a permit log, or a spreadsheet of change orders holds events the ledger never sees until someone retypes them. That retype is where job names drift and retainage gets forgotten. A job-cost connection between Procore and QuickBooks fails in the same place a Sage import fails: the job and the cost code do not match, and a person has to decide. If the firm is earlier in the accounting choice and still comparing lighter cloud books, the QuickBooks and Xero construction comparison is a different decision from the one on this page.

A proposed setup from US Tech Automations starts when a controller exports the week's unpaid vendor bills from QuickBooks Desktop. The flow reads each bill, checks that a job and a cost code are present, and writes an exception file for any line missing either one. A person reviews that file before a bill is approved. The prerequisite is a Desktop export or an SDK read the company already permits, including the due date on Bill.DueDate when the export carries it. The review point is a named controller. This is a configurable design, not a live customer and not a measured saving.

A second proposed US Tech Automations path watches an approved change order leaving Buildertrend or a similar project tool. The trigger is the approval or the daily export. The action matches the job name to the job in the ledger and opens a review task with the change amount, the cost code, and a retainage flag. The output is a change posted in the ledger only after a person accepts it. You would use the same pattern for moving a Buildertrend change into QuickBooks or for connecting Buildertrend's field record to the books. Permit status is the same class of problem: the city approval sits outside the job cost until someone records the fee, which is why permit status tracking belongs next to the ledger and not inside a hope that the accounting system saw the email. Prerequisites are an export the project tool allows and a job list from QuickBooks or from Sage. The flow stops when the names do not match.

When NOT to use US Tech Automations

Skip this layer when one person already closes the month inside a single ledger and nothing else feeds it. Skip it when the only gap is a report that takes a few minutes to export and a human already checks it. Skip it when the company has not chosen which system owns the job list. A flow cannot repair two charts of cost codes that nobody owns, and adding one would only make the duplicate official. A contractor that is happy with the ledger, the payroll add-on, and a careful bookkeeper does not need another product in the middle.

Zapier, Make, and n8n can keep run histories, retries, error branches, and an audit trail when someone configures them. The buyer then owns observability, idempotency, escalation, access control, and the repair when a vendor changes a column. A proposed US Tech Automations design can configure the exception list, the approval step before a bill or a change posts, and the record of lines held back, with the same prerequisites: a permitted export, a job and cost-code list, and a person who can reject a line. The split is who designs and maintains that control. It is not a claim that the other tools are unable to log a run.

Decision checklist before anyone signs

Use this list in the sales call. If the answer is a shrug, the quote is not ready.

1. Which reports will you run on the last day of the month, and can the vendor print them from a sample job today?

2. How many people must be in the accounting file at the same time, and does that number fit under 30, or under 40 only if you buy the Diamond plan?

3. How many employees are paid, how often, in which states, and in how many company files?

4. Do owners require AIA draws, retainage, certified payroll, or union fringes, and will the vendor print each one?

5. Is hosting in the quote, and who supports it when the file will not open on a Monday?

6. What stays outside the ledger, and who reviews a job and a cost code before a cost posts?

7. For Sage, which modules are in the quote, what Business Care covers, and what conversion is excluded?

Common mistakes on this shortlist

The first mistake is shopping "Sage 300" and landing on the wrong Sage product. The construction ledger in this search is Sage 300 Construction and Real Estate, formerly Timberline. A general Sage 300 ERP demo will not answer a job-cost question.

The second mistake is treating QuickBooks Online and QuickBooks Desktop Enterprise as the same construction tool. The prices, the user ceilings, and the contractor reports on the pages above belong to Desktop Enterprise. A cloud plan with a similar first name is a different product and a different close.

The third mistake is subtracting a QuickBooks starting price from a Sage rumor and calling the difference savings. Sage is Quote-based until the reseller writes a number. QuickBooks is more than $2,210 once payroll, extra users, extra company files, and hosting are on the order.

The fourth mistake is buying either ledger to solve daily logs, drawings, and RFIs. Those records can feed the ledger. They are not the ledger. The fifth is going live without a parallel work-in-progress report. If the new system and the old spreadsheet disagree, the controller needs to know that before the banks and the surety do.

Frequently asked questions

Is Sage 300 CRE discontinued or only renamed?

It is renamed and still sold. Sage's own page says Timberline Office became Sage 300 Construction and Real Estate after four decades, and the current product page still offers subscription pricing by request. It is not the same item as Sage 100 Contractor or Sage Intacct Construction.

What does QuickBooks Enterprise cost if we are a contractor?

The published starting prices are $2,210 per year for the Gold plan, $2,717 per year for the Platinum plan, and $5,363 per year for the Diamond plan, before payroll add-ons and hosting. The construction edition is an industry setup of that product, not a second price list on the page we opened. Your invoice still depends on users, employees, company files, and hosting.

Which product is the better construction ledger?

Pick QuickBooks Enterprise when the file you have, the user count, and Intuit's listed job-cost reports cover the close. Pick Sage 300 CRE when you need the broader construction, service, and property modules and you will judge a written quote. A 65 versus 64 analyst score does not choose for you.

Can either product replace Procore or Buildertrend?

No. Both products are accounting systems with job-cost tools. Field schedules, drawings, and daily logs stay in the project system. The accounting choice is about where cost, billing, payroll, and the close live after someone reviews the handoff.

How should payroll change this comparison?

Add the per-employee fee, the pay calendar, the states you pay in, and the number of company files before you compare headlines. On the Diamond plan, 20 weekly employees in the sketch above add $2,600 of Assisted Payroll and $1,200 of Time Elite to a $5,363 starting year. Sage payroll is Quote-based. Union fringes and certified payroll were not priced on the pages we opened.

When should we keep QuickBooks and skip Sage 300 CRE?

Keep QuickBooks Enterprise when the staff already close in it, simultaneous users fit the published ceiling, and the work-in-progress and committed-cost reports Intuit lists are the reports you actually use. Move to a Sage evaluation when property management, service management, or a deeper construction module set is the reason for the project, not when a single missing export can be reviewed by a person.

The call, then the work outside either system

Choose QuickBooks Enterprise if the published plan, the user ceiling, and the contractor reports match the close you already run, and then price payroll and hosting before you call it cheap. Choose Sage 300 CRE if the module list on Sage's pages matches the company you actually operate, and refuse any comparison that uses a guessed Sage price. Either way, write down the reports, the retainage rule, and the payroll states before the signature. The ledger will still not watch the field for you. A change order, a vendor bill, and a permit fee each need a job, a cost code, and a person. You can see how US Tech Automations configures this as a review step in front of the post, once the system of record is chosen and the export is one your company is allowed to use.