Professional tax preparers, if you’re looking for professional tax software for your accounting or tax prep business, there’s a lot of choices and things to think about. Which tax software is best for tax preparers, cheap tax software for tax preparers, best tax software for tax professionals , cheap professional tax software… the list goes on and so does the confusion of which one is right for your growing firm.
In this review, we have featured the best tax softwares for accountants.
Drip
Drip is the leading eCommerce CRM, but it’s also a great CRM for small business. It’s powerful, has a beautiful interface, and is very easy to use for any business.
This CRM makes it easy to build automation workflows and email campaigns. You even have the choice of building your email with a visual builder or text builder. And either option is really easy.
Drip also offers easy list segmentation, conversion tracking, content customization, purchase intent marketing, and much more. With tags, events, and custom fields you can learn and track everything you need about your customers’ stories.
This makes it an excellent customer database software that helps you manage your contacts in a profitable way.
It’s designed to increase your bottom line and help you generate leads, manage contacts, and turn them into lifelong customers.
Drip is loaded with features including marketing automation, advanced contact management, actionable reports, email campaigns, one-on-one conversations, eCommerce user tracking, and more.
You can easily integrate Drip with all of the best 3rd-party services like email services, lead generation software, WooCommerce, Shopify, and many more. There are even workflows for Facebook and Instagram lead generation.
Features:
- Marketing automation workflows
- Advanced contact management using tags, custom fields, and events
- Native integrations with popular 3rd-party services
- Actionable reports
- Easy email list segmentation
- Content customization
- eCommerce user tracking
- Custom conversion tracking
- Purchase intent marketing
- Automatic revenue attribution
Pricing:
Plans start at $49/month for up to 2500 active contacts, unlimited email sends, and 24/7 chat & email support. You can try Drip free for 14 days.
Less Annoying CRM
Benefits:
Less Annoying CRM (aka LACRM) is designed specifically for small businesses. They offer an all-inclusive, single price package for task management, keeping tabs on contacts, tracking leads, making sure follow-ups are sent out.
LACRM’s lean but nimble toolkit has got you covered when it comes to managing all your customers and other contacts, tracking your leads through pipelines and staying on top of events and tasks (in easy-to-use calendar and agenda forms).
Emails written and received outside a CRM platform can be logged inside LACRM, which provides every user with a unique email logging address (for which you create a contact with whatever email provider you use).
Drawbacks:
There aren’t any app integrations, which might be a significant limitation, depending on your needs. The app sends out notifications by SMS or email, but not in-app.
Pricing:
- $15 per user/per month, billed monthly.
LACRM offers a risk-free, 30-day free trial for its only pricing plan.
Freshsales
Benefits:
Freshsales is a full-fledged sales force automation solution for sales teams. It provides everything a salesperson needs to— attract quality leads, engage in contextual conversations, drive deals with AI-powered insights, and nurture customer relationships.
With built-in email, phone, chat, and telephony, Freshsales empowers sales teams with more time for selling by automating the sales process and increases efficiency and productivity in their daily activities. With Freddy AI, salespeople can get insights into the best deals to go after and what actions to take and predict revenue with sales forecasting. Businesses can take the next step forward towards powerful pipeline management with Freshsales. Also, the option to use native CPQ makes generating and sharing quotes and other vital sales assets hassle-free.
Drawbacks:
Like many vendors, some of the better features are reserved for premium packages. Among these for Freshworks CRM are time-based workflows, some chatbot tools and advanced metric reporting. But overall, the free and basic plans are a decent place to start, and you can always upgrade.
Pricing:
- There is a Free Forever Startup plan
- Growth plan is $15 per user/month billed annually
- Pro plan is $39 per user/month billed annually
- Enterprise plan is $69 per user/month billed annually
Sendinblue
Sendinblue is a powerful email marketing service that has all the features you need to serve as a complete CRM, too.
Sendinblue is a great option for any size business, because you can get started for free and then upgrade as your business grows. They offer reliable email delivery, email marketing, automations, transactional emails for eCommerce, smart segmentation, and more.
Unlike many other CRMs, they also have SMS marketing and chat. SMS marketing is a powerful tactic that can instantly boost sales and engagement. Their live chat solution allows you to connect with customers and leads in real time.
Sendinblue comes with a top-tier support team and detailed documentation so it’s easy to get started.
Features:
- Easy segmentation and personalization
- Powerful marketing automation tools
- Transactional emails with reliable delivery
- Landing page and signup form builder
- Easy Facebook ads and retargeting
- Detailed and actionable analytics
- Automatic send time optimization
- A/B testing
- SMS and Chat marketing tools
Pricing:
Get started for free! Click here to try Sendinblue free today.
HubSpot
HubSpot is hands down the best CRM for small businesses looking for a cost-effective CRM solution when they’re getting started. It’s a great customer database software for managing new leads.
HubSpot is an easy CRM to use and offers a wide range of tools to manage the customer journey. It even offers forever free plans with limited features for their CRM, Marketing, Sales, and Service Hubs.
The CRM has a nice interface, letting you see your entire sales pipeline right on your dashboard. If you want more data (and who doesn’t?), you can view all contact and sales activity, detailed reports, and performance on a user or team basis.
With a clever marketer, you can turn your emails into instant sales reps to increase your bottom line.
HubSpot has a mobile app for both iPhone and Android, email templates, real-time notifications, email tracking, scheduling, phone calls, and more.
It also integrates with more than 300 apps and services like WordPress, email marketing companies, lead generation software like OptinMonster, and on and on. You can also connect HubSpot to Gmail or Outlook to log activity automatically, capturing every single email.
Features:
- Personalize email sequences for leads and existing customers
- Place phone calls right from the CRM
- Get real-time notifications about lead behavior
- Integrate with popular tools like Salesforce, Shopify, and Microsoft Dynamics
- Store unlimited users, customer data, and up to a million contacts
- Integrate 300+ apps
- Create custom filters to sort contacts
- Schedule emails, tasks, and create tickets
Pricing:
The core CRM software is free, but for more powerful features you can upgrade to a paid plan for Marketing, Sales, or Service hubs (starting at $50/month). You can also upgrade to the Growth Suite starting at $113/month for a single user.
Monday.com
Best for: Customisation
4.3out of 5
- Ease of use4.5
- Features4.5
- Integrations4.0
Monday.com might be primarily known as a project management tool, but you can easily customise the app for CRM thanks to its intuitive interface and huge number of creative features. The app is organised around a simple traffic-light system that categorises your workflow as either green (it’s completed), orange (I’m working on it), or red (I’m stuck), helping you to design a system that personnalises the status of every customer relationship.
What type of small business is Monday.com best suited for?
The platform has a generous inventory of features, many of which allow for innovative customer relationship management. We think Monday.com works best for creative industries and businesses with unique client needs, such as design or estate agencies.
Whether you’re looking to track and organise your marketing activities, deals, client onboarding, or projects, Monday.com hosts lots of customisable elements, including:
- Custom fields
- 200+ dashboard templates
- Full mobile CRM
- Document management
- Custom apps
- Unlimited contacts
- Unlimited users
Pricing
Monday.com has a distinctive payment structure which is based on a set number of seats. For more information, read our monday.com pricing guide.
| Individual | Basic | Standard | Pro | Enterprise | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Price per month (billed annually) | Free | £7 seat/month | £9 seat/month | £14 seat/month | Contact sales |
| Price per month (billed monthly) | Free | £12 seat/month | £27 seat/month | £42 seat/month | Contact sales |
| Users | Up to two | Minimum of three | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Storage | 500MB | 5GB | 20GB | 100GB | 1000GB |
Verdict
Despite being best known for project management, Monday.com is a surprisingly good CRM tool. The platform has excellent customisability to give a personal touch to your CRM needs – we’d recommend it for creative teams in design or marketing.
Zendesk
Best for: Business support
4.1out of 5
- Ease of use4
- Features3.5
- Integrations5
According to a survey by Microsoft, 96% of consumers across the globe say that customer service is an important factor in their choice of brand loyalty. In other words, being able to assist your clients in their time of need can be a key influencer in their decision to purchase your product or service.
Zendesk is a powerful name in the business software market. Every one of its products boasts a fantastic array of integrations across a huge range of categories including analytics and reporting, e-commerce, email and social media, IT and project management, plus tons more.
The brand offers two main CRM products: Zendesk for sales and Zendesk for service. The former takes a powerful approach to sales monitoring and generation, but it’s the latter that really impresses us. It provides an all-in-one customer helpdesk solution with truly intelligent support elements designed not just to monitor client bugs, but also to analyse your performance when fixing them and identify the areas to improve.
As you can imagine, Zendesk also performs well for user support tools. Members at any payment tier can utilise a vast library of handy materials including onboarding and adoption resources, guided learning paths, and on-demand training courses. But it doesn’t stop at setup – if you do encounter a problem further down the line, you can also contact the platform for advice via email, phone and online 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
What type of small business is Zendesk for service best suited for?
If your business provides a specialist service, such as software development, and you get lots of phone calls from confused customers, then Zendesk service is the smart way to manage tickets and requests in one handy database.
The platform’s ticketing system allows users to record, organise, and track all your customers’ issues in one dashboard that’s accessible to your entire team, so you can keep a clear and up to date ticket pipeline.
Other features include:
- Triggers and automations
- Staff management
- Pre-built analytics dashboards
- Google Analytics for help centres
- Data exports
Pricing
Below, we’ve outlined the pricing information for both of Zendesk’s products. Both also have a 30-day free trial available if you want to try before you buy.
Zendesk for service:
The difference between Zendesk’s two lowest-tiered plans is minimal, however the Suite Growth plan, which costs around £26 more per month than Suite Team, does offer more workflow capabilities including multiple ticket forms and conditional ticket fields – ensuring you can provide a more bespoke service when it comes to support requests.
We think if you’re looking to grow your customer list then Suite Growth is the best plan to purchase.
| Suite Team | Suite Growth | Suite Professional | Suite Enterprise | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| £ per month (billed annually) | £39 per user | £65 per user | £79 per user | £120 per user |
| £ per month (billed monthly) | £45 per user | £79 per user | £99 per user | £159 per user |
Zendesk for sales:
Sell Team and Sell Professional are the two tiers designed for small businesses. Sell Team is only suitable for three users, and works better as an organisational software for sales. You’ll find more opportunity-based tools with Sell Professional, which boasts integrations with email marketing software, as well as more powerful reporting tools.
| Sell Team | Sell Professional | Sell Enterprise | Sell Elite | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| £ per month (billed annually) | £19 per user | £45 per user | £79 per user | £159 per user |
| £ per month (billed monthly) | £21 per user | £49 per user | £99 per user | £199 per user |
Verdict
Customer support is an important service for any business to offer, however SMEs dealing with a long list of requests, such as software developers, should use Zendesk for a service, as a full-featured management tool with a large number of integrations.
According to a survey by PwC, people are willing to spend just 16% more on products and services for a good customer experience, meaning there is a cost benefit to your purchase.
Conclusion
As a tax professional, you have a lot on your plate between personal and business taxes. The last thing on your “to do list” should be dealing with complicated professional tax software. In fact, finding software that meets your needs can be overwhelming. Not all tax software is created equal! Whether you are an accountant or a freelancer, the best tax software for you will depend on what features and integrations you need most.