If you are starting a business, you are probably looking for the best accounting software for small business. I have spent hours trying to figure out how to choose the best small business accounting software. Now, after spending so much time researching I have discovered some hidden gems in the field of small business accounting software.
What is the best accounting software for small business? Or free accounting software small business? What do these terms even mean? Below, you’ll learn about what is the best accounting software for a small business. This article is geared towards people who are thinking about starting a web based or brick and mortar business.
FreshBooks
FreshBooks is of the most popular accounting tools in the market. It can streamline the management of all your accounting activities like invoicing, time tracking, making payments, and more. The best part is that it is fast, secure, and easy to use.
Key Features:
- Invoicing – You can personalize your emails and create your own invoice with excellent customization, including your logo and signature
- Automatic Expense Tracker – Simply link your bank account with the software and get automated updates about your spending at predetermined frequencies
- Track Your Time – Track the exact time spent on activities like engaging clients, finishing a project, and more
- Accounting – Provides easy to use, double-entry accounting tools
- Project Management – Provides holistic project management features and facilitates collaboration
Pros:
- It’s a mobile-friendly software that lets you stay connected with customers through the mobile app
- User-friendly and intuitive user interface
- Multi-language and multi-currency compatibility
- Cloud-based software, so it is inexpensive and easy to use
- Excellent customer support via phone, email, live chats, and ticket
- Allows excellent customization
- Accepts credit cards, business credit cards, and performs ACH bank transfers online
- Regularly generates project budgets to keep your team up to date
- Generates robust and actionable insights
- 30-day free trial period
- Every transaction is SSL certification encrypted to provide enhanced data security and maintain the integrity
- Provides unlimited expense tracking, time tracking, expense entries, and customized invoices
- Clean, easy-to-navigate dashboards for increased efficiency
Cons:
- On-premise deployment not possible
- Doesn’t have a free plan
- The metrics, goal-setting, and reporting features need improvement
Pricing:
Freshbooks offers four plans.
The first three plans are priced at $6, $10 and $20 per month (billed annually). The last plan is a customized plan to cater to the needs of an individual, and you have to contact a sales rep to get a quote.
QuickBooks
Intuit QuickBooks Online is used by thousands of small businesses, and for good reason. This cloud-based software has a robust set of features that can be easily accessed online or through its mobile app.
QuickBooks’ features include:
- Invoicing and payments, receipt capture and expense tracking, mileage tracking, cash flow and inventory management, and more. Features vary depending on which plan you choose.
- The ability to add additional users including your employees or your accountant to your account and manage their access.
- Forums and online training resources to get you up to speed on the right way to use this tool.
- Integrations with QuickBooks Payroll, as well as third-party apps like Square, Stripe, and PayPal.
Depending on the features you need, you’ll want one of QuickBooks’ four monthly plans:
- Simple Start – $25 per month for basic features such as income and expense tracking, invoicing, general reports, and sales and sales tax tracking.
- Essentials – $50 per month for everything in Simple Start, plus up to three users, time tracking, and bill pay.
- Plus – $80 per month for everything in Essentials, plus up to five users, inventory tracking, and project profitability tracking.
- Advanced – $180 per month for advanced features, including up to 25 users, automation, a dedicated accounts team, and exclusive premium apps.
QuickBooks Online is a great place to start if you want to streamline your bookkeeping and accounting.
Xero
Xero is the best in our review for micro-businesses that are looking for very simple accounting software. This software has a clean interface and also fully integrates with a third-party payroll service. Businesses can collect payment online from customers through Xero’s integration with Stripe and GoCardless.Pros
- Cloud-based
- Mobile app
- Payroll integration with Gusto
- Third-party app marketplace
- Simple inventory management
Cons
- Limited reporting
- Fees charged for ACH payments
- Limited customer service
Xero was founded in 2006 in New Zealand and now has over two million users worldwide. This accounting software is popular in New Zealand, Australia, and the United Kingdom. Xero has over 3,000 employees and is growing rapidly in the U.S., as well.
Xero offers three monthly subscription options and a full-service payroll add-on: Early at $11 per month, Growing at $32 per month, and Established at $62 per month. The full-service payroll option is offered through Gusto and is an additional $39 per month, plus $6 per employee. The company offers a 30-day free trial and a promotion for 50% off for two months.
The Early plan limits usage and only allows entry for five invoices or quotes, five bills, and reconciliation of 20 bank transactions per month. This limited plan may be suitable for a micro-business with high-ticket transactions, but only a few per month, such as a consulting or small service provider. Both the Growing and Established plans offer unlimited invoices, bills, and transactions. The only difference between the two is that the Established plan has additional features like multi-currency, expense management, and project costing. All three plans offer Hubdoc, a bill and receipt capture solution.
Pabbly
Pricing: Starts at $9/month
Pabbly Subscription Billing is a recurring and subscription management software for small to medium-sized businesses. This software provides real-time actionable metrics on your monthly payments, revenue, net revenue, active customers, and new subscriptions. It also automates all your business workflows, customer communication, and invoice creation so you can focus on your business growth.
Best for Businesses Looking for a Reliably Fixed Pricing Model
One of Pabbly’s key selling points is its subscription billing model. It’s one of the only software on this list that doesn’t charge any extra fees on the basis of per-transaction and monthly revenue generation. That kind of consistency — paired with it’s first-rate functionality — make Pabbly a solid option.
Accounting Seed
Accounting Seed is a highly-customizable software solution that helps you take care of all accounting-related aspects of your business. It’s highly flexible, easy to use, and provides a collaborative environment that enables you to make strategic business decisions.
Powered by the Salesforce Platform, their open architecture allows both open customization and reliable connections with tools on and off Salesforce. This streamlined database provides best-in-class security, collaboration, and automation in one place.
If you’re interested in the accounting technology you need in 2020, check out their new 2020 Accounting Technology Buyers Guide.
This guide includes how accounting technology has changed over the last 50 years, key accounting features you need, the current costs of new accounting software, how to implement new solutions, and more.
Key Features:
- Financial reporting – Accounting Seed offers a wide range of standard financial reports, including profit and loss, balance sheets, cash flow statements, comparative of budget to actual, comparative of budget to budget, and many more. They also offer custom reporting with unique formatting and calculations tailored to any business.
- Flexibility – Since every business is unique, Accounting Seed has a lot of customization tools to configure any business process. This includes customization around custom objects and fields, document management, security, and much more.
- Cost-Effective – Their software is fast to implement and their sales team offers potential incentives for new prospective customers.
- Automation – Anything that can be put into logic can be automated. This includes event automation, batch automation, scheduled job automation, as well as full automation of internal control processes.
- Inventory and order management – Take control of inventory and order management from ordering to replenishment.
- Sales order management – It creates a consolidated sales order process that is highly streamlined. You can create a sales order, allocate inventory to reserve products, record packing, and shipping details and create purchase orders directly.
- Purchase order management – Fully customize purchase order management by tracking creation and approval of purchase orders, receipt of goods in warehouses, and more.
Pros:
- User-friendly and intuitive interface
- Create subscription billing and automated recurring billing as per your needs
- Integrated with Stripe to conduct credit card, ACH payment processing, and other add-ons
- Analysis of past, present, and future activities to help you manage billing
- Easily embed purchase orders with sales orders and accounts payable
- Cloud-hosted and therefore easy to set up
- Provides customer support via phone, email, tickets
- You can link multiple banks and multiple customers to your account
- Create bank reconciliation statements easily
- Powerful automation features eliminate needs for manual, error-prone data entry
- Highly configurable and customizable
Pricing:
The pricing details aren’t available on their website. To get a personalized quote based on your business needs, you can contact their sales team.
Conclusion:
You’ve just started your own business and you need to figure out how to handle accounting and finances. The easiest option is to use general ledger. But there are other options as well. If you want to keep things simple, it would be best to stick with the easiest accounting software for small business.