Are you looking for the best accounting to automate the bookkeeping and other financial tasks for your business? This article is for you!
Accounting software plays an integral role in uplifting your business from managing invoices, billing, and payments to predicting financial growth.
Instead of relying upon complex spreadsheets, simple accounting software enables you to manage the cash flow better, remove intricacies, automate repetitive tasks and streamline all the operations to get complete control over your business’s finances.
To accomplish these objectives, you will need the best accounting software to make the entire process hassle-free. However, there are lots of choices available with varying capabilities and pricing.
So in this article, I’ve analyzed and ranked the top small business accounting software that provides all the features needed to amplify the profit margins and overall financial performance.
Ready to dive in? Let’s get started
1. QuickBooks – Overall Best Accounting Software
Quickbooks is the #1 best accounting software for small businesses due to its ease of use and flexibility. The dashboard gives you a clutter-free view of all your expenses, sales, P&L, invoices, bank accounts, and many more without navigating elsewhere.
With Quickbooks, you can manage your entire financial data on the cloud, so it becomes easy to track and update. The great news is, that Quickbooks is GST-ready, so all the features specific to GST are automatically enabled at no extra cost.
Furthermore, you can schedule recurring payments, create customizable invoices and improve collaboration by giving access to your team members. You’ll also get a complete picture of your product’s inventory for efficient buying & selling.
On the whole, if this is the first time you’re using accounting software for your business, Quickbooks shall be the best pick, as it’s loaded with all the financial capabilities that you’ve thought of.
Key Highlights –
- Free unlimited customer support
- Connect your bank account to view and download transactions
- Auto-categorize transactions to manage expense and sales
- Track all the unpaid and late invoices instantly to clear the due
- Calculate the cost of each product sold using FIFO
- Free mobile app to manage your business 24×7
- Print multiple invoices and sales forms as a batch to save time
- Data is synced and backed up automatically
Pricing & Plans – Quickbooks has a 30-day free trial and the paid plans start at just $12.50/mo and goes up to $90/month with advanced features and more users accessibility. If Quickbooks fits your business requirements, you can use the button below to buy now for 55% off for 3 months.
2. Zoho Books – Comprehensive accounting software
Zoho Books is robust accounting software that seamlessly works beyond your expectations. Starting from invoicing, sales orders, and sales tax to automating complex tasks, it improves your business’s financial accuracy to a much greater level.
It is a complete functional system, so it takes care of all routine tasks from start to finish. Being a fully integrated platform, you can add 30+ other Zoho apps to surpass your financial health and performance.
However, you don’t require any knowledge to set up Zoho Books. You can get started by creating invoices, managing clients, inventory, tracking payments, adding multiple bank & credit card accounts, and the list goes on.
With a pool of transactions flowing into your business, you can easily lose track of them. Zoho books allow you to categorize transactions and put them on autopilot to avoid this mishappening. Now your job to fulfill your revenue goals becomes much more accessible and simple.
Bottom Line, Zoho Books is solid accounting software designed to elevate every financial aspect of your business with its wide array of features and tools.
Key Highlights –
- Prepare audit reports in accordance with IRS guidelines
- Convert estimates into invoices and get paid faster
- Easily import your bank statements to skip data entry
- Integration with multiple payment gateways like PayPal, Stripe, Worldpay, Square, and many more
- Improve vendor relationships via a dedicated vendor portal
- Access to 50+ business reports to enrich your business financial flow
- Automatic tax calculations
- Create partial invoice for the availability of products and ship them directly
- Attach bills, receipts, and credit notes to associated transactions
Pricing & Plans – Zoho Books comes with three major pricing plans –
- Standard Plan – $20/month – 3 users, manage upto 5000 invoices, track project expenses, bulk updates, payment gateways, Avalara & Zendesk integration, timesheet & billing
- Professional Plan – $50/month – 5 users, sales approval, sales/purchase orders, automatic exchange rates, stock trading, price lists, create 10 workflow rules, recurring bills, vendor credits
- Premium Plan – $70/month – 10 users, custom reports, budgeting, 200 workflow rules, validation rules, vendor portal, integration with Zoho Sign & Twilio
For businesses with <50k USD/annum in revenue, a free plan allows upto 1 user + 1 accountant, 1000 invoices, multi-lingual invoicing, automating payment reminders, Zoho Apps Integration, bank rules & reconciliation, and many more.
3. Freshbooks – Best Invoicing and Accounting Software
Having started as a simple invoicing software to offer numerous capabilities, Freshbooks is the top-rated accounting software for small businesses with over 30M+ users worldwide.
You can make smart business decisions via double-entry accounting by identifying the revenue items and related expenses at your fingertips. Since you get a transparent view of debit and credit amounts, you’ll strike a perfect balance between incoming and outgoing transactions.
Unlike chasing behind clients for clearing payments, Freshbooks helps in fastening the process by letting your clients pay via invoices directly. The process is quick and secured, so you get your bills cleared at lightning speed.
Freshbooks seamlessly integrates all your accounting activities, invoicing, expenses, and estimates and increases efficiency by letting you know the duration you spend on each project. With its user-friendly interface, getting started and scaling up is as easy as pie.
Key Highlights –
- Equity, transfers, and refunds are easily marked and categorized
- Send unlimited estimates and proposals
- Automatically capture receipt data
- Send automated client emails with dynamic fields
- Scan your bank accounts and match account activity against your financial records in Freshbooks
- Get paid with easy-to-use checkout links
- Track bills, payments, and vendors with accounts payable
Pricing & Plans – Freshbooks offers a 30-day free trial and has 4 major pricing plans, which are as follows –
- Lite Plan – $6/month – 5 billable clients, unlimited estimates, expense tracking, and payment via credit cards/bank transfers
- Plus Plan – $10/month – 50 billable clients, double-entry accounting, business health reports, invite accountants, capture receipt data, accept e-signatures, bank reconciliation.
- Premium Plan – $20/month – Unlimited billable clients, customizable email templates, track project profitability, accounts payable, recurring billing & client retainers, send late payment reminders, financial/accounting reports.
It also offers Custom Pricing with access to lower credit card transaction rates, removes Freshbooks branding from client emails, subscription-based payments, secure card storage, and other specialized features
4. Wave – Free Accounting Software
Wave is simple accounting software that offers easy-to-use bookkeeping and payment solutions absolutely for free. It is reliable, secure, manages cash flow, and lets you view all the financial activities neatly organized on its innovative dashboard.
With its customizable invoice software, you can send rich-looking invoices with support for advanced features like recurring billing and automatic payments. Also, by getting access to every customer’s history, you can clearly understand the spending habits of your target customers.
The added advantage here is, that even if you have multiple businesses, you can run them seamlessly in one account even if you have multiple businesses. So your entire financial hub is maintained, monitored, and grown under centralized accounting software.
Wave is best suited for small businesses and solopreneurs who want invoicing accounting and receipt scanning at zero cost. However, it lacks inventory tracking and management, making it difficult to monitor your product’s stock levels.
Key Highlights –
- Unlimited bank and credit card transactions
- Organize income and expenses into tax categories
- Add unlimited partners, collaborators, and accountants
- Full-fledged double-entry system
- View the financial statements for year-end
- Make important decisions by viewing reports on Overdue invoices & bills, cash flow, P&L, and many more.
- Invoicing and payment information gets synced automatically
Pricing & Plans – Wave is completely free to use. No setup fees, no hidden costs, and no monthly fees.
5. Xero – Easy-to-use Accounting Software
Xero is easy-to-use accounting software that has helped over 3 million users. You’ll get a lucid view of your accounts payable, manage cash flow, reimburse expert claims, track projects, purchase orders, and more simply and smoothly.
You can pay & get paid in over 160 countries via multi-currency accounting. Besides, Xero makes it possible for you to view and analyze how fluctuations in exchange rates affect your cash flow. This is pivotal to optimizing your business for higher revenue.
In addition to this, you can create professional quotes and also send them directly from your desktop or mobile app. Upon the quote getting accepted, you can convert it into an invoice and send them to customers for collecting payments.
Xero covers all the aspects needed to streamline and manage your business’s financing successfully. However, it becomes difficult to process larger transactions as it might affect the speed and performance.
Key Highlights –
- Capture bills and receipts with hubdoc
- Bulk reconcile transactions
- Automate essential tasks like invoicing and reporting
- Integrate with over 1000 apps in the Xero app store
- Track your costs and profitability
- Approve expense claims quickly
- Apply formulas to compare budget vs. actual
- Record, update your assets, manage depreciation & disposals
Pricing & Plans – Xero offers 30-day free trials with access to all its premium features. Once the trial period ends, you have to opt for one of these 3 plans –
- Starter Plan – $22/month – send quotes & 20 invoices, enter 5 bills, reconcile transactions, capture bills, short term cash flow, and business snapshot
- Standard Plan – $35/month – send invoices & quotes, bulk reconcile transactions, and all other features of Starter Plan
- Premium Plan – $47/month – All features of Standard plan plus using multiple currencies
Note that every pricing plan comes with optional paid add-ons for claiming expenses, tracking projects, and viewing analytics.
6. ZipBooks – Free Accounting Software & Online Invoicing
ZipBooks provides you with all accounting & invoicing essentials and a suite of insightful reports to increase your profit levels. It also claims that users have spent 15% less time on mundane bookkeeping tasks, which paves the way for improving productivity and efficiency.
The money you make and the amount owed will be automatically updated in the accounts receivable report. However, for those transactions outside of ZipBooks, you can add them manually for careful processing.
Whether you choose regular invoicing or need a subscription for continuous billing, you can customize it to fit your needs. The best part is that ZipBooks provides a quality score by analyzing 200k+ invoices with which you can optimize for getting paid quickly.
Lastly, ZipBooks delivers you the best suggestions and actionable insights needed to boost your financial performance. This is possible via its powerful data-driven intelligence that analyzes millions of data points to yield credible results.
Key Highlights –
- Access to the chart of accounts – one place to organize all your accounts
- Create additional accounts customized to your business
- Tag by the customer, vendor, product lines, or anything to track specific finances
- Generate tasks and assign them to the existing projects
- Machine learning to simplify the bookkeeping process
- Provides a general ledger based on the parameters you chose
Pricing & Plans – ZipBooks has a free plan in which you can send unlimited invoices, manage unlimited vendors, accept digital payments, view basic reports, and 1 bank account connection.
It also offers a 30-day free trial for one of its premium plans, which are as follows –
- Smarter Plan – $15/month – Scheduling recurring invoices, automating reminders, saving invoice line items, connecting multiple bank accounts, 5 team members
- Sophisticated Plan – $35/month – Smart tagging, customize categories, lock completed books, generate reports, invite unlimited users, and other Smarter plan features
- Accountant Plan – Custom Pricing – Text clients directly from ZipBooks, export financial packages, bulk transaction edit, migrate existing account data, manage clients from one dashboard
7. AccountEdge Pro – Best Accounting Software for Mac desktop
Being competitive for 30+ years, AccountEdge Pro offers fully functional desktop accounting with advanced capabilities. You can organize all the data needed to track your small business – assets, liabilities, equities, income, and expenses and create double-entry journals.
There are no restrictions when it comes to sales tax. You can create the type of tax required for your country and the reports needed for tax forms. It also supports GST, VAT, Import duty, and Voluntary Withholding.
Also, to increase productivity bars, you can allow your employees and contractors to add data by giving them access to the books via AccountEdge Connect.
AccountEdge Connect is a cloud-collaboration tool that enables your employees, bookkeepers, vendors, and contractors to enter data from any browser on any device. In this way, you don’t have to struggle and spice up things to get done rapidly.
In general, AccountEdge Pro is ideally designed for small businesses that want high reliability and powerful options for financial scalability.
Key Highlights –
- Create email templates using merge tags, such as customer name, amount due, transaction ID, and many more
- Edit or delete the deposit payments after an order has been converted into an invoice
- Dropbox integration for online backup
- Write cheques or make electronic payments for non-purchase order bills, donations, and basic reports
- 360-degree inventory management
- Set default payment methods, pricing, and payment terms per customer, and those fields will autofill on quotes and invoices.
- Add Paid Stamps on your sale forms to avoid confusion when re-sending the paid invoice copy to the client
Pricing & Plans – AccountEdge Pro offers a one-time fee starting at $499 with access to full desktop accounting for 10 users. You can also sign up for a 30-day free trial (no credit card) to explore how it helps in amplifying your financial business flow.
Which is the Best Accounting Software for you?
Selecting the right accounting software for your small business is the best decision to stabilize and scale your financial health. Only when you get a clear idea of how the money flows in and out you examine the financial condition and make sheer decisions to expand your business’s footprint globally.
Now, here are top picks that you may consider for your business –
- Zoho Books – Robust Accounting Software with ample features in Free Plan
- Quickbooks – Beginner-friendly Accounting Software
- Freshbooks – Most Affordable and Feature-rich Accounting Software