Best free accounting software

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Read on for our detailed analysis of each app

Whether you're a freelancer or a full-time business owner, a graphic designer or a greengrocer, if you're running any kind of business you really need some kind of accounting software to stay on top of things – as we discovered, the age-old system of throwing everything into a drawer and panicking at tax return time isn't the best way to go.

But that doesn't mean you need to invest huge sums or learn something hopelessly complicated. The best free accounting software is easy to use and enables you to see how well you're doing and who owes you money.

When it comes to highlighting our favorites here, we considered not just available features, but also professional reviews and user experiences.

• Want your company or services to be added to this buyer’s guide? Please email your request to desire.athow@futurenet.com with the URL of the buying guide in the subject line.

1. ZipBooks

ZipBooks offers accounting software that has a contemporary interface along with a robust feature set. It promises to make accounting easy so the user can save time, and get on with other tasks.

The Starter tier is available for free. It provides unlimited invoices to an unlimited number of customers, making it less restrictive than some other free accounting offerings. It can also be used for unlimited bookkeeping, and can accept payments from credit cards and PayPal.

Paid tiers begins at $15 (£12) per month, and includes most of the features you'll ever need. However, if you need really advanced ones such as smart tagging, with advanced reporting and intelligence, it will cost $35 (£30) per month. For $125 per month you can even get your own supplied bookkeeper to provided analyses and recommendations.

Download here:ZipBooks

2. Money Manager Ex

Straightforward enough for home use, as well as small businesses

Another superb open source tool, Money Manager Ex is well designed and packed with enough features to rival premium software. It's easy to understand, and you'll have your accounts and transactions set up in no time. Money Manager Ex's simplicity makes it a particularly good choice for sole traders or your own home finances.

This free accounting software is a portable app, so you can save and use it straight from a USB stick without even needing to install it. There's an Android app for updating your accounts on the move, too.

Review and where to download: Money Manager Ex

3. GnuCash

GnuCash is accounting software designed for individuals and small businesses, and was initially conceived as an open source alternative to apps such as Intuit's Quicken.

This app has been around since the late 1990s, and the most recent version is GnuCash 3.4. It's available for Linux, GNU, OpenBSD, Android, macOS and Windows.

It handles invoicing and credit notes, accounts payable and receivable, employee expenses and some payroll features too, and it's quite happy with multiple currencies, cards and accounts. Its sheer flexibility makes it our top choice when it comes to accounting software for kitchen table businesses.

Review and where to download: GnuCash

4. TurboCASH

A heftier accounting tool that will suit owners of SMBs

TurboCASH is free accounting software that's been in continuous development since April 1985, and it's hugely popular in Europe, the US, Canada and Australia. It's available in 23 languages and boasts an online community of more than 100,000 users.

Designed for small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs), it's probably a bit much for freelancers or sole traders, but if you need something a bit more useful than a cash book TurboCASH can handle VAT, debtors and creditors, purchase orders, multiple companies and multiple users.

While TurboCASH is free and covers most of the basics needed with accounting software, there's a paid-for version available as an upgrade which provides more advanced features. This paid-for version allows for it be to run from the cloud, as well as providing budgets, payroll, PDF reports, and a ledger analyzer among other things.

Download here: TurboCASH

5. Wave

Lenovo g580 laptop camera driver. Slick, cloud-based free accounting that works well for freelancers

With more than two million users, Wave is one of the most successful online accounting services - and it's completely free for accounting, invoicing and receipts, although if you want personal technical support you'll need to pay for it. Payroll isn't included in the free service either, and you do get the occasional advert – just as you do with pretty much any free online service.

It's a very well designed and carefully thought out application, and while it's probably a little basic for medium-sized businesses it's a good option for sole traders, freelancers and small firms.

However, note that while Wave is free to use, you still pay per transaction, currently between 1.4%-2.9% plus a fee of around $0.25. For start-ups and businesses with low sales volume this may not matter, but for businesses with significant sales volume they may be able to find a more competitive pricing model.

Try it online: Wave

6. NCH Express Invoice

Generate forms, invoices, quotes and orders in moments

With versions for PC, Mac, iPad and Android, NCH Express Invoice caters for most kinds of businesses - and if you have fewer than five members of staff, you can have it for free without time limits or other restrictions.

It's designed to create invoices, quotes and orders easily, to automate recurring ones and to send them by email or fax, and there's a decent range of reports to pore over. The free accounting software is really just a front-end for a web-based service, but that's no bad thing unless your business struggles to get a decent internet connection. Plymouth massachusetts starr program greenfield.

Download here: NCH Express Invoice

7. VT Cash Book

Minimalist bookkeeping that uses Excel for the grunt work

It's not going to win any awards for aesthetics, but VT Cash Book isn't there to look good: its priority is to record day to day cash transactions with the least amount of fuss. It uses Autocomplete to speed up data entry, supports multiple bank accounts and bank reconciliation, can be used to prepare VAT returns and enables you to create profit and loss, balance sheets and ledgers.

The free accounting software installs alongside its companion program, the paid-for VT Transaction+, but you don't need to buy the latter to use the former.

Download here: VT Cash Book

8. Invoice Expert Lite Edition

A good option for anyone selling physical products

The free (Lite) version of Invoice Expert is limited to 100 customers/products, but it retains the features of the paid-for Advanced Edition – which retails at $69.95 (about £55) – including inventory and customer management, invoicing and quoting, purchase orders and inventory management.

This free accounting software is a little bit intimidating at first glance, especially in the template-editing screens, but it's straightforward enough. It's an American program but it uses your Windows location to set the currency, so it should adjust itself accordingly for those outside the US.

Download here: Invoice Expert Lite Edition

9. Adminsoft Accounts

A complete money-management toolkit for small business owners

Adminsoft Accounts is a software accounting package that's powered by advertising to generate revenue, making it free to download and use. According to the website, more than 300,00 people have taken advantage of what is a surprisingly thorough free accounting system (and an refreshingly honest set of terms and conditions).

It can handle not just invoicing and statements but remittance advice, stock control, purchase orders, budgeting and some HR functions too. It's a UK program so the default is pounds sterling, but it works happily in other currencies too.

There is a paid-for version you can buy to run the software without advertising, with pricing starting at $259 (£199) for the main accounting software platform, with a slightly higher cost if you also want to include AutoManager or Shop/Cafe Manager.

Download here: AdminSoft Accounts

10. QuickFile

Free small business accounting in the cloud – no desktop software needed

Designed specifically for non-accountants, QuickFile offers multiple free tiers for small businesses while still delivering automatic invoicing, purchase/receipt management, quotations and multi-currency support. Add in a fully branded client area, and this makes for a professional solution at a hard to beat price.

It’s cloud-based rather than a software download, and if you like the free version you can upgrade to an ad-free, more advanced version with bulk invoicing, revision history and a host of power user features for a modest fee of $58/£45 annually.

Try it online: QuickFile

• Need something a bit more complex? Try one of these best accounting software packages

Keep Your Business Running With an Online Accounting Service

According the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, about 20 percent of small businesses fail before they complete their second year. Among the many potential culprits for this widespread demise is the lack of effective money management and bookkeeping. Small business accounting software can do a lot to prevent your business from falling into this trap, keeping you on the right side of that grim statistic.

Financial bookkeeping is complicated and time-consuming. Business owners find it challenging enough to cover the basics—paying the bills and tracking incoming revenue—let alone answer critical questions such as these: Are we profitable? Why or why not? Can we make required tax payments? Should we invest in new equipment? Do we need to explore financing? Will we hit our budget numbers? Where can we cut expenses?

A good small business accounting website can answer these questions in seconds, based on the input you provide. Once you've populated a site with information about your financial accounts, your customers and vendors, and the products or services you sell, you'll be able to use that data to create transactions. These feed into reports, which can provide critical insight. Instant search tools and customizable reports help you track down the smallest details and see overviews of how your business is performing. Android apps and iOS apps for the services give you access to your finances anywhere that you have wireless connectivity.

QuickBooks Online's advanced implementation of technology, its skillful blend of features, its customizability, excellent mobile apps, and user experience have made it our Editors' Choice again this year. We're not crazy about the recent price increase, but Intuit services are often heavily discounted.

Setting Up Bookkeeping

Depending on how long your business has been operating, getting started with an accounting website can take anywhere from five minutes to several hours after signing up for an account. Accounting services charge monthly subscription fees and usually offer free trial periods. The more you need the site to do, the longer your setup tasks will take (and the higher the monthly payment).

First, you'll need to supply your contact details. If you want your logo to appear on sales and purchase forms, you can upload a file containing it. Some accounting service sites ask whether you plan to use specific features like purchase orders and inventory tracking, so they can turn them on or off. You may also be asked when your fiscal year starts, for example, and whether you use account numbers.

Do you want access to the transactions you have stored in online financial accounts (checking, credit cards, and so on)? Enter the user name and password you use to log on, and the accounting site will import recent transactions (usually 90 days' worth) and add them to an online register. Would you like to let customers pay with credit cards and bank withdrawals? You'll need to sign up with a payment processor like Stripe or PayPal (extra charges will apply).

Your People and Your Stuff

One of the really great things about using an accounting website is that it reduces repetitive data entry. Once you fill in the blanks to create a customer record, for example, you'll never have to look up that ZIP code again. When you need to use a customer in a transaction, it'll appear in a list. The same goes for vendors, items or services, and employees. No more card files or messy spreadsheets.

Once you've completed a customer record and started creating invoices, sending statements, and recording billable expenses, all of those actions will appear in a history within the record itself. Some sites, like Zoho Books, display a map of the individual or company's location and let you create your own fields so you can track additional information that's important to you (customer since, birthday, and other things like that).

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If you have employees that you've been paying using another method, payroll setup can take some time and effort, since you'll have to enter payroll history information. Even when you're starting fresh with employee compensation, there's a lot of ground to cover. The site needs very precise details about things like your payroll tax requirements, benefits provided, and pay cycles. Many accounting solutions offer personal assistance with this task, and they all make it clear exactly what needs to be done before you run your first payroll. (Note, however, that some of the products here don't offer payroll capability.)

It is possible to do minimal setup and then jump into creating invoices, paying bills, and accepting payments. All of the services included here let you add customers, vendors, and products as you're in the process of completing transactions (you'll need to do so anyway as you grow and add to your contact and inventory databases). You just have to decide whether you want to spend the time up front building your records or take time out when you're in the middle of sales or purchase forms.

Most small business accounting sites offer the option to import existing lists in formats like CSV and XLS. They provide mapping tools to make sure everything comes in correctly. This procedure works better in some products than others.

Moving Money and Products

Accountants like to use phrases like accounts receivable and accounts payable to describe the primary elements of accounting: recording and tracking income and expenses, or sales and purchases. Small business solutions are designed to appeal to people who don't use the same kind of language as accounting professionals, avoiding such terminology.

The services let you easily create any transaction that a small business is likely to need. The most common of these are invoices and bills, and all the services we reviewed support them. Applications like Xero and Zoho Books go further, allowing you to produce more-advanced forms, such as purchase orders, sales receipts, credit notes, and statements. They provide templates for these online forms that resemble their paper counterparts. All you have to do is fill in the blanks and select from lists of customers and items.

Once you've completed an invoice, for example, you have several options. You can save it as a draft or a final version and either print it or email it. If you do the latter and you've established a relationship with a payment processor, your invoice can contain a stub explaining how the customer can return payment via credit card or bank withdrawal. You can create a PDF version of the invoice, copy it, record a payment on it, or set it up to recur on a regular schedule.

All forms on these sites work similarly. These solutions also pay special attention to your company's expenses—not bills that you enter and pay, but other purchases you make. This is an area of your finances that can easily get out of control if it's not monitored. So accounting websites monitor them, divide them into expense types, and compare them with your income using totals and colorful charts.

If you're traveling and have numerous related expenses on the road, for example, you can take pictures of receipts with your smartphone. Some sites just attach these receipts to a manually entered expense form. Others, like QuickBooks Online, actually 'read' the receipts and transfer some of their data (date, vendor, amount) to an expense form.

As we mentioned earlier, one of your setup tasks involves creating records that contain information about the products and services you sell so you can use them in transactions. These vary in complexity, so you need to understand the differences before you go with one site or another. Some, like Kashoo, simply allow you to maintain descriptive records. Others, like QuickBooks Online, go further. They ask how many of each product you have in inventory when you create a record and at what point you should be alerted to reorder. Then they actually track inventory levels, which provides insight on selling patterns and keeps you from running low.

Banking and Reports

While much of your daily accounting work probably involves paying bills, sending invoices, and recording payments, you also need to keep a close eye on your bank and credit card activity. If you've connected your financial accounts to your accounting service, this is easy to accomplish. For one thing, their balances will often appear on the site's dashboard, or home page. You'll also be able to view each account's online register, which contains transactions that have cleared your bank and been imported into your accounting solution (along with those you've entered manually).

You can do a lot with these transactions once they appear in a register. For one thing, they should be categorized (office expense, payroll taxes, travel and meal costs are some examples) so you know where your money is coming from and where it's going. Every service guesses at how at least some transactions might be categorized; you can change these if they're incorrect and add your own. Conscientious categorization will result in more accurate reports and income tax returns.

You can also match related transactions, such as an invoice that was entered in the system and a corresponding payment that came through. Again, some sites make educated guesses here. You can split transactions that should be assigned to multiple categories, make notes, and reconcile your accounts with your bank and credit card statements.

Read It in a Report

Reports are your reward for keeping up with your daily work and completing it correctly. Every accounting website comes with templates for numerous types of insightful output. You select one, customize it using the filter and display options provided, and let the site pour your own company data into it. It only takes a few seconds to generate a report after you've defined it.

There are really two types of reports. The bulk of them are the type that any small businessperson could customize, generate, and understand. They tell you who owes you money, which of your products and services are selling well, whether you're making money, which expenses and services haven't yet been billed, which customers are buying the most, how much you owe in sales tax, and more.

There are other reports, though, that aren't so easy to view and understand. These are considered standard financial reports, and they're the kind of documents you'll need if you ever want to get a loan from a bank or attract investors. They have names like Balance Sheet, Statement of Cash Flows, Trial Balance, and Profit & Loss. Accounting websites can generate them, but you really need an accounting professional to analyze them and tell you in concrete terms what they mean for you company.

How Accounting Sites Work

Accounting probably doesn't make the list of things you like to do as a business owner. It can be complicated, and it needs to be done correctly. So, the makers of online accounting solutions have worked hard to present this discipline as simply and, well, pleasantly as possible. Some—including QuickBooks Online, Zoho Books, and ZipBooks—have been more successful at this than others.

If you've ever used a productivity application online, you shouldn't have any trouble understanding these services' structure. They all divide their content into logical modules by providing toolbars and other navigation guides. Sales tasks are grouped together, as are purchase, inventory, reporting, and payroll activities. There's always a Settings link that takes you to screens where you can specify preferences for the entire site; these include your setup chores and settings you may need to modify at times, such as restricting additional users to specific areas.

A site's dashboard homepage provides a real-time overview of the financial information you need to see frequently, including charts comparing income and expenses, account balances, and invoices and bills that need immediate attention. There are often links to areas of the site where you can take action.

You use standard web conventions to navigate around each site and enter data. Along the way, you'll encounter lots of buttons and arrows, drop-down lists and menus. Color is sometimes used to signify related information, while graphics and fonts are well chosen to make the sites as aesthetically pleasing as possible.

Accounting Software for Simpler Businesses

If you're a sole proprietor or freelancer, you probably don't need all the features offered by full-featured small business accounting websites. You might want to track your online bank and credit card accounts, record income and expenses, maybe send invoices, and track time worked (if you're service-based). Maybe you need to track mileage. You might need help estimating your quarterly income tax obligation, and you certainly want mobile access to your financial data.

There are numerous sites that can do a combination of these things. They're easy to use, inexpensive (totally free in the case of Wave), and they overwhelm you with functionality you don't need.

Our Editors' Choice this year in this category goes to FreshBooks. This beautifully designed website started life as a simple online invoicing application, and it's since added more tools, including basic time- and project-tracking, expense management, estimate and proposal creation, and reports.

FreshBooks lacks some features that others offer, though. It doesn't help with quarterly estimated taxes, while GoDaddy Bookkeeping and QuickBooks Self-Employed do. It doesn't have its own integrated payroll-processing application like Wave does (though it integrates with payroll Editors' Choice Gusto and dozens of other related web services), and it's not a true double-entry accounting like Billy is. Wave also lacks QuickBooks Self-Employed's real-time mileage tracker and it doesn't automate as many processes as Less Accounting.

Note that while we did review Less Accounging, it didn't make the cutoff for this roundup of the top ten services. The same is true of Sage Business Cloud Accounting and ZipBooks.

The Accounting Software Your Business Needs

Cpa Accounting Software

Whether you need one of these entry-level financial management websites or your business is complex enough that you need to start with one of the small business accounting options, we think you'll find that this year's batch of solutions offers enough variety that you can find the right fit for your business.

While you're thinking about your money, you might also like to consider our reviews of online payroll services and tax software.

Cpa Software Reviews

Best Small Business Accounting Services Featured in This Roundup:

• Intuit QuickBooks Online Review

  
  MSRP: $50.00
  

  Pros: Excellent user interface and navigation. Flexible contact records and transaction forms. Customizable reports. Comprehensive payroll support. Hundreds of add-ons and integrations. New project-management support.

  Cons: Expensive. Poor online documentation.

  Bottom Line: QuickBooks is the best online accounting application for small businesses, thanks to its depth, flexibility, and extensibility. It's easy to use, well designed, and built to serve a wide variety of users, but it's also pricey.

  Read Review

• FreshBooks Review

  
  MSRP: $15.00
  

  Pros: Freshbooks offers a delightful user experience that enable freelancers and SMBs to quickly invoice customers and get paid faster. Team collaboration tools, time tracking, and estimate functionality are great add ons.

  Cons: Poor reporting functionality, limited features in the estimates tool. Late Fees feature could use more options.

  Bottom Line: FreshBooks offers a well-rounded and intuitive time tracking, online accounting, and invoicing solution that anticipates the needs of freelancers and small businesses.

  Read Review

• Zoho Books Review

  
  MSRP: $19.00
  

  Pros: Affordable. Excellent user interface. Superior depth in records and transaction forms, including numerous custom fields. Multiple payment gateways. Good project- and time-tracking. Document management. Generous support options. Excellent mobile version.

  Cons: Integrated payroll feature limited to California and Texas.

  Bottom Line: Zoho Books is an excellent choice for cloud-based small business accounting, with an excellent interface, an attractive price, and a rich set of tools. Its limited payroll offering may cause some users to look elsewhere, however.

  Read Review

• Intuit QuickBooks Self-Employed Review

  
  MSRP: $10.00
  

  Pros: Exceptional user interface and navigation. Easily tracks expenses and income. Automatic mileage tracking. Can assign business transactions to Schedule C categories. Estimates quarterly income taxes. OCR capability.

  Cons: Lacks direct integration with e-commerce sites. No data records, time tracking, project tracking, or recurring transactions. Invoices not customizable or thorough. No estimates or sales tax.

  Bottom Line: The simplicity of online accounting service QuickBooks Self-Employed may make it a good fit for some freelancers and independent contractors, but others will miss standard features like time tracking, project tracking, and estimates.

  Read Review

• Billy Review

  
  MSRP: $15.00
  

  Pros: Excellent user experience and dashboard. Double-entry accounting. Easy to establish different sales taxes. Supports both quotes and estimates.

  Cons: Some operations involve dealing with debits and credits. No timer or dedicated time-tracking. Few reports. No full mobile app. Only one third-party add-on.

  Bottom Line: Billy's combination of tools and usability make it a good choice for freelancers and sole proprietors who need to track income and expenses and invoice customers. It doesn't offer a lot of reports or third-party add-ons, however.

  Read Review

• GoDaddy Bookkeeping Review

  
  MSRP: $3.99
  

  Pros: Inexpensive. Good invoicing tools and overview. Simple time tracking. Calculates estimates for quarterly taxes. Direct integration with PayPal, Amazon, eBay, and Etsy.

  Cons: No project tracking or bill payment. No individual logins for other users. Lacks multi-currency support. Minimal client information in records. No auto-categorization.

  Bottom Line: GoDaddy Bookkeeping's direct integration with Amazon, eBay, and Etsy make it a terrific tool for entrepreneurs who sell at those sites, but its overall bookkeeping depth and flexibility doesn't match FreshBook's.

  Read Review

• Xero Review

  
  MSRP: $30.00
  

  Pros: Affordable. Thorough record and transaction forms. Approval levels. Inventory tracking. Customizable reports. Online quotes. Smart Lists. Updated expense tracking. Exceptional online support.

  Cons: Payroll not available for all states. Time tracking still in beta. Lacks phone and chat help. Weak mobile apps.

  Bottom Line: Double-entry accounting app Xero excels at inventory management, payroll, and many other functions critical to keeping the books of a small business.

  Read Review

• Wave Review

  
  MSRP: $19.00
  

  Pros: Free, though payments and payroll incur fees. Smart selection of features for very small businesses. Excellent invoice- and transaction-management. Good user interface and navigation tools. Multicurrency. Payroll.

  Cons: No dedicated project- or time-tracking features. No comprehensive mobile app.

  Bottom Line: Wave is priced like a freelancer accounting application (it's free) and it's an excellent service for that market, but it also offers enough extras that a small business with employees could use it-with some caveats.

  Read Review

• Kashoo Review

  
  MSRP: $19.99
  

  Pros: Simple, clean user interface. Good income and expense management. Project cost-tracking. Free email, phone, and chat support. Integrates with SurePayroll.

  Cons: Doesn't use a standard dashboard. Lacks time and inventory tracking. No Android app. Few add-ons.

  Bottom Line: Online accounting service Kashoo's strengths are income and expense management, usability, and support. It's a simple, speedy choice for smaller businesses that don't need product inventory tracking or robust time billing tools.

  Read Review

• WorkingPoint Review

  
  MSRP: $9.00
  

  Pros: Customizable dashboard. Good user experience. Capable inventory tracking. Estimates quarterly taxes. Schedule C report. Includes simple company website.

  Cons: No mobile version. Recurring invoices are dispatched without review. Inflexible user permissions. Few add-ons. No built-in payroll or integration with payroll services.

  Bottom Line: WorkingPoint is an easy-to-use double-entry accounting service with unique features like quarterly estimated tax calculation and a mini site builder, but it has no mobile version or payroll feature.

  Read Review