Small business accounting software

Small business accounting software keeps a company's books: it sends invoices and takes payments, records bills and expenses, imports bank transactions to reconcile, and produces the profit and loss, balance sheet and tax reports an owner and accountant need. Freelancers, agencies, shops and service firms use it, often with their accountant invited into the same account. The products differ in how they charge (per business, per plan with a user limit, or per added user), which plan carries bills, bank feeds and multi-currency, and whether payments and payroll come from the same vendor.

We compare them on the same six indicators, read from each vendor's pricing, payments, payroll, security, help center and developer pages:

• Pricing clarity: whether the plan you need has a published price and can be bought online, whether the pages say what an extra user costs, and whether they leave prices out or contradict each other.
• Free plan and trial: a permanent free plan, and whether it includes bank feeds, bills, enough invoices and more than one user; otherwise the length of the trial and whether it needs a card.
• Price for 3 users: the monthly cost for 3 users sending 30 invoices and entering 20 bills a month with bank feeds, on the cheapest plan that covers it, billed monthly at list price, with the arithmetic shown.
• Bookkeeping depth: multi-currency, inventory, project profitability, purchase orders, budgets and class or location tracking, and on which plan each one sits.
• Getting paid and payroll: published card and bank payment rates, recurring invoices, payment reminders and payroll from the same vendor.
• Security, access and data export: SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, two-factor sign-in, custom roles, an audit trail, an API and an export of your books.

How fast books close or bank feeds update depends on the business and its banks, so we do not score it. Each review says which pages it was written from and when. Where we have run a product hands-on, the evidence is on its page.