Accounting is an essential task for any organisation. It helps you record, organise, and understand financial information such as all your business transactions, taxes, projections, liabilities, etc. Think of it like a mechanism that converts all your raw financial data into an easy-to-understand story about the financial state of your enterprise. Accounting will tell you if you are making a profit, the current value of your assets and liabilities, how healthy your cash flow is, and what parts of your business are generating money and the ones that are not.
This accounting process may not seem like a daunting task in the beginning. Your finance teams can rely on spreadsheets and other disparate tools for bookkeeping and monitoring all the financial activities. But as you scale, these disconnected documents offer limited insights into the financial health of your business. The chances are that your teams will deal with multiple versions of the finance documents and reports, offering no singular view about the status of your company. Moreover, the manual process of handling business transactions keeps your finance teams occupied.
An accounting software eliminates these inefficiencies in your finance process. The software helps you automate most of the accounting tasks, ensuring not only accuracy and compliance but also enabling you to make smart business decisions quickly.
Let’s take a look at some of the top accounting and bookkeeping software apps that you can use to efficiently manage your business finances.
Top 6 Online Accounting Software for Small Businesses
1. Intuit QuickBooks Online
Most of us would think of Intuit QuickBooks Online accounting software when we want smart tools for account reconciliation, sales tax assignment, and invoice management. And rightfully so. This centralised dashboard for organising transactions, accounts receivables and payables, and all other accounting information is known for its 24/7 support and receipt capture.
All plans have an easy-to-use interface and navigation tools to make your task easier. You can create customizable records, forms, and transaction reports with QuickBooks in no time. Further, end-to-end payroll support helps with new hybrid sales tax options and cash flow features.
Pricing: Starts at $12.50/month
2. FreshBooks
FreshBooks is a cloud-based accounting software that helps small businesses save up to 46 hrs annually on tax-filing procedures. You may consider FreshBooks if you wish to manage receipts and expenses, track time, send invoices, and accept credit cards. You will be provided with a dedicated account manager to facilitate customised onboarding of client teams. Once you start using FreshBooks, it will be easy to migrate your current accounting platform to the cloud.
As an accounting solution with a strong user base of over 24 million worldwide, FreshBooks has made its mark with user-friendly accounting tools and features. You can start using its 100 plus accounting tools right away with the support of its active customer services and support team. If you are worried about sharing accounting data and records with others, you will like how FreshBooks’ integrates with Slack, Stripe, MailChimp, and Gmail to aid easy collaborations.
Pricing: Starts at $6.00/month
3. Sage 50Cloud
Sage 50cloud is a helpful, scalable, robust, and user-friendly small business accounting application with many financial tools and customization options. This accounting software will help you with several hybrid solutions, courtesy of its integration with Microsoft 365. You can use Sage to share data (via the cloud) with your productivity applications to save valuable time and resources.
You may find the pricing of this mature accounting software online to be slightly on the higher end. However, you get a sophisticated set of applications, features, tools, and customisation options in return for making the investment worthwhile. If your growing business requires advanced inventory management tools, it may be a good idea to delve deeper into the features and benefits of Sage 50Cloud to understand what’s in for you.
Pricing: Starts at $56.08/month
4. Xero
Xero is a feature-packed online accounting software that will simplify your business tasks like paying bills, creating invoices, managing expense claims, and more. You will not have to worry about data imports, account reconciliation, purchase/sales transactions, and project tracking after integrating this business software with your databases. Once installed, you can assign unlimited users for all its plans.
Centralised accounting requires a smart dashboard for the management of accounts. Xero’s dashboard is just that. Its tools and features will help you create interactive quotes, well-defined lists, and business views. In addition, if you are looking for seamless tracking and management tools, the software’s integration with Gusto (payroll) and end-to-end reconciliation tools are pretty helpful.
5. FreeAgent
FreeAgent is an online accounting system specifically designed for freelancers, small businesses, and accountants. If you are one among them, you will find it easy to set up recurring invoices that can be dispatched automatically to clients as payment reminders. Once you get your hands set on the FreeAgent mobile application, you can also track expenditure by uploading images of expense receipts.
You may want to install FreeAgent if you are tired of tracking invoices, timelines, project status, and estimates. This business accounting software will give you a complete overview of the financial position of your business. What’s more? You can create dividend vouchers automatically. In-depth time recording and reporting against projects also becomes a possibility.
6. C-FINANCE
C-FINANCE streamlines the accounting processes of small businesses and large enterprises. This cloud-based accounting software allows you to create, store, and send invoices from any device, anytime. In addition, the tool lets you track expenses, run reports, automate all your accounting processes, and access in-depth financial analysis of your organisation to help you make informed business decisions. Overall, you can empower your businesses by offering powerful insights backed by easy-to-understand reports.
What makes C-FINANCE stand out from the rest of the accounting tools is that it is a part of an Integrated Business Management System (IBMS) offered by ContinuSys. The IBMS ecosystem allows you to access other essential business applications to manage other core processes of your business, such as people management, asset management, information management, collaboration, and more. These apps share the same database, which means you can always access reliable business data across all of them. The best part is that you can get this entire suite of apps along with C-FINANCE absolutely free for 10 users.
Pricing: Free for 10 users | Plans start at $29/month
Think Long-Term; Invest in an Integrated Accounting Software
Depending on your nature of work, accounting processes and procedures, and client base, you will require an end-to-end cloud business accounting system for faster and improved payments and invoicing. While standalone or free small business accounting software can improve bookkeeping accuracy, reduce paperwork, and cut down on operation costs, it may not connect well with other business processes. As a result, you will likely end up adding more tools to effectively manage all parts of your business as you grow. Instead of opting for single-point solutions that lack scalability and integration capabilities, you may want to invest in an integrated accounting software that provides improved accounting capability and connects with other business processes.