Jay Leonard
Wow, it seems like there are a million small business accounting apps on the market, with more coming out all the time. In fact, many of them are great, and one is often just as good as another, in terms of features. So it becomes a challenge to distinguish one accounting app for another, especially for small business owners who hate accounting. Let’s face it, that’s the case quite often – maybe most of the time!
If you don’t have an accounting degree but you need to keep accurate books, you need a tool that doesn’t require you to be both a computer programmer and mathematician to operate. In short, you need an idiot-proof tool. You’re in luck, because several accounting apps stand out and distinguish themselves as positively simple, beautiful tools. In fact, there are certain tools aimed at small business owners who simply shudder at the thought of dealing with bookkeeping.
In this article, we’re serving up a list of the ten best accounting apps for your specific predicament. Because you have to keep the books, but you dread having to do it, here are the ten best accounting apps for small business owners who HATE account!
FreshBooks
FreshBooksFreshBooks is a cinch, anyway you look at it. FreshBooks is simple to understand, especially if you’ve used any accounting software before. Even if the source of your disdain for accounting stems from having used Excel spreadsheets to keep track of things, you will find the transition to FreshBooks easy, and rewarding.
Featuring an easy-to-understand dashboard and brilliant visualizations, you won’t find an easier accounting app to stomach if you just so happen to hate accounting.
FreeAgent
FreeAgentFreeAgent makes our list of the best accounting apps for non-accounting types because it cuts out all the jargon and focuses on the things that matter to small businesses. FreeAgent makes it easy to invoice customers, track expenses, synchronize your bank accounts, and even chase payments, all from one intuitive interface.
FreeAgent offers excellent user support on demand, and the app backs up your data regularly, so you never have to worry about losing your data.
QuickBooks Online
QuickBooks OnlineQuickBooks Online is an accounting app with a walloping set of features presented in one of the simplest accounting interfaces ever. If you’re concerned about a particular feature, or support for a certain bank, or the ability to retrieve a particular accounting metric, you should look to QuickBooks Online, which benefits from the infrastructure of of accounting powerhouse, Intuit.
QuickBooks Online is the original and most popular cloud-based accounting app, and one test drive will convince you of that.
Nutcache
NutcacheNutcache is a free yet feature-rich accounting application that many small business owners swear by. In fact, you might say it’s an app that has a “cult following.” But Nutcache’s allure is understandable, as the app’s features are robust. Nutcache sports support for multiple languages, and adds invoicing and time tracking functions to the expected array of accounting features.
Nutcache is free and simple, and its features compete admirably against the paid options on this list.
KashFlow
KashFlowKashFlow is a seriously powerful accounting app that is specifically aimed at UK small businesses. KashFlow listens to its customers and puts in only the features that are most requested. What’s more, KashFlow handles UK taxation effortlessly, with VAT reports built right in.
If you’re a small business based in the UK, give KashFlow is worth considering, especially since it bills itself as “no accounting knowledge required!”
Arithmo
ArithmoArithmo takes the complexity out of small business accounting by automating the math. If you’re coming from the old spreadsheet to the cloud, you are surely familiar with the aggravation of formulas in cells, and the agony of copying in pasting, deleting and replacing those formulas as you try to input simple data. Arithmo makes all that simply go away.
Arithmo is easy to use, even if you have no prior experience using accounting apps.
Sage One
Sage OneSage One is an accounting app that operates on a curious principle. Acknowledging that small business accounting is mostly a snore, a laborious residual of doing business, Sage One aims to put the dull aspects of being in business, accounting tasks, largely on autopilot.
Sage One puts simplicity ahead of other considerations. If you’re not a bookkeeping lover, you can still keep it all organized and accurate with Sage One.
Zoho Books
Zoho BooksZoho Books is another super simple accounting app. Zoho Books also benefits from integrating with Zoho’s other business apps, which are perhaps the most notable alternatives to Google Apps for Business. Zoho Books, together with the other apps in Zoho’s growing Web app ecosystem, can help you keep it simple at every stage of small business accounting.
From invoicing to tax reporting, Zoho Books puts everything you need at your fingertips, and leaves out the stuff you don’t need!
Sellsy Invoicing
Sellsy InvoicingSellsy Invoicing is suitable for the simplest of all small business needs (and freelancers). If all you need is to send invoices, take payments, and occasionally send payment reminder, it gets no simpler than with Sellsy Invoicing.
Sellsy Invoicing also offers estimating tools as part of its easy feature set.
FinancialForce Accounting
FinancialForce AccountingFinancialForce Accounting rounds out our list of the ten best accounting apps for small business owners who hate bookkeeping largely because it plays so nicely with SalesForce.com. As a matter of fact, FinancialForce is made for SalesForce integration. If your business is one of the many using Salesforce for customer relationship management (CRM), you owe it to yourself to check out FinancialForce Accounting.
Tight CRM integration makes FinancialForce Accounting a unique tool that can help you capture sales as customer interactions play out to your advantage!
Are you a small business owner who HATES bookkeeping?
It’s okay to not love bookkeeping. After all, unless you happen to be an accountant, bookkeeping is probably not why you got into business in the first place.
We hope this list of the ten best accounting apps for your situation has helped. If you don’t see the perfect app for your business on this list, be sure you check GetApp’s full coverage of small business accounting software currently on the market.
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This article was written for Business 2 Community by Jay Leonard.
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I would suggest you add Xero.com to your list. Xero is great for small business owners and entrepreneurs. It is cloud-based, handles multiple currencies and can handle imports from other bookkeeping software.
Another great web app for small business owners who don’T want to waste their time doing invoicing is called Invoiceberry http://www.invoiceberry.com/
Invoiceberry makes invoicing simple and it’s free for unlimited time if you manage up to 3 clients at a time.
Thank you for the informative list and this may be good for my bookkeeper and tax accountant in Winston Salem, NC (http://logictaxnc.com).
The list misses one of the best booking keeping apps in Easy Books.
Thank for the article! This comparison is very comprehensive. As for accounting software, I personally prefer QuickBooks. Have been using it for quite a long time, when it was just a desktop software, not online. But the challenge for all of them is data input. Sure you can import bank transactions in all three, but what about paper receipts, cheques, travel expenses…lots of manual work. There has to be a better solution that would save time to collect all these expenses and keep them in one place allowing to export all this into Xero, QBO, Wave etc. I heard a lot about these receipt scanning apps like Shoeboxed, IQBoxy, Expensify, but still hesitating which of them to use… I tried probably 5 of them and so far prefer the IQBoxy ‘cause it’s the fastest one but not 100% sure if other apps are better or worse. Do you have any articles with comparison of these?