This is where FreshBooks can help, and it’s been rated among the most user-friendly software available. FreshBooks is also cloud-based and it integrates very well with iOS and Android phones and tablets. Best accounting software for freelancers who may need professional accounting help Like most of the apps on this list, ZipBooks lets you connect bank and credit card accounts, automatically pull transactions, and edit the details of those expenses.
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).
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. Download from samsung galaxy. 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
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.
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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: Exceptional user experience. New team collaboration tools, estimates, and projects. Multiple businesses. Context-sensitive settings.Cons: No product records. No inventory tracking. Lacks expansive customer records.Bottom Line: The new FreshBooks is a polished, intuitive online accounting system. It's the best choice for freelancers and sole proprietors, though it still lacks inventory tracking and a few other features from the previous version.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 -
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 -
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 -
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 -
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 -
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. Free pitch card game app. 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 -
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
When you envisioned what it would be like to work as a freelancer, you probably imagined days spent writing, coding, designing, or doing something else that you love. You certainly didn't daydream about scanning receipts, logging expenses, sending invoices, and filing your taxes. But those tasks are an inevitable part of working for yourself in every role and industry.
Doing your own bookkeeping doesn't have to be a time-consuming chore. The best accounting software for freelancers simplifies and expedites the tasks of logging and tracking your expenses, sending invoices, and filing your taxes at the end of the year. With the right tool, you can spend as little as an hour a month doing the accounting work for your business.
Originally published in January 2018, this post has been updated for the 2019 tax preparation season with each app's latest features and pricing.
What Makes Great Accounting Software for Freelancers?
As the gig economy has grown, so have the number of options for self-employed accounting software. But not all apps are equal. We set out to discover the best among them, those that met the following criteria:
- Simple to use: A user-friendly interface makes accounting less of a chore—minimal clicks or taps to create an expense report, for example, and navigation that doesn't require multiple, lengthy video tutorials to accomplish the core purposes of the app.
- Core features for essential tasks: Selected apps focus on the bookkeeping tasks freelancers need to complete: invoicing, tracking payments, and logging deductible expenses.
- Beginner-friendly: Users need little-to-no knowledge of accounting and tax laws to take advantage of each app's features.
- Digitization: Each app provides a way to digitize receipts, save them, and record the expenses from your email, phone, or scanner.
After testing nearly 40 accounting and bookkeeping apps, we narrowed the list down to the following 11 tools.
The 11 Best Accounting Software for Freelancers
These 11 web and mobile apps make it faster and easier to do the unavoidable accounting and bookkeeping tasks that go hand-in-hand with working for yourself:
- QuickBooks Self-Employed (Web, iOS, Android) for freelancers who file their taxes using TurboTax
- FreshBooks (Web, iOS, Android) for freelancers with complex billing needs
- Wave (Web, iOS, Android) for freelancers who want free invoice tracking and bookkeeping
- FreeAgent (Web, iOS, Android) for freelancers who need a place to create, store, and track estimates
- Xero (Web, iOS, Android) for freelancers who need a highly customizable and scalable app
- Zoho Books (Web, iOS, Android, Windows) for freelancers who need more than a bookkeeping tool
- Expensify (Web, iOS, Android) for freelancers who only want a way to keep track of receipts
- SlickPie (Web) for freelancers who need to invoice in multiple currencies
- Shoeboxed (Web, iOS, Android) for freelancers who need simple receipt digitization
- ZipBooks (Web, iOS) for freelancers who may need professional accounting help
- AND CO (Web, macOS, Chrome, iOS, Android) for freelancers who need to manage both accounting and legal tasks
QuickBooks Self-Employed (Web, iOS, Android)
Best accounting software for freelancers who file their taxes using TurboTax
If you prefer to file your taxes on your own using TurboTax, QuickBooks Self-Employed will save you a lot of time when tax season rolls around. Since both TurboTax and QuickBooks are Intuit products, they're integrated. Automatically transferring data from QuickBooks into TurboTax when it's time to file taxes saves hours—or days—of manual calculations and data entry.
But even if you hire an accountant to prepare your taxes for you, QuickBooks Self-Employed is an excellent bookkeeping tool, particularly for tracking expenses and tax payments. Connect it to your business or personal bank and credit accounts to automatically capture all transactions. For freelancers in the U.S., QuickBooks also calculates how much you owe in federal taxes each quarter so you never overpay or underpay.
The QuickBooks mobile app provides even more features. If your business and personal accounts are combined, you can swipe left or right on the mobile app to tag expenses as either business or personal. And if you turn on automatic mileage tracking, the app records the number of miles traveled every time you drive. Then, categorize trips as business or personal later.
QuickBooks Self-Employed Price: $5/month for Self-Employed which includes expense tracking, invoicing, and mileage tracking; $10/month for the QuickBooks Online Simple Start plan that includes tips for maximizing tax deductions and sales/sales tax tracking.
Automate QuickBooks Online with QuickBooks' Zapier integrations.
FreshBooks (Web, iOS, Android)
Best accounting software for freelancers with complex billing needs
For some freelancers, billing is relatively simple: You agree on rates, and the client pays those rates each month. But for others, billing clients is much more complicated. Maybe you charge by the hour and keep track of billable time. Maybe you pay for things out of pocket and get reimbursed later. Or maybe you hire and pay other contractors.
If you have varying invoice needs, FreshBooks is designed for you. Within the system, you can set up multiple clients and multiple projects for each client. If you have clients that are notorious for paying late, you can set up automated payment reminders in FreshBooks that remind clients of upcoming and past-due invoices so you don't have to.
FreshBooks' lowest-cost plan covers nearly every use case for self-employed bookkeeping, letting you track time, record general business and billable expenses, send invoices, and collect payments. And if you upgrade to a mid-tier plan, you also get tools to help you send proposals, collaborate with an accountant, and charge late fees on overdue invoices.
FreshBooks Price: $15 per month for the Lite plan that includes unlimited invoicing and estimates for up to five clients; $25/month for the Plus plan that includes proposals, recurring invoices, automatic payment reminders, and late fees for up to 50 clients.
Automate FreshBooks with Zapier's FreshBooks Classic and Freshbooks New integrations.
Wave (Web, iOS, Android)
Best accounting software for freelancers who want free invoice tracking and bookkeeping
When you're starting out as a freelancer, you may not have a lot of excess cash to throw around. But even if you're not making much, you still need to keep track of your income and expenses. Wave is a free solution that provides all the tools you need to do your business accounting—from sending professional invoices (including recurring invoices) to receipt scanning on the mobile app and even payroll processing.
Like QuickBooks and FreshBooks, Wave connects directly to your bank or credit card accounts, pulling in all of your transactions so you can easily capture business expenses. You can also upload old bank statements to the system to get caught up on past expenses you failed to record. This makes Wave handy if you neglected to do your bookkeeping for part of the year.
And if you ever decide it's time to grow your business, Wave has the features you need to scale your accounting operations. It lets you add unlimited collaborators if you bring on someone to help with bookkeeping, run multiple businesses from a single account, and even manage payroll and payroll taxes.
Wave Price: Free for accounting, invoicing, and receipt scanning; from $20/month plus $4/employee or contractor for Payroll within the U.S.
Automate Wave with Wave's Zapier integrations.
FreeAgent (Web, iOS, Android)
Most User Friendly Accounting Software 2017
Best accounting software for freelancers who need a place to create, store, and track estimates
If you create estimates for large projects as part of your business, FreeAgent may be the right accounting app for you. Directly within the tool, you can create and send project estimates to prospective clients. If those prospects become clients later, track future invoicing against those estimates to see which of your contracts are profitable and which aren't.
Additionally, including estimates as part of your bookkeeping records allows you to get a full picture of both your historical income and potential future profits. Quickly view both received and anticipated income on your FreeAgent dashboard to stay on top of the health of your freelancing business.
FreeAgent also has helpful bonus features like time tracking and invoicing. Use its built-in time-tracking tool to capture every second that you work on a project, then transfer that time to an invoice to bill clients quickly. And like some of the other apps on this list, invoicing can be set up to send automatic payment reminders that nudge late-paying clients.
FreeAgent Price: $12/month for the first six months; $24/month thereafter.
Automate FreeAgent with FreeAgent's Zapier integrations.
Xero (Web, iOS, Android)
Best accounting software for freelancers who need a highly customizable and scalable app
When you're starting out freelancing, you only need to send invoices and track expenses for a few clients. Eventually, you'll get a business bank account and want to track expenses separately—and perhaps will need to make custom documents for clients, track time spent on projects, and more.
Xero is an accounting app that can grow as you do. You can start out using it to send invoices, monitoring payments as they come in on Xero's dashboard. Then, you can connect it to your bank and payment services to manage all of your finances. Upgrade later if you hire team members and need to manage payroll from Xero as well.
If your accountant uses Xero, you can share your financial data with them directly. And if you need more tools over time, you can add a wide variety of integrations and extra features to extend your accounting app as your work grows. Xero integrates with more than 700 apps—like Shopify, PayPal, Stripe, and Gusto—through its app marketplace.
Xero Price: From $9/month for the Early plan that includes five invoices and quotes per month and reconciliation of up to 20 bank transactions.
Automate Xero with Xero's Zapier integrations.
Not sure which accounting app is best for your needs? Check out our comparison of FreshBooks, QuickBooks, and Xero to take a deep dive into each app's features.
Zoho Books (Web, iOS, Android, Windows)
Best accounting software for freelancers who need more than a bookkeeping tool
Zoho Books is a full-featured accounting app. It's designed for businesses, but it has all the features you need as a freelancer, too. Plus, Zoho's business focus might even help you speed up your work. Instead of having separate sections for your customers, tasks you're working on for them, expenses during the project, and invoices once the project is finished, Zoho Books organizes everything into a timesheet workflow.
Add new clients to Zoho Books, then list the projects you'll work on with them. You can then track time and expenses, send invoices, and manage everything about that client in one place.
But the best thing about Zoho Books is that it's part of Zoho's comprehensive suite of apps. If you need other tools to run your business—such as a CRM, email hosting provider, project management app, or inventory tracking tool—you can take advantage of Zoho's other apps to connect all of your business operations to your accounting workflow.
Zoho Books Price: $9/month for the Basic plan that includes two users, 50 contacts, and five automated workflows; $19/month for the Standard plan that includes three users, 10 automated workflows, and 500 contacts.
Automate Zoho Books with Zoho Books' Zapier integrations.
Only need to send invoices? Zoho Invoice includes a free plan for managing five customers.
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Expensify (Web, iOS, Android)
Best accounting software for freelancers who only want a way to keep track of receipts
If your accounting goal is just to have a way to keep track of your business receipts throughout the year so you can hand them off to your accountant during tax season, Expensify may be the best solution for you. Unlike the other apps on this list that offer more full-suite accounting solutions, Expensify focuses on a single goal: helping you keep track of your receipts.
With Expensify's mobile app, quickly capture clear images of receipts, and the app will automatically categorize expenses, parse the amounts and merchant names, and save all the transaction details to your Expensify account. Add entries for mileage and hours worked, if needed, to track all of your business expenses in a single view. And if you connect your credit card to Expensify, that's also an easy way to select expenses and turn them into emailable reports or PDF files.
Expensify is the simplest app on this list to use, but it doesn't have some of the options that will help if you're filing your taxes yourself—such as auto-calculations of quarterly taxes owed or categorizing expenses based on how you'll file them as deductions. However, if you plan to work with an accountant, Expensify probably has all the features you need.
Expensify Price: Free for expense tracking and up to five SmartScans of receipts each month; from $4.99/month for the Track and Submit plans that include unlimited SmartScans.
Automate Expensify with Expensify's Zapier integrations.
Download hindi dubbed movies. Not sure if Expensify is right for you? Check out our guide to the best expense tracking apps to discover more options.
SlickPie (Web)
Best accounting software for freelancers who need to invoice in multiple currencies
SlickPie has a steeper learning curve than some of the other apps on this list, but taking time to learn how it works is worth it if you need to track expenses in various currencies. Use SlickPie to create invoices in any currency you need to bill in. Regardless of what currency you're paid with, your dashboard shows what you've earned in your default currency.
SlickPie also has a process for recording expenses from receipts, though it doesn't use a mobile app like the other products on this list. Instead, you take a picture of a receipt—or a saved PDF of a bill—and drop it into a dedicated Dropbox folder. SlickPie then processes the receipt data and adds it to the system for you.
SlickPie Price: Free for unlimited receipts, multi-currency invoicing, and up to 10 company accounts; from $19.95/month for the Pro plan that includes up to 50 company accounts and phone support.
Shoeboxed (Web, iOS, Android)
Best accounting software for freelancers who need simple receipt digitization
Shoeboxed is another great option for freelancers who want to hand off expenses and receipts to an accountant at the end of the year. Use it to digitize your business receipts in many different ways:
- Capture pictures of receipts on the go with the Shoeboxed mobile app.
- Forward email receipts to Shoeboxed.
- Set up auto-sync to have Shoeboxed automatically pull receipts from Gmail.
- Mail a pile of receipts to have them scanned and saved by Shoeboxed.
Because Shoeboxed offers so many different options for digitizing and saving receipts, you can record every business expense—regardless of how the receipt is delivered—within seconds. It's particularly helpful if you have boxes or file folders filled with business receipts but no time to scan them in and want to outsource that job to a service.
Shoeboxed Price: $29/month for the Startup plan that includes one prepaid envelope for sending paper receipts and 25 receipts (paper or digital) per month.
ZipBooks (Web, iOS)
Best accounting software for freelancers who may need professional accounting help
Like most of the apps on this list, ZipBooks lets you connect bank and credit card accounts, automatically pull transactions, and edit the details of those expenses. Use your phone to capture images of receipts, and upload them to ZipBooks using its iOS app. Finally, create and send one-off and recurring invoices.
But if you're really nervous about doing your own bookkeeping and want the certainty of knowing that a professional is there to help the moment you need it, ZipBooks is the tool for you. ZipBooks gives you the option to pass all of your accounting and bookkeeping off to a professional who can answer your questions and help you reconcile your bank accounts, find deductions, and prepare your taxes.
ZipBooks Price: Free for the Starter plan that includes unlimited invoicing and one connected bank account; from $125/month for the Simple Bookkeeping plan that includes professional bookkeeping services.
AND CO (Web, macOS, Chrome, iOS, Android)
Best accounting software for freelancers who need to manage both accounting and legal tasks
As far as accounting tasks go, AND CO has everything freelancers need. Connect your bank/credit accounts to record business expenses, track your time, create and send invoices, accept payments, and even see when clients have viewed invoices you sent. Forward email receipts or take a picture of physical receipts and upload them using AND CO's mobile app.
Where AND CO stands out is with its legal features. Protect yourself with AND CO's standard freelancing contracts, written by the Freelancers Union. Turn sections of the contract on and off as needed, and collect client signatures with e-signing functionality. And when clients don't pay, send a prewritten physical demand letter directly from the app.
AND CO Price: Free
Automate AND CO with ANDCO's Zapier integrations.
Stop Wasting Time and Start Automating Your Bookkeeping
Every hour you spend on bookkeeping, accounting, and tax-related tasks is an hour that you're not earning any income. As much as possible, you'll want to automate these tasks so you can focus on building your business and your profits. With Zapier's app automations (Zaps), you can build automated workflows that handle bookkeeping tasks so you don't have to.
Here are some examples:
- Add sales receipts from your payment processor to your bookkeeping app automatically:
- Automatically create a new contact in your accounting app when you add one to your CRM:
- Add new customers from your accounting software to your email marketing app:
Collecting receipts, sending invoices, logging and categorizing expenses, filing taxes: These are all inevitable parts of working for yourself. However, if you use the right app—one that makes it easy to capture all of those potential deductions and access them quickly and easily when tax season rolls around—you can save yourself a lot of time and money year-round.
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Cover image by Freepik.