Best Accounting Software to Help Make your Business a Million Bucks: SageOne / Freshbooks / Harvest / Zoho / Less / FreeAgent / WorkingPoint / Xero / Kashoo

BRITTANI SPONAUGLE writes: Are you an accountant looking to make your life easier? Or are you a business owner without the fondest idea of how to keep your businesses finances in order? Either way, account management is incredibly important to the vitality of a business. For a detailed accounting overview this introduction to financial accounting course is great. The whole point of working for yourself is to make money, right? So, it’s super important you find a tool that will help you do that fast, safe and efficiently. We’ll go over some of the more popular options here.

Sageone

SageOne is a cloud based accounting system based on the web. It provides businesses the organization to track projects, manage expenses, and invoicing. It doesn’t have a lot of room for customizations, but that’s okay, because it makes up for it with its reasonable price and 5GB of cloud storage. This is primarily for very small to small business who need a little bit of help. You can integrate all of your banking information to SageOne to keep track of financial trends. There are a few catches to SageOne that can complicate things for business owners. You can import business information from other systems except for contacts, but, you can set up ledgers. Pre-ledgers do exist, that way each time income or expenses are recorded in a category, they are assigned to the transaction. The report options are limited to aged invoices, balance sheets and profit and loss. However, they have a message on the reports page that is open to suggesting more types of reports to include in the system.

The short:

Online payroll

Three types of reports

Banking integration

Import contacts

Support from the SageOne team

Cloud based with 5GB space

Expense tracking and invoice creation

Free trial

Freshbooks

Don’t be intimidated by accounting. Yeah, it sounds really complex but Freshbooks and their cloud accounting web-based system will make everything crisp and clear. They also offer live help should you need to call in a question. That’s pretty much unheard of these days! Since they operate on the cloud, all of your data and work is backed up, all the time. It’s not going anywhere, but if you do, you’ll be able to access it – no problem. It’s also encrypted with a 256-bit encryption so you don’t have to worry about security issues.

You can accept payment by credit card, PayPal or any of the other twelve payment options. You’ll be able to track time at your desk and import important information with the click of a button. FreshBooks lets you customize your invoice, send late payment reminders, and has high-level expense tracking and time tracking. It will also draw up profit and loss reports, accounts again and balance sheets.

The short:

Free trial

Cloud Accounting System (automated back-ups)

14 different payment gateways

Encrypted 256-bit encryption

Send customized invoices and reminders

Profit and loss reports

Starting at $19.95/mo

Harvest

Simple to use. Simple to access. Simple to deploy. You can be using Harvest within minutes. There is nothing to install so you don’t have to wait through lengthy downloading queues. You can manage employees, or have Harvest automatically remind employees to send in time sheets – from anywhere, and on any device. Doesn’t get much easier than that. Harvest offers desktop time tracking integration and an invoice that automatically pulls in project hours and expenses. It will actually retrieve and organize all your billable hours – so you don’t have to.

Curious about how your business is doing? Harvest creates organized and easy-to-understand reports that export to Excel, Google Docs and more. Your workflow will be streamlines as estimates and accepted estimates can be sent, real time, through Harvest to get the project started immediately. Everything is customizable. You can edit your labels, defaults, categories, and messages. (You can add your logo and company info to the header). All of your receipts can be stored digitally and you can analyze expenses in fast and accurate reports. If you’re starting a business and want to understand more about accounting, take this Introduction to Small Business Accounting tutorial to get ahead.

The short:

Free trial

Automatically remind employees of time sheets

Desktop time tracking

Project management

Reports that export to PDF and google docs

Workflow streamline

Digitalized receipts

SSL encrypted connections

$12, $49, or $99 a month plans available

Zoho

 

“The best small business accounting software” – Zoho

Well, we are looking for the best so let’s talk Zoho. Zoho is an online accounting system with the standard dashboard layout. This dashboard gives you insight into your finances by showing you an aging summary, accounts watch list, and a summary of your bank and credit card accounts. As for the money coming in, you can keep track of your invoices, credit notes and create quotes. You are also able to accept online payments, track payments, have automated follow-up’s and thank you emails. Whoa, that’s nice. You won’t lose track of money, anywhere, because Zoho has a “trail your money’s exit” feature and ensures you won’t ever lose money on reimbursable expenses.

Then you have the project management side of things. This will help you track time and log hours and customize access to users. You also get profit and loss reports, classified reports, and all the sales and customer reports you could want.

The short:

Dashboard view

Multi-user capabilities

Project and time management features

Customized reporting

Automate bank and credit card feeds

Bill scheduling

Aging summary of bills and invoices

Create quotes

Globally friendly

$24/mo

Less

Less Accounting is really trying to get you to leave Quickbooks. They say they are the easy solution to all of your accounting needs. They’ve got a fun landing page for the website which is indicative of their software. You can do all of your book keeping, add your accountant as a user, categorize expenses, manage invoicing and it has bill scheduling features. They also have a really nice contact management system that helps you keep track of all of your clients and contacts. You can import from places like Gmail, Basecamp and other web apps.

Of course, importing data is of the utmost importance. >Less integrates with thousands of domestic US banks and a few hundred international. Chances are, they will fit with your needs. You can upload QIF and QFX files, too. In addition to all of these awesome things, they have fun features like keeping track of trip mileage. You can also create custom reports to keep track of your accounts payable, receivable and payroll. Oh, and you can accept payments via PayPal. Really nice.

The short:

Custom reporting

Bill scheduling and management

Sleek and fun design which is nicely organized

Contact management system

Customizable categories

Multi-user functioning

It’s not QuickBooks

Freeagent

FreeAgent helps you keep track of your finances. No if’s, and’s or but’s. It is a web-based system that gives you the standard dashboard view summarizing all of your financial information. If you’re concerned about it being web-based, don’t worry. FreeAgent has bank level security and data protection. This system lets you create estimates and proposals, in a number of different currencies. You can automatically generate invoices from unbilled time, generate reports in PDF, and integrate with desktop time tracking widgets (for ultimate control).

You’re bank feeds automatically into the transaction data each day and you can reconcile invoices and bills made in FreeAgent. It keeps coming. FreeAgent draws up profit and loss charts, multi-user access, and you don’t have to worry about accounting jargon – it’s all laid out in plain English. You can get a free trial but it’ll cost you $24 a month to use every day. Not bad.

The short:

Expense tracking

Back up features

Profit and loss charts

Report in PDF

Bank level security

$24/month

Account integration

Project creation

Working Point

WorkingPoint is an account and contact management system online that small and medium sized businesses can use to manage their finances and customers.  This site will generate invoices, create reports including an income statement, balance sheet and cash flow statement.  WorkingPoint has an interface that is easy to use and organized in a manner that will make sense to a lot of new users. You even get your own custom site (domain.workingpoint.com) if you want to showcase your company’s profile. Hey, free advertising, I’ll take it. You’ll be able to view upcoming bills and bills that have been paid on the “Bills” page. The Accounts page will show you a set of predefined account categories – if you want to customize these, you’ll have to cough up some of that cash money.

The short:

All-in-one account and contact management

No experience required

Banking account and e-commerce integration capabilities

Online accounting

Personal domain

Free or paid membership

Xero

Xero is a New Zealand born accounting application (don’t worry if you’re in the U.S. you can still use it) that has partnered with major financial service providers like PayPal and ADP. It’s a web-based system that offers a lot of competitive features like, being double-entry (without the heaviness of standard double-entry programs), monthly management reports, and exporting to familiar extensions like PDF and Google Docs.  Don’t have a background in accounting? That’s okay. Xero makes it easy for you to get started with no complicated equations required. If you’re looking for some extra help, Xero has a lot of self-help on the website to make you a master at using their interface in no time. Xero is really sleek and well organized which helps orient you with using it. You can manage your inventory, timesheets and job placement and a zillion other add-on’s that add ease of use to the comprehensive accounting system. This system is used for small business or bookkeeping, but you can purchase a personal finance version for $34/mo. Trying to understand how business finance and accounting works? A course in finance and accounting for start-ups might fill your desire to learn.

The short:

Monthly Management breakdowns in reports

Export to Excel, PDF, Google Docs

Mobile and tablet sync

Send invoices and get paid online

Manage cash flow with scheduling bill payments

Sleek interface

Fixed Assets

Kashoo

Let me start off by saying that Kashoo only works with Canadian based payroll. If you are running a business in the U.S., at this time, Kashoo is not for you. For those of you that are running Canadian businesses – great! Kashoo is going to win you over with its intuitive and lightweight design and vast functionality. One of the best features of this software is the “change log”, or audit trail, that only QuickBooks Online offers. Additionally, it offers functions like managing income and expenses downloaded from financial institutions, paying bills and invoicing customers, great visual graphs and cash flow reports. Kashoo also supports over 100 currencies. Yes.

One of the fun things about Kashoo’s platform is where you start off. Most accounting and money management systems have you operating from a “dashboard” but they decided to take a different route. Their version of the dashboard shows your account totals, net income, taxes and links to pages containing more data. Sounds about the same? There’s more. The majority of the screen is actually a workspace! You can start filling out invoices and transactions right away. Downside? No U.S. payroll, and you can’t categorize transactions.

The short:

International platform that supports 100 currencies

Download transactions from over 1000 financial institutions directly to Kashoo

Cash flow reports and graphs

Pay bills

Invoice customers

Change log

Ipad optimized

Unlimited collaborators

Pay as you go or $192 flat

You’ll notice that a lot of the software has basically the same functionality. Some have cleaner interfaces, and some offer a ton of add-on’s that will make them worthwhile. Since a lot of these have free trials, I suggest going with your gut. If one of these guys stood at to you for a feature or just because they look nice, go check it out. Their websites are incredibly informative and will guide you every step of the way. I know we didn’t discuss Quicken or QuickBooks and that’s because there is already so much information out there about them. These are the underdogs and that’s admirable. If this article has piqued your interest about the accounting and finances of a small business, this online small business and managerial accounting training might give you a better idea of what it takes.