The Best Accounting Apps For Small Businesses: Making Your Life Easier

Accounting is vital for any business. Still, it can be time-consuming and hard to manage. Hopefully, many solutions are available to help small business owners facilitate accounting and approach it more efficiently. From tracking expenses to creating detailed financial reports, these apps can make your and your accountant’s life easier by automating many tedious bookkeeping and accounting tasks. 

In this article, we’ll look at some of the best accounting apps for small businesses so you can choose the one that suits your needs and can help you make the most of your finances and resources.

What are accounting apps?

Accounting apps are software designed to help you manage your finances. They can be installed on desktop computers, laptops, mobile devices, or tablets or be cloud-based, giving you real-time access to the latest version of your data, which is essential for accurate accounting. 

Many accounting apps also offer such features as expense tracking, cash flow management, forecasting, invoicing, and payroll and may connect with other business apps, allowing you to integrate your data across different programs. It gives you a single view of your entire financial picture and makes managing your finances much more effective. 

Accounting apps can help with many aspects of accounting, such as bookkeeping, financial reporting, and budgeting. They’re also suitable for various small businesses, including service providers, retailers, manufacturers, wholesalers, etc.

Different types of accounting apps

All accounting apps, having many in common, still differ in terms of their main focus and, of course, the features they offer. But in general, they can fall into three main types: bookkeeping, financial reporting, and accounting software. 

Bookkeeping apps are accounting software designed for small businesses that don’t require in-depth financial reporting. They allow you to track expenses and earnings, understand your cash flow, invoice clients, send and receive payments, and more. 

Financial reporting apps offer an overview of your finances, such as income, expenses, assets, and cash flow. They also allow you to create reports that include charts, graphs, and other visuals to help you understand your business’s overall financial health. 

Accounting software usually aims at larger businesses that need a more in-depth accounting solution. These apps allow you to manage customers, suppliers, inventory, assets, and other business resources. They also allow you to create invoices, track sales and earnings, and manage inventory.

Benefits of using accounting apps

Accounting apps provide many benefits to small business owners, but we’ll get through the most significant ones.

Convenience

Accounting apps are designed for the modern business owner and can offer on-the-go access to their financial data. So they can manage finances when away from the office and at any time. You can also connect other business apps to your accounting solution to have all the necessary data to drive your decisions in a single ecosystem.

Speed

Accounting apps make real-time data entry easy. They also offer features that allow you to automate many tasks, such as importing data from payment providers like Stripe or PayPal or e-commerce platforms like Amazon or Shopify, saving you a lot of time, which is especially useful when managing multiple businesses. 

Accuracy

The data you enter into accounting apps is always up-to-date, which means you have accurate information at all times. This way, it becomes easier to spot trends and manage your finances while reducing the chance of errors.

Tips for choosing the right accounting app

Today, there’re so many bookkeeping and accounting apps available on the market, so choosing the one suitable for your business might sometimes be confusing. So, you might want to consider a few helpful things that can make it easier to find the right app and get the most out of it. 

What does the app do?

You might want to start looking for certain functionality to solve the specific problems you’re encountering. But besides, it might help to look through all the features an app offers to understand how else it can benefit your work.

Ease of use

The ease of use is one of the factors to consider because it might help understand how fast you can implement the app into your processes. Here, you may consider who will use the app and how frequently. Most apps are usually pretty simple to start working with and intuitive. However, if it’s a complex solution offering multiple features, you might need more time to get acquainted with the functionality and how it applies to your business needs.

Security

When working with finances, you need to keep security and data privacy in mind. So you might want to ensure the accounting app you choose meets your security and data privacy requirements.

Support

The support behind an app is an often overlooked factor that can be a game changer in the long run. There might be glitches, downtimes, or confusion about how to set up your app to do the job correctly. At this point, you might welcome all possible help. So before you choose a solution, look at what type of support they offer. Besides, you might want to learn what customers say about the app’s support and how it aligns with what’s written on the website. So if people often complain about not being answered for days or weeks, you might think twice before going with the app.

Budget

One more thing you need to do is determine how much you can spend on accounting software. It will help you narrow the selection at the final step and focus on apps within your price range.

Best accounting apps for small businesses

Now let’s review some of the best accounting apps for small businesses. Choosing the right accounting app is an important decision that will impact how you manage your finances for years to come. To simplify the process, we’ve broken down our list by app type, so you can quickly find the app that best suits your needs.

E-commerce accounting

Synder is an accounting software tailored to cover the needs of e-commerce businesses and online small businesses with high loads of monthly transactions. Synder allows for joining all the company’s data sources, such as accounting solutions, payment processors, and e-commerce platforms, into a single ecosystem, drastically facilitating bookkeeping and accounting for business transactions. This way, business owners can seamlessly and accurately import transaction data from all their channels into accounting, making bookkeeping a breeze, generating correct and informative financial statements for accounting and taxation purposes, and having a 360-degree view of their business with instant sales, customer, and product insights.

Should you believe Synder can be the solution you’re looking for, don’t hesitate to book a free demo or sign up for a free trial to learn more about how it can help your particular business.

Small business bookkeeping

Cashflow and Xero are the best apps for bookkeeping. These apps are designed to help you manage your income and expenses on the go. They also allow you to send and receive bill payments, create budgets, and more.

Financial reporting

Workiva, Oracle Netsuite, and Sage Intacct are great solutions for financial reporting. They help you record transactions, collect and calculate data on profits and losses, make balance sheets and budgets, presenting the results in the form of accurate financial reports that might help you in your business analysis, budget planning, forecasting, and more.

Accounting

FreshBooks, QuickBooks, and Wave are the best apps for accounting software. These apps allow you to manage your finances, create and send invoices, track expenses, and more. They’re also suitable for businesses of all types, including freelancers, contractors, and small business owners.

Conclusion

Accounting apps are one of the best ways to simplify the management of your financial data. These apps allow you to track your spending, receive bill payments, create budgets, manage your cash flow, and more. To make the right choice and pick the solution that will fit your business the best, you might want to make sure it meets your needs and offers the features you require. You should also keep security and data privacy in mind.