Best Accounting Practice Management Software Options in 2024

Post Covid-19, using an practice management software for accounting firms is more important than ever.

Why is this?

Accounting firms are still working remotely and most don’t plan to return to the office 5 days a week after COVID. However, to effectively manage your remote firm you need a way to maintain accountability, organization, and a big picture view of what is happening in your firm.

Of course, this process becomes much more difficult when you and your team are working remotely.

You can’t stroll over to someone’s desk and see how the project they are working on is coming along. In fact, you can’t even ensure that your team is staying on task during normal working hours! (Read our blog, What to Know When Measuring Your Team’s Productivity for help on tackling this issue).

You need a way to remotely track the status of client work, collaborate with your staff, and store client information so your firm can continue to operate. See this 25 practice management tips for accountants by accountants.

Thankfully, a good practice management tool gives you the ability to do all this, and more!

Benefits of Practice Management Software for Accounting Firms

1. Improved Efficiency

Practice management tools streamline tasks like manual billing, reducing time spent on manual work by 50% which would typically take up 1-10 hours, according to this findings from accounting firm owners in this report. This minimizes paperwork, accelerates operations, and enhances result production.

2. Data and Workload Analysis

The workflow dashboard in an accounting firm management software provides you with an overview of all client tasks at glance to enable track the progress of work done. You can see upcoming tasks and manage deadlines.

3. Enhanced Communication

A good practice management system would typically have an inbuilt communication feature embedded in it, making it easy for accounting teams to communicate and collaborate when working on client tasks in real time. You can also use the communication feature to chat with clients

4. Go Remote

Using a firm management software makes it possible for you and your team to work virtually and manage all clients task remotely since it is hosted on the cloud.

5. Increased Scalability

Scaling your firm doesn’t solely rely on hiring more staff; with the many features available in the right management software, you can take on more clients, streamline your processes, get work done faster and accurately. This enables you to attract more clients and generate more revenue without proportional increases in costs.

6. Improved Profitability

These benefits collectively contribute to increased profits for your firm. By reducing the time spent on recurring and manual tasks, an accounting firm practice management system provides you with the ability to take on more clients and invest resources in optimizing other operational aspects. By so doing you are able to gradually improve your overall bottom line – profitability.

Want to ensure you enjoy the full benefits of using a practice management software in your accounting firm? Read this blog to discover the 5 ways to optimize your accounting firm’s productivity using a practice management solution.

8 Things Every Practice Management Solution Should Help You With

Not every piece of software that is developed to help accounting firms manage their business is created equally.

So, how can you know which one is best for you?

Here are eight essential actions every accounting firm management software should be able to complete.

1. Project management.
2. Team collaboration.
3. Workflow automation.
4. Time tracking and billing.
5. Client management.
6. Reporting
7. Ease of use
8. Pricing

1. Project and Task Management

When it comes to an accounting firm, ignorance is not bliss.

You need to be able to easily track work across the firm:

• Are projects being completed on time?
• Is your workflow being efficient?
• Are you being profitable as a firm?

A good software for accountants allows you to delegate work, track your team’s progress, streamline your workflows, and ensure that everything gets done on time.

2. Team Collaboration

Efficient and organized team communication is crucial as you grow. If you can’t communicate with your team quickly, you miss important details, and stuff will fall through the cracks.

We don’t have to tell you that stuff falling through the cracks is not ok – especially with an accounting firm. After all, you are dealing with people’s finances!

To take a deeper dive into this topic, read our blog: How To Facilitate Better Communication Across Your Firm.

3. Workflow Automation

As you grow, you will take on more clients and work. Finding a solution that will automate time-consuming tasks will help you save time, reduce human error and focus on growing your firm.

In 2023, 63% of accounting and bookkeeping firms owners reported that workflow was a major challenge for them. This indicates that workflow automation and management is an essential feature to look out for when selecting your practice software.

4. Time Tracking and Billing

Tracking time is vital for firms that bill hourly or on monthly engagements. It helps you provide accurate invoices, get paid faster, and identify work that may be over budget.

5. Client Management

It’s important that you have a team of people that work hard to meet deadlines and get their tasks done.

However, it’s not always your employees’ fault for not getting a particular task done. If they don’t have access to the information they need to complete a project, they can’t make any progress on it.

That’s why organizing all your client information and storing it in a place that your team can easily access is so critical!

Manage your client information properly, and everyone is likely to remain happy. Drop the ball, and your accounting firm suffers.

(You may be interested in –  Accounting CRM Software: The 5 Best for Accountants)

6. Reporting

What’s worse than being on a sinking ship?

Being on a sinking ship and not realizing that it’s going down.

Proper reporting helps you know if your ship is steaming full ahead, or if it has sprung a leak. As you grow, you will need insights into your firm’s performance so you can identify inefficiencies and bottlenecks that may be holding you back and shrinking firm profitability.

7. Ease Of Use

Accountants, bookkeepers, and CPAs are always busy. So finding a practice management software for accountants that is easy to use will help you save time on implementation and training.

You can also check our review of the best accounting workflow software.

8. Pricing

At the end of the day, you need an affordable solution that can scale with your firm.

Growing firms need to reinvest their money into growth, and if you are spending a significant portion of your budget on a new practice management tool for your firm, it doesn’t leave much money left over.

That’s why it’s so important to choose an affordable practice management software for your firm.

With these eight tasks as a guide, you can decide which accounting firm management tool is best for you. If a particular piece of software does not help you do one or more of these jobs, it is likely not a good investment for your firm.

However, we know that sifting through dozens of software systems can be a major brain drain. And at the least, it’s going to take a lot of time.

So, we’ve made the process easier, and compiled five of our favorite accounting practice management tools.

Let’s take a look!

The Best Practice Management Software Solutions in 2024 for Accounting Firms

1. Financial Cents
2. Karbon
3. Jetpack Workflow
4. Aero Workflow
5. Xero Practice Manager

1) Financial Cents

Financial Cents is an accounting practice management software built for small and medium-sized accounting, bookkeeping, and CPA firms. We also serve larger firms, but our focus is on firms with 1 – 50 employees.

We have worked closely with thousands of firms over the years to build a solution that is easy to use, quick to learn, yet has everything you need to take your firm to the next level.

Here are the strong points that Financial Cents has to offer:

i. Project and Task Management

Project Management is the core focus of Financial Cents. We believe that delegating, tracking, and completing work on time is the most challenging thing to do as an accounting firm grows.

So, how do we go about making sure you can effectively manage all your work?

(a) – Workflow Dashboard

When you log into Financial Cents, the first thing you see is a dashboard that lets you track all the client work across the firm. You can see what status it is in, who is working on it, and when it will be completed all in one simple view.

You also have workflow filters that let you quickly view work for specific clients, team members, statuses, and time periods with our inbuilt due date tracking—making it easy to locate particular work in seconds when a client calls.

This will allow you to always know where things stand across your firm.

(Read our blog to find out which 3 Workflows that Every Accounting Practice Should Know).

(b) – Workflow Templates

If you don’t establish a standard operating procedure for completing particular work as you grow, it becomes tough to maintain work quality.

Financial Cents provides you accounting workflow templates and also allows you to create your own custom templates to fit your process. This makes it easy to standardize your process, so everyone on your team knows the right and most efficient way to complete their work.

Also, we recently added an Artificial intelligence integration through ChatGPT to help you create workflow templates in seconds. All you need to do is input the prompt and a workflow template is created for you. You can learn more about our ChatGPT integration here.

Read this blog to see how accountants and bookkeepers can use ChatGPT in their firms.

ii. Team Collaboration

Financial Cents has team collaboration built directly into the project management solution.

Your team can easily ask questions and leave updates on the client work to keep everyone in the loop. Also, it makes it easy for anyone taking over work to quickly get caught up to speed and have all the context they need to keep the work moving forward.

iii. Workflow Automation

Financial Cents provides a lot of different options to automate time-consuming and important parts of your workflow. Here are just a few perks that will save you a mountain of time and energy!

(a) – Automate Client Data Collection

Chasing down clients for information and documents can be a time-consuming part of an accountant’s job. That is why Financial Cents automates the client data collection process for you, thereby making document management easy.

You can schedule a request list to be sent to your client every month and have the system automatically follow up with them until your client completes the tasks.

The client will be able to access a secure and encrypted portal (without having to set up a login or password) where they can upload documents and ask you questions.

The best part is that all the documents and client communication are stored on the relevant client work so your team can access it at the click of a button and have everything they need to get their work done on time.

(b) – Recurring Projects

As an accountant, you do a lot of repetitive work. We’re talking about things like:

• Bi-weekly payroll
• Monthly bookkeeping
• Annual tax returns

As you know, these repetitive tasks end up taking a lot of valuable brain space that should be used on more creative and intense projects.

Thankfully, with Financial Cents, you can set projects to recur, so it automatically recreates a new project for future work.

For example:

You could have your monthly bookkeeping project recreate itself every month, so you don’t have to remember to manually create the same project every month. This saves you time and removes the risk of forgetting to add it to your to-do list which would cause it to fall through the cracks.

(c) – Task Dependencies

Task dependencies help ensure work is done correctly and notify team members when they can begin their work. You can set dependencies on specific tasks that won’t let you complete a task until the previous one is completed. It will also automatically notify the next team member in line when the previous task is completed and so they know when to begin their work. This makes it easy for your staff to stay on top of work and hit their deadlines.

iv. Time Tracking and Billing

With Financial Cents, robust time tracking is built directly into your workflow solution to help you seamlessly track time. This is a huge benefit because it prevents you from tracking time in a completely separate app, which saves you time and money.

We built it directly into the workflow because we wanted to make it very easy for your staff to track time while looking at their work. This improves adoption by your team and results in more accurate time billing reports for your firm.

Receiving payments from clients is easy with the Financial Cents billing feature, you can create invoices and send to clients to collect payments for work done. The billing feature is also integrated with automations such as auto reminders to make sure your clients never forget to pay, auto charge clients, recurring payments and more.

You can also integrate Financial Cents with QuickBooks Online so your time entries automatically get added to QBO. This allows you to seamlessly create invoices and bill your clients from the time tracked in Financial Cents.

v. Client Management

Financial Cents provides a client management solution that allows you to keep all your client information in one place, so it is always easy for your team to find.

Here’s how it’s done:

(a) – Client Profile

Each client has a profile where you can store their documents, notes, contact information, passwords, security questions, and other information. This makes it easy for your team to access important information on demand to get their work done.

Below are some of the things your firm can easily view in your client’s profile.

• Upcoming Work
• Client Notes
• Related Documents
• All Client Requests
• Usernames and passwords for their apps
• All their contact information
• Custom fields
• Relationships between other clients
• The type of client they are (Bookkeeping, tax, payroll, etc.)

There’s also a ChatGPT integration to help you compose client emails in seconds to help you improve client communication in your firm. All you need to do is provide a prompt and an email will be composed for you, you can then modify the email to your taste.

(b) – Audit Trail

You also have an audit trail that keeps track of your firm’s interactions with a client.

If someone on your team talks to a client, has a meeting, or writes an important email, it is stored in chronological order. Then with a click of a button you can:

• Know who talked to a client
• When they contacted the client
• What they were talking to the client about.

(Do you want better communication with your clients? Read our blog: A Guide to Taking Better Notes During Meetings with Clients.)

vi. Reporting

Accounting firms are basically built on numbers. When you don’t have accurate numbers or insights you can’t make good business decisions.

Thankfully, Financial Cents makes reporting easy and accurate. You can keep track of everything from your team’s work capacity to how profitable your firm is.

(a) – Capacity Management

Financial Cents makes it easy to manage your team’s workload. In the capacity management report, you can quickly identify which team members have too much work on their plate and reassign the work to someone with more capacity.

This ensures that everyone has enough time to get their work done on time. Also, it helps you realize when you may need to hire another staff member to support the increased workload as your firm grows.

(b) – Effective Hourly Rate

Financial Cents has built-in profitability metrics to help you identify which clients are not profitable for your firm.

You can easily see which clients are constantly going over budget and making you the least amount of money. This gives you the hard data you need to quickly renegotiate engagements with clients and be successful.

The result?

You will boost your bottom line and have more money to reinvest back into your firm for growth.

(c) – Time Tracking Reports

You can quickly run time tracking reports to see where your team is spending their time. You can see reports on three different levels.

• Client level: to see how much time your firm spends on each client
• Project level: to see how much time your firm spends on each type of work
• Team level: to see how much your team is working and have the time for payroll

You will also be able to see which clients, work or team members are constantly over budget and drill down to identify what is causing the work to go over budget.

vii. Canadian Compliant File Storage for Firms in Canada

Accounting and Bookkeeping firms based in Canada can use Financial Cents practice management software without having to worry about breaking Canadian Data Residency laws. You can securely perform all your clients tasks and store their data within Canada.

Learn more about it here.

viii. Ease Of Use

Financial Cents was built on the belief that any firm should be able to implement the solution within the first day. That being said, it is very easy and doesn’t require training. Your team should be able to pick up and learn the product in no time.

Read more reviews

That being said, Financial Cents does not need to offer onboarding services. However, we offer a lot of helpful content to get started and learn the most valuable features. Such as a Getting Started Guide and a Youtube Academy.

However, if you need help, we offer live training, client import, template creation, and a dedicated success manager for FREE.

Customer Reviews

• G2 – 4.8 stars
• Capterra 4.8 stars

Pricing

Financial Cents is one of the most affordable and easy-to-use practice management software for accounting firms on the market. We offer two plans:

• Solo Plan – $9/month (paid annually) or 19/month (paid monthly).
• Team plan – $39/month per team member (paid annually) or $49/month per team member (paid monthly),
• Scale plan – $59/month per team member (paid annually) or $69/month per team member (paid monthly).

Financial Cents Features

• Accounting workflow management and automation
• Accounting CRM feature
• Project Management
• Billing – automate your invoicing and payments collection.
• Time tracking
• Email integration with Gmail and Outlook
• Over 50+ workflow templates
• ChatGPT and AI integration
• E-Signature
• Zapier integration with 5,000+ Apps
• SmartVault Integration
• Capacity management
• Simple and easy to use. Financial Cents is rated 4.9/5.0 for ease of use.
• Collaborate and communicate with team members with inbuilt chats, @mentions
• Automate recurring tasks
• QuickBooks integration
• Manage uncategorized transactions with ReCats
• Document Management and integration with other DMS (SmartVault, Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive etc)
• Automated client requests and reminders
• Client Portal
• Solo practice management plan for single user firm owners.
• Canadian compliant data residency laws file storage option for firms based in Canada.
• Facebook community group for users
• Annual Workflow Conference

Start our 14 day FREE trial and see how Financial Cents can help take your firm to the next level!

See how Controller4Hire uses Financial Cents to save 20+ hours a week on manual tasks.