These days, there are a myriad of apps out there that can drastically simply your accounting and bookkeeping process. These applications help track all sorts of financial information, and should be utilized whether your business’s financials are tracked internally or by a financial services firm like ours.
Accounting Software
Quickbooks — Simply put, Quickbooks is the ideal business accounting software for small to mid-sized business owners. With their diverse product offerings, you can find an edition that fits any business. You can also easily scale from their online version to their enterprise version when your business needs to take advantage of one of their more robust platforms.
Pricing: It all depends on the version that you choose.
- Quickbooks Online: $7–25/mo with options for payroll add-ons
- Quickbooks Pro: $219.95/year for the 2018 edition
- Quickbooks Premier: $379.95/year for the 2018 edition
- Quickbooks Enterprise: Starting at $770/year for the 2018 edition
Remote Desktop Hosting
SureTech — Having a remote desktop can be a game-changer, especially if your financials are running on one of Quickbooks’ desktop editions. With SureTech, you’re able to access your desktop software from anywhere, at anytime, with multiple users.
SureTech has allowed for cross-collaboration with clients who are located in different states and still need regular access to their Quickbooks Desktop financials.
Pricing: Plans start at $52/mo/user
Accounts Receivable/Payable Tracking
Bill.com — Bill.com dramatically simplifies the complete accounts payable and accounts receivable process. It allows us to input invoices via pdf, and it give our clients the ability to view and pay their bills in real-time.
This process has increased financial transparency, as well as given our clients more control when it comes to managing and understanding their day-to-day cash flow.
Pricing: Plans range from $29–59/mo
- ePayment/ACH processing fee: $0.49/send & receive
- They mail your checks or invoices: $1.49/check payment or invoice
- They do your Payables data entry (optional): $0.49/bill
Document Management
SmartVault — SmartVault gives our clients one location where they can access all of their tax and financial documents via a personalized online portal.
The application gives you the ability to securely upload, download and view your financial documents from anywhere and at anytime. For accountants, SmartVault also integrates with Intuit ProSeries.
Pricing: The plans and features vary depending on whether you want to accountant or business plan.
- Accountant Plans: $30/mo/user for tax prep only or $40/mo/user for expanded features
- Business Plans: From $12–20/mo/user depending of features
Inventory Management
Cin7 — Cin7 is an inventory management solution for small and midsize retail and wholesales businesses. They offer a wide range of services including inventory management, point-of-sale, and warehouse management. They also integrates with an array of e-commerce platforms and provide robust reporting and analytics.
Pricing: Plans start at $299/mo
Job Management
Knowify — Knowify is great if you have a construction business and need to link your back-office financials with the front-end, day-today-day management involved in creating bids, job costing, time tracking and AIA project invoicing.
It’s a huge help when you don’t want too many users interacting with your Quickbooks file, and your foreman doesn’t want to be slowed down with untimely and inefficient project documentation and correspondence with the finance department.
Pricing: Plans start at $42/mo (billed annually)
Online Sales
Shopify — Shopify is one of the leaders in the e-commerce space, and probably the easiest tool to build your online store.
Pricing: Plans start at $29/mo
Online/POS Sales Tracking
CommerceSync — Commerce Sync is an automated accounting platform that integrates your point-of-sale and online storefront to your accounting software.
Their pricing is great, however I would make sure to speak with a customer rep about their sales tax integration before purchasing, especially if you are collecting tax in multiple states and using Quickbooks to breakdown your reporting.
Pricing: It depends on whether you want to sync from Square, Stripe or Clover
- Square Pricing: Plans start at $15.83/mo/per location (billed annually)
- Stripe Pricing: Plans start at $12.46/mo (billed annually)
- Clover Pricing: Plans start at $19.95/mo
Webgility — Webgility is a bit more robust than CommerceSync and because of this it costs a bit more. Unlike CommerceSync, they integrate with a lot more platforms and allow you to track your shipping expense, inventory, and sales tax based on state and city. The level of detail depends on the plan you choose, but they definitely have options that allow them to scale with your business.
Pricing: It depends on whether you want to use their Online or Desktop version. Hint: you can use the online version with your desktop version — don’t pay more if you don’t have to.
- Unify Online Starter: $24/mo (billed annually)
- Unify Online Growth: $79/mo (billed annually)
- Unify Desktop Advanced: $249/mo (billed annually)
- Unify Desktop Premium: $499/mo (billed annually)
Reimbursements
Expensify — Like its name, Expensify helps your business track expenses for employees and administrators. It has a lot of integrations, including Bill.com and Quickbooks, which allows you to create expense categories in Expensify that match up perfectly with your other software.
Expensify’s app also always your employees to scan receipts on the go, further simplifying the reimbursement process.
Pricing: Starting at $5/mo/user
Time Tracking
Planday — Planday is a time-tracking application that provides a one-stop-shop for staff management, scheduling, communication, time tracking and reporting.
We like the application because it allows you to track employee wages based on both hourly and project-based rates.
Pricing: Plans start at $2/mo/user
Shipping
Shipstation (Retail Shipments)— ShipStation was build to take orders, regardless of the selling platform, and give their customer an all-in-one interface to manage their shipping decisions and get their labels created. However you decide to ship your product, ShipStation is their to assist with logistics.
Pricing: Plans range from $9/mo (Starter Plan) to $159/mo (Enterprise Plan)
Flexport (International Freight) — If you’ve ever dealt with international shipping, you know that it involved a complex chain of different companies. Freight forwarders from Flexport solve that problem.
By utilizing built-in software, they can make sure that your cargo gets loaded onto the ship and tell you how many days it is going to take before your shipment is delivered to its final location, while shaving time off your delivery and saving you money.
Pricing: Contact Flexport directly to discuss your business and their pricing options.
Summary
You’ll notice that we’ve only highlighted one or two products below per category and this is because these are the apps/software that have found to worked the best for us.
If there are other applications out there that you feel are superior and have worked from you, we’d love to hear about them.
Lanyap Financial is a tech-based accounting and financial services firm that specializes in streamlining their clients’ financial operations through FinTech software and cloud-based applications.