Accounting Practice Management Software: The Top 19 Roundup

Looking for the best accounting practice management software for your firm?

Good news, because this is the ULTIMATE accounting practice management software round-up post.

Key Takeaways

• Get to know the top accounting practice management software and why it is essential for your business.
• Important categories to evaluate when choosing a workflow management software for your CPA firm.
• Helpful features that could benefit accounting firms’ productivity to make sure that tasks are delegated and completed on time.

In no particular order, check out the 19 best accounting practice management software products on the market.

Let’s go!

Table of Contents

• What is Accounting Practice Management Software?
• The Benefits of Accounting Practice Management Software
• Top 19 Accounting Practice Management Software
  • 1. Teamwork
  • 2. Karbon
  • 3. Canopy
  • 4. Keeper
  • 5. Asana
  • 6. Jetpack Workflow
  • 7. Client Hub
  • 8. Aero Workflow
  • 9. QuickBooks Online Accountant
  • 10. Taxdome
  • 11. Xero Practice Manager
  • 12. Financial Cents
  • 13. Pixie
  • 14. Pascal Workflow
  • 15. BQE Core
  • 16. Senta
  • 17. Thomson Reuters Onvio
  • 18. CCH iFirm
  • 19. Firm 360

What is Accounting Practice Management Software?

Before jumping in, let’s look at what purpose accounting practice management software serves and specific features I’ll use as benchmarks for this accounting solution roundup.

Accounting software lets you keep track of team and client work, assign tasks, and ensure they’re completed on time.

Yes—including complex tasks like tax preparation.

Accounting tools aren’t just vital to managing tasks. They also help in delivering a great client experience, making them one of the most important types of tools in your firm.

The Benefits of Accounting Practice Management Software

Accounting practice management software is essential in every firm because it:

• Enables more efficient collaboration within your team.
• Helps ensure that work is completed on time and no deadlines are missed.
• Improves consistency of client work, therefore improving client satisfaction.
• Streamlines team communication.
• Automates various aspects of your day-to-day work.
• Reduces the need for tedious paper- and spreadsheet-based work.
• Supports smarter, more efficient firm management.

Join 9,497+ Modern Firm Owners Improving Their Work-Life Balance In Just 3 Minutes Per Week

Get 2 value-packed emails each week that give you the tactics, templates, and tools you need to spend less time working and more time enjoying your life.
​

Join 9,497+ Modern Firm Owners

​

7 Features To Evaluate

When evaluating accounting firm workflow management software, I recommend prioritizing the following features:

• Task and project management: Assess how the software helps organize, track, and prioritize tasks and projects.
• Collaboration (team and client): Evaluate the tool’s communication and file sharing capabilities and how they fit your team’s workflows and your clients’ needs.
• Time and billing: Look at how the software tracks time spent on tasks and manages invoicing and billing processes.
• Reporting features: Review if the types of reports it can generate match your firm’s specific requirements.
• Integration with other apps: Check the software’s compatibility with other tools and apps you use.
• User-friendliness: Consider the software’s intuitiveness. The right tool should be easy to use for all your team members.
• Pricing: Analyze the cost of the software relative to its features and the value it provides for your firm.

I always assess these categories before integrating any new software into my Future Firm team.

As counterintuitive as it might sound, here’s a pro tip: don’t focus on the number of features. Think about whether it actually enhances your firm’s operations and aligns with your goals.

Top 19 Accounting Practice Management Software

1) Teamwork

I used Teamwork (affiliate link) to manage client work at my previous accounting firm years ago. I still use it with my Future Firm team now.

Why? It’s an excellent workflow management software for accountants with great customer support.

More importantly, it’s straightforward.

I primarily use the “My Work” view, which shows my tasks due for the day. I keep this tab open all day.

You can choose different default views and customize widgets on the left.

Other tabs include:

• Search: Find a specific task or project.
• Project: Displays all projects. You can customize the view and status.
• Calendar: Gives you an overview of tasks for the month, week, or day.
• Templates: Lets you create tasks and projects faster.

Opening a project in Teamwork gets you access to several sections:

• Overview: I don’t think this is very useful.
• Tasks: This is where you’ll find all your tasks, like tax preparation, and each one’s respective deadline.
• Milestones: Lets you set important goals for your projects and track them.
• Messages: Allows you to communicate with team members about projects without leaving Teamwork.
• Files: A place for you to store project-related files. You can integrate it with Google Drive for added convenience.
• Time: See all the time tracked by your team members.
• Notebooks: Want to add thoughts on the project but can’t find a specific task in which to share them? You can write them down here.
• People: Shows a list of all the people involved in the project.

Task & Project Management Tracking

I create a project for each client, and all their work is organized within that project.

You can add tasks to Teamwork in a few ways. For starters, you can set up task templates to streamline the creation of future tasks.

With tasks added to the project, you’ll be able to access various options when you click on a task.

You can:

• Re-assign the task (or assign to multiple people)
• Add a description
• Attach files to it
• Set user privileges
• Set the priority (low, medium, high)
• Record time against it

Collaboration

While Teamwork doesn’t have a client portal, one of the things I like best about it is how easy it is to manage documents and collaborate on tasks and projects.

You can comment on just about anything in Teamwork, which I love!

If you add files, links, notes, or anything else in Teamwork, you can have discussions on these items via the comment functionality. It just makes communication and document management for team members much more efficient compared to email.

Time & Billing

Teamwork comes with basic time and billing functionality, which might not cut it for tax practice management and accounting firms heavily oriented towards time-based billing.

You can:

• Log time manually
• Start a timer
• Set the time as billable or non-billable

From there, you can head over to the “billing” section of the project to turn that time into an invoice.

I found the invoicing functionality to be basic—but it’s more than usable.

Reporting

There are several reports available in Teamwork.

Teamwork’s reporting features can provide valuable insights into project progress, time management, and team performance. 

Key reports like Project Health and Planned vs. Actual help track whether projects are on schedule and within budget, while Utilization and Time reports allow you to monitor how your team uses their time and whether resources are being maximized.

These insights can help you identify areas of improvement and make informed decisions to increase your efficiency.

Workload

Here is where Teamwork sets itself apart from the competition. 

The Workload section essentially helps plan your accounting firm’s capacity and workload.

While most accounting firms record time, very few project their forecasted time commitments. 

And how accounting firms and tax professionals can operate without looking into their time commitments looking into the future is beyond me.

Many months in advance, I need to know if my team will be overworked so I can hire or reallocate work. 

The only way to achieve this is through capacity or workload planning.

Watch this video to learn more about how Teamwork executes this feature.

Integrations

Here’s another area where Teamwork shines as an accounting firm solution.

First, they have native integrations with their core suite of products, one of them being Teamwork Desk, which is an awesome help desk option for your accounting firm. 

If you’d like to learn more about help desk software for accounting firms (and why I like them), read this post.

Second, they have about 60 third-party app integrations, including a whole bunch of the best cloud-based accounting software apps. If you use Xero or the QuickBooks online accounting software, they’ll fit right into Teamwork.

User-Friendliness

While user-friendliness is subjective, I would rank this piece of accounting workflow management software as exceptionally user-friendly. 

In fact, it’s one of the main reasons why I chose it in the first place.

Pricing

I think Teamwork’s pricing is spot on.

1. The monthly price per user is reasonable and predictable for your cash flow.
2. They have a Free Forever plan that you can play around with.
3. They offer a free trial.

Most accounting firms comfortable with cloud-based accounting automation software can maximize the Premium plan, taking advantage of their workload feature.

2) Karbon

It’s hard to ignore the immediate difference in approach Karbon takes compared to the rest of the pack.

As soon as you log in to Karbon, you’ll be greeted with their standout feature, Triage:

Triage centralizes your emails from Gmail or Microsoft 365, enabling you to respond to them from a single location and delegate email tasks to team members.

Another one of their signature features includes setting reminders for tasks, deadlines, meetings, and other events.

You can set reminders for yourself, assign them to your team members, or even assign them to clients.

Here’s a brief overview of other key features and elements:

• Assignments: Items assigned by an individual and used by a manager.
• My Week: Shows your workload for the week. It also integrates with calendar apps like Google Calendar or Microsoft Outlook.
• Work: You’ll find project-related items like emails, notes, tasks, documents, and client work, here.
• Contacts: This is Karbon’s CRM feature; you can manage your clients and other contacts here.
• Insights: Shows you real-time reports of metrics like team output and deliverables.
• Time: Lets you set time and budget estimates and track actual usage including utilization.
• Billing: Allows customers to invoice and accept payments inside Karbon.

What’s neat is that Karbon comes pre-loaded with a variety of workflow templates for you to choose from instead of creating your own from scratch:

Karbon also provides a Workflow feature, which presents the statuses of jobs or client work in a Kanban board.

This provides a clear and concise overview of the progress of each task, enabling team members to easily identify where tasks currently are and what the next move should be.

Task & Project Tracking

If you’re considering Karbon to manage your firm’s work, modifying the work templates and workflows to match your specific requirements should be your priority. 

In one of my podcasts, I discussed the importance of using accounting software to track, delegate, and deliver work on time.

This can be done by going to the “Settings” section.

Once you have selected a particular work template, you’ll be able to customize the process and automations to match your firm’s operations.

For instance, consider a section of the “accounting month-end close work” template:

You can tailor the procedure according to your firm’s practices so that it aligns with your business objectives.

Within this given template, I’m able to:

• Modify the list of required tasks as needed
• Assign each task to a team member or the client
• Implement an automation tool to handle repetitive tasks
• Set due dates for each task to meet the overall project deadline

The Automator feature can assist in moving tasks through a predetermined workflow.

It’s a great tool that helps me complete my work efficiently.

For instance, when I select the “Complete month-end bookkeeping” task from the list, I can easily access an “Add Automator” screen that looks like this:

By using Automators in Karbon, you can push the work (in this case “Accounting: month-end close”) into different:

• Workflow statuses
• Due dates
• Assignees

One great thing about using Karbon is that it improves efficiency by automating tasks with workflow automation.

For example, when a bookkeeper finishes month-end bookkeeping, the Automators can automatically reassign it to the manager, change the due date, and set the status to “In Review,” streamlining the process.

Below, you’ll notice that I have added the “Accounting: Month-end close” template to a Test client. You can toggle between 3 tabs:

• Timeline: This shows a timeline of all activity (tasks, notes, emails, etc.) on the work.

• Tasks: This shows outstanding to-dos.
• Details: This shows you additional details about the work such as the estimated time to complete, people on the project, privacy settings, and uploaded documents.

By aggregating all work items, you can view all outstanding tasks at a firm level. Alternatively, you can apply filters to a list view:

You can also view the outstanding tasks in multiple Kanban views:

With Karbon’s Automators, you can automatically move tasks on the Kanban board from one column to the next based on specific actions.

Collaboration

Karbon includes some interesting collaboration features:

• Client Collaboration: Share files, assign tasks, and communicate with clients in real time.
• Team Collaboration: Assign tasks, set deadlines, and track progress.
• Time Tracking: Karbon not only allows you to track your team’s time on projects but also facilitates scheduled data collection on the amount of time it took to complete each task.
• Reporting and Analytics: See how much time is being spent on each task, and identify areas for improvement.
• Integration with other tools: Karbon integrates with popular tools like Xero, QuickBooks, Microsoft Teams, and more.

Karbon AI

With Karbon’s AI feature, users can leverage the rich contextual information available within the platform to automate tasks and streamline workflows, ultimately improving the client experience.

Here are some things Karbon’s AI can do:

• Summarize lengthy discussions.
• Draft initial emails for your review and modification.
• Automate personalized client updates based on your prompts.
• Prioritize emails by urgency, sentiment, and tone.
• Enhance outgoing client emails for various tones and situations.

Time & Billing

Karbon is constantly improving its time tracking and budgeting features, which are particularly useful for accounting and tax practice management.

If Karbon continues to prioritize this, its capacity planning could become even more versatile in the future.

Reporting

Karbon also offers an Insights tab that contains several widgets that provide key performance indicators (KPIs) for some critical areas.

These widgets are intuitive. Some of them provide KPIs on essential metrics such as the average number of times due dates have been changed, average days overdue, and percentage of work completed on time, among others.

In my opinion, these metrics are more relevant to firms than time-tracking metrics.

Here’s a quick snapshot:

Integrations

Karbon has integrations with Ignition, QuickBooks Time, GoProposal, Liscio, and Zapier. It lets you automate multiple common processes and supports QuickBooks Online and Xero accounting software as well.

User-Friendliness

Karbon Practice Management is a user-friendly software designed for accounting practices. It’s well-designed and has polished features that strike a balance between simplicity and functionality.

It helps accounting firms become more efficient in managing their work with its smart feature set.

Pricing

With a price of $99/month on their Business plan, the pricing is not the cheapest. But in this case, you truly get what you pay for.

I recommend taking advantage of their free trial to see the unique capabilities that Karbon has to offer.

Check out our in-depth review of Karbon for more details.

3) Canopy

Canopy has been getting a lot of attention for a suite of amazing features that have recently hit the platform.

The company has pivoted multiple times in the past, but it seems to have landed on building out its tax and accounting practice management system.

Canopy has good features for email integration, automated file chasing, and document management for anything like a tax resolution.

Additionally, it has calendar integrations, a Client Portal feature, if-this-then-that automations (very neat), among other interesting features.

Task & Project Management Tracking

Canopy helps your team members boost their productivity and increase your revenue by enabling you to build efficient workflows.

Canopy’s Task Management Software Tool lets you assign your members to a client’s record, set dates, track the client’s task status, and add internal team members if needed. 

Canopy helps you make reminders and team up with team members and clients to accurately perform individual tasks.

Plus, it assists you in organizing client tasks in the task tab, creating a time budget for each task, and then tracking time for that budget.

Collaboration

You can effectively manage your interactions with clients through Canopy’s Client Collaboration, which lets you:

• Save and organize all client data in one place. 
• Filter clients and perform tasks for different clients at once.
• Receive custom, admin-specific notifications that inform you when a team member has a client update or when a client uploads a file or answers a request.
• Automatically send reminders for client requests.
• Access a calendar and the Client Portal feature, which allows clients to:
  • Access, share, and upload files anytime. 
  • Safely make payments and view invoices anywhere.
  • Get notifications and reminders, review files and invoices, and make payments. 
  • eSign needed documents using the mobile application. 

Time & Billing

You can easily track your time with Canopy. It comes with features that allow you to:

• Clearly view billable or non-billable saved time to clients, archived time, and your team members’ and clients’ time.
• Easily track the time your team spends on tasks and subtasks and create time budgets for these tasks. 
• Manage your time by project and client through the built-in Timer feature. The timer easily connects to your saved client and workflow information on the platform. 

Canopy also lets you invoice your accounting firm clients without switching apps. Added features are:

• A fully featured integration with QuickBooks Online (QBO), which syncs your client’s payments and deposits.
• Invoices created in Canopy can be accessed by your clients through the website and mobile Client Portal. They can also be sent out as scheduled, as a one-time or recurring invoice. 
• A Work in Progress (WIP) summary that shows the client’s fixed service rates, unbilled tasks, and your team member’s total rates. 

Reporting

Canopy’s productivity reports help you monitor your firm’s efficiency. They show you your team members’ individual tasks from clients, which can help you gauge your profit growth.

It also offers reporting features like:

• Billing reports and time reports
• A dashboard
• Tasks and client profitability
• Credit, payment, and invoice statements

Integrations

In terms of integrations, Canopy doesn’t disappoint. It integrates with platforms like:

• API Access
• Zapier
• Global Inbox
• Gmail
• QuickBooks Online Accountant
• Canopy Desktop Assistant
• Zapier

User-Friendliness

Canopy is a simple and user-friendly platform that continually improves its functionalities. It also aims to add new features for better assistance and performance.

The Client Portal feature and clients’ ability to access files with the mobile application make client work run more smoothly.

Pricing

Canopy offers packages tailored to your firm’s unique requirements.

With the 15-day free trial, you can explore Canopy’s full set of features. Canopy doesn’t ask for credit card details, so you can jump into the trial with no strings attached.

Here’s a pricing breakdown of their Practice Management Suite:

• Document Management: $40 per user/month
• Workflow: $35 per user/month
• Time & Billing: $25 per user/month

Additional services are also available. You can access transcripts and notices, tax resolution, collection cases, and knowledge-based authentication for an extra cost.Find out more about Canopy Accounting Software by checking out my review.

4) Keeper

If you’re looking for a more bookkeeping-focused practice management tool, I recommend checking out Keeper.

This app’s standout feature is how it enhances client communication.

It provides a centralized platform where you and your clients can easily communicate and share financial information.

Clients can access their financial data, receive bank statements, and manage uncategorized transactions all in one place.

This eliminates the need for back-and-forth emails and ensures that all essential information is conveniently stored and accessible.

Task & Project Management Tracking

Keeper lets users create, assign, and prioritize tasks within the platform. 

This feature simplifies the creation of to-do lists, assigning tasks to team members, setting deadlines, and tracking task statuses.

Users can also view all the tasks in your firm via the Firm Tasks tab.

Collaboration

Similar to other practice management software, Keeper allows commenting, file sharing, and real-time updates within tasks.

You can write instructions, updates, or short notes on tasks with the Notes feature.

Time & Billing

While Keeper has a time tracking feature, it’s available only for users subscribed to Keeper Premium.

You can start a task timer from any page and choose whether it’s for client or firm work.

If you’re working on a client’s close, the timer will automatically pre-fill with the relevant details, which is very convenient.

Keeper has a built-in receipt and bill processing feature, called Keeper Receipts.

It is powered by AI that allows you to collect documents from your clients, process them with customizable rules, and post them directly to your client’s QuickBooks file.

Your clients can upload files for you through the Client Portal feature or by emailing or texting you.

To receive documents by email, you can set up a unique forwarding email for each client. 

This email address is tied specifically to that client, allowing contacts, users, or even outside vendors to send documents directly to the inbox.

Reporting

One of Keeper’s more convenient features is Management Reports.

Also referred to as Financial Report or Client Financials, Management Reports include:

• A cover page
• A table of contents
• An executive summary
• Key Profit & Loss and Balance Sheet accounts

You can add client logos and your branding to your reports.

Keeper also lets you include (or exclude) reports in your client’s reporting package.

Integrations

Keeper integrates easily with Xero and Quickbooks, and can be connected to thousands of other tools via Zapier.

User-Friendliness

The browser extension enables saving and auto-filling passwords, while the reliable mobile app offers most of the desktop features.

Overall, I think Keeper provides an intuitive interface on both desktop and mobile platforms, which allows users to manage their tasks more easily across different devices.

Pricing

Keeper offers three pricing tiers.

Keeper’s pricing is competitive, with plans starting at $8 per client/month for the Standard Plan and $10 per client/month for the Premium Plan.

5) Asana

I’ll start by saying that I think Asana is probably the slickest of all the options out there. Their user interface is clean and responsive.

I also think that this system is the most different compared to the other systems discussed in this post. You’ll need to tinker around with it to make it your own as there are many possibilities for how you might use it.

While it’s certainly not geared towards accounting firms, I know many modern firms that use and love it for tax practice management, which is why I decided to include it in this article.

Task & Project Management Tracking

Honestly, I could have done a whole write-up of this section, but I decided to link to an absolutely spectacular video done by Scott Hoppe of Why Blu and how they specifically set up and use Asana in their firm for task and project management system purposes. Check out the video.

Collaboration

I think Asana is probably one of the better systems out there when it comes to collaboration, even though there isn’t a specific client portal.

As you’ll see in the video above, there are many possibilities to:

• Chat and comment on practically everything
• Manage documents (e.g., upload a tax resolution from your tax software)
• Set up a knowledge base for SOPs, templates, and anything else of interest to the firm’s internal workings
• Client management (i.e., invite guests into Asana to collaborate on work together, improving client experience)

Time & Billing

Firms looking for specific tax software or practice management when it comes to time and billing will need to look elsewhere. Asana doesn’t work with any accounting software apps, though you would be able to leverage some of their third-party integrations, namely the Harvest integration.

Reporting

Don’t expect a whole lot of reporting here for tax practice management.

Their “reporting” section contains the following reports, which are hardly reports at all:

• Tasks I’ve created
• Tasks I’ve assigned
• Recently completed tasks

If you are looking for reporting options, they have 25+ third-party reporting apps that can integrate with Asana.

Integrations

Asana really shines here. Small business owners will appreciate the ability to automate a whole bunch of workflows by leveraging available third-party integrations, including most of the best accounting software for small businesses. There are probably over 100 that you can use.

If you’re an Ignition user, be sure to check out this article from Brian Clare of Blueprint Accounting and how he automates the creation of tasks from an accepted engagement letter.

User-Friendliness

The app is sleek, modern, and fast. I think it’s a pretty easy app to use once you have it set up. 

The configuration of this app is really meant for people who want a personalized approach to their accounting practice management software, whereas some of the other apps on the list kind of fit you into a box.

I can see why there are a bunch of modern firms that enjoy Asana. That said, it’s not for everyone. 

The question is, are you willing to create your own templates and workflows for accounting tasks like tax resolution? Or would you rather use accounting-specific software with pre-built templates?

Pricing

Pricing is reasonable with free trials on all plans:

6) Jetpack Workflow

Jetpack Workflow (JPW) is geared specifically for accounting firms and tax practice management (and it shows).

I’m pretty confident this app will provide the vast majority of what an accounting firm needs from an accounting practice management software.

As soon as you log in, you’re presented with a functioning dashboard—one I prefer over several.

The widgets (which can be toggled between tasks, jobs, and team members) are simple and made a lot of sense for what I’d want to get a bird’s eye view on:

The navigation bar is straightforward as well:

• Dashboard: Gives you a bird’s eye view of the jobs and hours of your team.
• Jobs: You can access all the jobs, tasks, and templates here.
• Calendar: Deadlines are highlighted in a calendar format.
• Clients: Information about your clients is available on this tab, including the jobs and tasks associated with them.
• Reports: Provides progress reports on the jobs and tasks for a specified period.

Under your profile name on the right, you’ll see:

• A workflow library: This contains prepopulated templates for your firm to use, some more helpful than others.
• Settings: This includes some of the more basic settings around, which is not a bad thing

Also, the terminology within the app is exactly what you’d expect. There’s no big learning curve. You’ll have jobs and tasks within those jobs. That’s it.

It’s also worth noting that JPW allows good flexibility with setting user permissions:

Task & Project Management Tracking

Adding and tracking work is simple.

You don’t need to set up templates first, but I recommend it. With templates, repetitive tasks like tax resolution or (as seen below) a month-end close become much more manageable.

Here’s one I set up pretty easily:

You can configure templates to be recurring, and I like how you can set a final review of the job to be required before it can be completed, which is a typical financial management step in an accounting firm.

Once the templates have been set up, you can add them to the small businesses you service.

Inside a job, you’ll see this view:

A few interesting things here:

• The right side is where you can chat back and forth with your team on the job.
• You can set time budgets, the in-date, and expected turnaround time, which many firms want to track.
• There’s a time tracker you can expand.
• At the bottom is a straightforward task view.

There are also job statuses that you can set to display the task’s current stage in a workflow:

While the statutes don’t change automatically based on certain actions (like in Karbon) I do enjoy how they appear in the dashboard view.

I also appreciate the ability to filter between them in the “Jobs” view within the Jobs tab:

Collaboration

I think that JPW provides some great collaboration and document management possibilities. This collaborative element is essential for multi-layered tasks like tax resolution or year-end reporting.

Within the settings, you can change the kind of email notifications you and your team receive, which I think are quite pertinent for accounting firms providing financial management:

Time & Billing

If time tracking is important for your accounting and tax practice management, then Jetpack Workflow has you covered here. Time can be added at a job level.

To see the recorded time, however, you’d need to download a report.

And for billing, you’d need to look elsewhere, unfortunately.

Reporting

Reporting is basic with this web-based app, although I think the dashboard and jobs list provide most of what most firms will need.

There is a project report that gives another overview of how tasks are going:

You also have a few other reports that you can manually download in Excel if you want to manipulate the data.

Lastly, I like how the dashboard represents things in terms of hours overdue and hours expected to be due in the week. This is helpful for capacity planning.

Integrations

JPW doesn’t have a lot of integrations that you can leverage for tax practice management or accounting software.

If you use time tracking, you can integrate JPW with QuickBooks Online accounting software to synchronize that time.

There are also the Gmail and Outlook integrations previously discussed.

User-Friendliness

One of my favorite things about Jetpack Workflow is how easy I found this cloud-based app to use.

Some cloud-based apps require a much more complex setup and learning period. They may come with other benefits, but if you’re looking for something simple, Jetpack Workflow is hard to beat for tax practice management.

Pricing

You’ll find that as with Jetpack Workflow’s other aspects, pricing is simple. They offer a free trial too:

To learn more about JPW, check out our in-depth review.

7) Client Hub

Client Hub was designed with accountants in mind, so you can expect it to meet most of your needs. If you’re a new business owner, they also provide a variety of resources to help you use the system efficiently.

Credit goes to Lauren Spicer of our Future Firm Accelerate program who helped us put this section together.

Task & Project Management Tracking

You can easily create job templates in Client Hub that contain a variety of tasks, including both the client and firm duties. There is also a Kanban dashboard view to improve workflows and the overall efficiency of the firm.

Client Hub also lets you:

• Create jobs/tasks from client messages that are sent within the portal
• Publish tasks automatically once started
• Automate client reminders (one of their big features)

Collaboration

The Apps and Resources area, where users can preload links to websites and applications or upload files, is one of its users’ favorite features in the client workspace. It’s easy to share a personalized link with a specific client.

Additionally, clients can quickly log in to view their assigned tasks. They also have the option to chat via instant messaging in their workspace.

Time & Billing

Client Hub does not have time and billing features as of the time of writing.

Reporting

Client Hub does not have reporting features as of the time of writing.

Integrations

One of Client Hub’s biggest (and best) integrations is QuickBooks Online.

This system will pull in all uncategorized transactions from QuickBooks. Your clients can then provide information on these outstanding transactions so you can more efficiently reconcile them. It’s pretty slick.

User-Friendliness

The user interface is neat and easy to use. In addition, the simplicity of Client Hub’s mobile app makes it convenient for the users to explore and use. 

Pricing

Client Hub charges $59 per user/month. If choosing the annual payment option, the monthly user fees are rounded to $49 per user/month.

Here’s what’s great: there are no limits to the number of client users on the platform.

8) Aero Workflow

I’ve known about Aero Workflow’s popularity among accounting and financial management firms, but my attempt to explore and include it on this list was cut short. 

The cloud-based app proved challenging due to confusing terminology and a not-so-intuitive user interface. 

Despite its potentially useful features, especially in email integrations at an affordable price, the absence of a Xero accounting software integration and the complexity of the interface led me to discontinue my exploration. 

It might still be worth considering, particularly if QuickBooks Online integration suffices for your needs.

Task & Project Management Tracking

To ensure your firm’s efficient client services, Aero lets you track and manage your firm’s resources and your team’s productivity. 

This also helps your firm to keep your work at pace and never miss a client’s deadline.

Moreover, it includes automatic time tracking of your team members, which can help in tracking your team’s performance and your accounting firm’s potential profits.

Collaboration

Aero Template lets you create checklists of your accounting firm’s professional services. This helps your team perform tasks accurately and on-time to consistently meet client deadlines. 

Another feature of this application is the ability to delegate and schedule one-time projects or client-requested tasks to your members.

It also helps you notify and guarantee your clients that tasks are being performed and due dates will be met.

Time & Billing

Aero’s Time Notes feature can help you stay on top of tasks in your growing firm. It can also be useful in billing client tasks by the hour.

Plus, you can easily sync Aero with QBO or TSheets. 

You can use multiple time entries with Aero. Your team’s time entries can be found in Aero’s Time Tab too, meaning everything you need is in one place. 

Reporting

Reporting is made easy, accessible, and customizable with Aero. It even has a Memorize tab where you can save and bookmark your customized report for future use.

Integrations

Aero Workflow integrates with the following apps, which you can find in the Aero Library:

• Intuit QuickBooks
• Google Workspace
• Connect My SaaS
• QuickBooks Time
• Zapier
• Office 365
• Zoho Flow

User-Friendliness

To put it bluntly, I found this software tough to use.

Pricing

• Startup Plan: $108/month paid annually, or $135 paid monthly for 1-5 users.
• Growth Plan: $200/month paid annually, or $250 paid monthly for 6-25 users.
• Scaling Plan: $295/month paid annually, or $365 paid monthly for 26-50 users.

9) QuickBooks Online Accountant

QuickBooks Online Accountant is a program designed with the demands of accounting specialists in mind.

It enables you to accomplish and oversee accounting tasks for numerous client companies in one place.

This app includes task and project management tools that bookkeepers and accountants will find helpful in tasks like adjusting client transactions and reviewing books.

Task & Project Management Tracking

QuickBooks lets you:

• Create projects for recurring tasks.
• Set reminders for projects your team needs to prioritize.
• Take note of deadlines and new incoming projects.

Moreover, you can easily collaborate and assign tasks (and subtasks) to yourself and your team. 

Collaboration

QuickBooks Online Accountant has a team collaboration and client management feature that allows you to:

• Track and manage your accounting clients using QuickBooks Online with just about 2,000 clients per QBOA firm.
• Seamlessly send requests to clients and read their replies without leaving your workflow.
• Keep track of deadlines for your projects and tasks in the Work Tab.
• Collaborate and assign team members to different clients as lead accountants to contact, remind, and manage their books.
• Integrate with Slack via Zapier, allowing your team to receive timely notifications for new projects, task changes, and deadline reminders.

Time & Billing

QuickBooks Online Accountant ProAdvisor has expense tracking software that helps you and your team members effortlessly control and track every time consumed per project, billable time, and other work performed in your firm. 

Reporting

With QuickBooks Online Accountant, you can filter clients and check project progress in real time.

You’ll be able to keep tabs on project statuses and monitor due dates pretty easily, so you can catch potential issues early and keep clients in the loop.

Integrations

QuickBooks Online Accountant has good integration support. It’s compatible with various apps like:

• Ignition
• Aero Workflow
• Dext
• Fathom
• Zapier

User-Friendliness

I’ve found QuickBooks Online Accountant to be one of the most multi-functional and fully featured accounting software. 

With that said, it doesn’t compromise on user-friendliness. Collaborating with your team and clients, managing tasks, and keeping track of time and deadlines are simple.

Pricing

QuickBooks Online Accountant is free for your firm. You only need to pay when you add clients, and when offering the software to your clients either through direct billing or wholesale. 

For direct billing, your client must buy their own QuickBooks online subscription that comes with a 50% discount for the first year.

For the wholesale option, your firm should buy the QuickBooks subscription for your clients—you can save up to 50%.

10) Taxdome

TaxDome combines internal practice management with client-facing technologies on one platform, enabling businesses of all sizes to simplify their operations.

Taxdome minimizes admin work by eliminating unnecessary tools. Delegating tasks and tracking progress should be simple, and this tool’s user interface mirrors that philosophy.

Task & Project Management Tracking

With TaxDome, you can create automated workflows, called the Automove jobs feature. The app can trigger document approvals, client messaging, and more based on specific conditions.

TaxDome also helps with:

• Maintaining automatic reminders and communications with clients.
• Creating recurring tasks and schedules to avoid missed deadlines.
• Building custom templates for emails, contracts, and invoices.
• Assigning tasks, tracking time spent on tasks, and leaving work reminders for your team members. 
• Securing your firm and client’s documents with its unlimited cloud-based storage at no extra cost.
• Managing files and documents in one location with TaxDome’s virtual drive.

Collaboration

I think TaxDome’s client portal is one of its standout features.

It’s easy to use, and it secures messages, making it easy to request sensitive data from clients. Through TaxDome, your clients can upload, scan, e-sign, access, and share documents with your firm electronically.

It has an accessible document audit trail that registers when the document was opened, the modifications made, and the user.

Time & Billing

TaxDome has a time tracking feature that lets you record billable hours, leave work reminders, and monitor your members’ productivity. Its timesheet feature integrates with your firm’s billings too, allowing for more time savings. 

One of TaxDome’s interesting features is its ability to lock files to invoices — they unlock automatically once the client’s invoice is paid.

With its integration with online payment providers, your firm can accept ACH and credit card payments. Clients will appreciate the option to pay anytime and anywhere. They can also receive push notifications when invoices are due.

Reporting

TaxDome’s reports provide actionable insights through a variety of tools.

You can leverage prebuilt dashboards to track your firm’s performance metrics like revenue, task management, time allocation, and overall capacity.

The platform also features an AI-powered search function, which lets you create custom reports through natural language queries.

You can display these reports in various formats like charts, graphs, and pivot tables, making it easier to interpret the data.

Integrations

TaxDome is widely integrated with different accounting tools and other applications such as:

• Tax and bookkeeping programs: TaxWise, PROconnect, Zoho, MyTAXPrepOffice, Drake Software, Lacerte, TaxSlayer, Crosslink, TaxAct, OLT, Xero, UltraTax and QuickBooks Online
• Online payment providers: Stripe and CPA
• Email sync: Office 365, Gmail, Outlook, iCloud, and Yahoo
• Schedulers: Calendly, You Can Book Me, Schedulista, and Acuity Scheduling
• Zapier
• Cloud tax hosting providers: Verito and Right Networks

User-Friendliness

For new users and accounting business owners, TaxDome includes video tutorials to help you get acclimated to the project management tool. You can also access it anywhere with your mobile app.

Pricing

TaxDome Pro includes unlimited support, storage, clients, and advanced training sessions for $50 per month/user.

Individual users can get TaxDome Lite with a free onboarding session and unlimited storage and clients for $25/month.

11) Xero Practice Manager

Xero Practice Manager (XPM) is Xero’s rebranded version of Workflowmax, which they acquired back in 2012.

When I started my cloud-based accounting firm in 2013, I was actually on Workflowmax, so I do have some experience with this accounting practice management software.

And putting this section together was a bit of a trip down memory lane, though not totally in a completely positive way.

This system is seriously powerful. And for some firms out there, it might be the perfect match. But for firms like mine, it totally wasn’t.

When you log in, you’ll be faced with their dashboard (which still looks like it’s from 2012):

The dashboard will show:

• 2 time-based widgets
• A calendar with upcoming tasks and jobs (e.g., tax resolution due dates)
• A list view of upcoming tasks and jobs

In the navigation bar, you have a few tabs which lead to a variety of other options:

1. Client tab: This is a collection of all small businesses you service (and prospects) that can act as a CRM.
2. Jobs tab: You’re able to see jobs, tasks, upcoming schedules for jobs and tasks, and a collaboration option, which we’ll get into later.
3. Business tab: Here is where you’ll be able to see leads, quotes, WIP, invoices, timesheets, and access XPM’s settings.
4. Reports tab: You can access a variety of real-time reports here

Task & Project Management Tracking

Before starting to log and track work in Xero Practice Manager, you’ll want to first head over to the “tasks” settings and add all tasks that correspond to a job.

A job would be something like an accounting month-end close and a task would be a subset of that.

It’s not super intuitive to add subsets of a job first and then add the job after, but that’s how it’s done here.

Here I added a task called “reconcile books” which will form part of a job called “accounting month-end” where I also need to enter the cost to perform the task and the billable rate:

Once I’ve added all necessary tasks pertaining to a job (which sit in a huge, long list), I’ll then head over to “job settings” and then “job template” to set up my templates to add to clients. Here’s a basic template I created:

The weird thing is that when you add a task, then you need to add to-dos to those tasks, which are even more granular actions that one must take on the task. Not sure why these to-dos are being done at a job level and not when you create the task in the first place.

Nevertheless, once that’s done, I’m ready to start adding these to clients.

Once I’ve added the job to a client, you’ll have a ton of options:

• You’ll see info on the job
• You’ll be able to click into the navigation bar of the job to log time, add notes, add documents, and see invoices/quotes
• You have options on the left to edit the job and change the state of the job (planned, in progress, completed, etc.)

And a bit lower down, you’ll see the tasks that were in my template, which are now assigned with estimated time established:

Once all jobs are added, you can navigate to the jobs tab to see a list of everything (and get a similar view of tasks in the tasks options):

Once all jobs are added, you can navigate to the jobs tab to see a list of everything (and get a similar view of tasks in the tasks options):

By the way, recurring jobs are possible to set up on the small businesses you service, but it has to be done in a completely separate menu option within the jobs tab. Definitely not intuitive.

I’m personally not a fan of the whole setup process. But once that’s done with and once the work is added, tracking all work for accounting and tax practice management is effective.

Also, if expense management is important for you, you’ll also notice that expense management is possible within XPM.

One more thing: you’ll need to move the job through different job states (by default: planned, in-progress, on-hold, complete) which will affect how you filter through work and report on it.

Collaboration

Herein lies one of XPM’s weakest areas when it comes to a tax practice management solution, hurting the client experience.

In my opinion, there isn’t a whole lot in this cloud-based app that helps your team collaborate efficiently on work. 

If you want to communicate on tasks or jobs, you’ll, unfortunately, have to resort to email or Slack versus some of the others on this list that allow you to collaborate in-app. This was one of the reasons why I moved away from XPM.

Time & Billing

This is where XPM thrives, as I believe the platform is built specifically for time- and billing-based businesses.

There’s a dedicated timesheets section that shows logged time for a given period:

From there, you can take a look at your WIP in the dedicated WIP section and then bill it out after you’ve adjusted your invoice templates.

There are also a ton of options to compare your budgets to actuals within the job or within the report which might be interesting for tax practice management.

You might also want to use some of XPM’s quoting functionality which you can then turn into jobs and invoices.

Reporting

Here’s another very strong area for this accounting practice management software.

There are a ton of reports for you to take a look at (here’s just some of them):

And if that’s not enough, they have an incredibly powerful report builder section, which gives you tons of options to create the types of reports you want. Perfect for tax practice management.

Integrations

It goes without saying that if you’re a Xero accounting software firm, then you’ll certainly want to leverage their native integrations to push invoices through from XPM to your Xero accounting software instance. 

Naturally, though, a QuickBooks Online accounting software integration doesn’t exist.

The ability to integrate with others is not limited to accounting software. Unfortunately, many of them are likely not useful for most firms, though one with your tax software could be interesting.

One last integration worth mentioning is the Ignition integration, to help get jobs into XPM automatically once a proposal is accepted.

User-Friendliness

While this section is subjective, you can probably tell by my tone above that I’m not super thrilled with the level of user-friendliness with this accounting practice management software.

That being said, I also think that it has more power beneath the hood (for better or worse) than some of the other available options.

Pricing

Xero provides a free 30-day trial for users to explore all features before committing to a plan.

Additionally, discounts are available for users subscribing to multiple organizations under the same email address.

12) Financial Cents

Financial Cents is a user-friendly accounting practice management solution in which you can store client information, communicate with team members, track tasks, and monitor financial performance monitoring. 

The web portal facilitates client engagement, document retrieval, and interaction tracking. If you need workflow automation, Financial Cents’ practice templates streamline processes and automate repetitive tasks, making it a preferred choice for many firms.

Task & Project Management Tracking

Financial Cents’ workflow management lets you collaborate with your team members, monitor your staff, create recurring projects, and track your team’s work. It features an accounting workflow software that helps your firm:

• Make efficient workflows.
• Track important and impromptu client email requests.
• Consistently meet client deadlines. 

Moreover, it allows your firm to communicate with your clients and securely store sensitive information in one place.

Collaboration

One of Financial Cents’ best client collaboration features would be its automated reminders and sending of client proposals and request schedules of your firm. It also:

• Makes client communication faster and more efficient.
• Protects and secures your client’s information.
• Allows safe storage and sharing of client passwords within your team.

In terms of client management, Financial Cents lets you manage specific client notes and emails while tracking important emails between team members and clients.

Time & Billing

Time tracking and invoicing are easy with Financial Cents. It also helps you easily identify your most (and least) profitable clients, which I appreciate. 

As an added bonus, it synchronizes your bills for your time entries with other applications too.

Reporting

With Financial Cents’ reporting tool, you can keep track of your client’s key financial metrics and see financial projections.

Furthermore, it has a time tracking report insight feature where you can run reports to follow your firm’s payroll management, time consumed, and many more.

Integrations

Financial Cents fully integrates with QuickBooks Online.

It also has an email integration that allows you to:

• Manage your emails in the app (Gmail or Outlook)
• Merge Outlook and Gmail with its two-way sync feature
• Organize, share, and manage important client and project emails

User-Friendliness

Financial Cents is a well-ordered and easy-to-use platform. You can also view instructional videos as you start using it to help you get up to speed. 

In addition, it doesn’t require clients to create usernames and passwords, making it more client-friendly.

Pricing

Financial Cents offers affordable pricing. It starts at $23 per user/month if paid annually or $29 per user/month if paid monthly.

13) Pixie

An intuitive and user-friendly tool, Pixie provides everything you need to manage your team, clients, and workloads.

Pixie’s minimalist interface is one of its strongest features—it’s easy to navigate even for complete beginners. It also has a chat window that allows team members to communicate with clients easily.

Other features that are included in Pixie are integrated CRM, workflow management, task management, and email management.

Together, these features simplify organizing your team’s work and collecting the data you need from your clients.

Task & Project Management Tracking

Pixie provides a variety of accounting workflow management templates for starting accounting firms. These help you:

• Enhance procedures by adding links, images, directions, training videos, and checklists to projects.
• Customized workflow to align with each client’s scheduled dates.
• Control project stages to meet deadlines with efficiency.
• Automate task creation.
• Optimize communication with email templates that you can automatically send to clients.

And, you can say goodbye to screen switching—all the files, information, and emails you need to complete client tasks are conveniently stored in one central location.

Time & Billing

Although Pixie integrates with Clockify, time tracking still needs room for improvement.

Clockify does not automatically assign time records to a specified task through Zapier, which many may find complicated and time-consuming. 

Reporting

Pixie has internal notifications that inform you of read emails, tasks completed by your team, and other important work updates.

Pixie also provides custom filters by task status, task deadline, job type, and more.

With all the information you need stored in one place, accessibility isn’t a problem with Pixie. Combined with the app’s automated to-do lists, your team members can stay in control of your deadlines.  

Integrations

Pixie integrates well with proposal tools like Ignition, GoProposal, and 1000+ more apps through Zapier. Pixie connects with Gmail and Outlook too.

Additionally, it integrates with Companies House (for synchronizing your firm’s client records if you’re from the UK), Xama AML Onboarding (via Zapier), and Clockify as well. 

Pricing

Pixie’s pricing depends on the number of clients you have. It starts at $129/month for firms with fewer than 250 clients.

This app’s price may look relatively expensive at first glance, but at that price point, you get all of the features, and there are no hidden fees. Its flat-fee pricing model also allows it to scale with your firm as it grows quite well.

14) Pascal Workflow

If price is a major consideration, you’ll enjoy that Pascal Workflow has a free-forever tier for up to 5 team members.

This web-based product’s navigation and UI seem simple enough and it includes a bunch of features you might enjoy, such as being cloud-based, Karbon-type email triage, e-signed tax returns (in the US), document management for something like a tax resolution from your tax software, client portal, and more.

However, it lacks any significant accounting software integrations. This app doesn’t integrate with QuickBooks Online’s accounting system or any other of the best accounting software out there.

Task & Project Management Tracking

Keep track and save all your client’s emails, documents, information, and other interactions in one place with Pascal Workflow. It will help your members work faster and easier by:

• Keeping your team informed about their assigned daily tasks.
• Helping your team focus on productivity and hit all deadlines.
• Making all needed client information accessible to your team so they can work on tasks.
• Saving time by keeping all necessary documents in one place.

Collaboration

Pascal Workflow makes interactions much easier with the Client Portal, E-Sign, and 8879 features. The app allows you to: 

• Send finished tasks to clients
• Send tax returns to clients
• Make a clear and detailed list of tasks for clients
• Show your clients the tasks they haven’t seen, acted on, or paid
• Virtually upload documents that need the client’s signature
• Obtain your client’s e-signature on 8879 and collect required documents
• Provide step-by-step instructions on client’s forms and payment vouchers

Time & Billing

Pascal Workflow offers a feature that sets automated follow-ups and requests for missing documents from clients when you schedule tasks or subtasks. This helps your team members save time and focus on other tasks.

For every proposal accepted by your accounting firm, an automated recurring invoice is sent to your client.

Another interesting Pascal Workflow feature is the Payment Lock, which lets your clients view, share, and download the finished tasks and documents only when they have paid.

Reporting

Pascal Workflow does not have time and billing features as of the time of writing.

Integrations

Pascal Workflow has solid integrations, able to connect with Triage, Gmail, Outlook, Exchange, Google Drive, and iCloud.

Many accountants will also appreciate that it can integrate with Xero and QuickBooks.

User-Friendliness

The software is easy to understand and operate. Aside from the free price tag, the Client Portal also stands out with its utility and simplicity. 

Plus, it secures the uploaded, shared, and transmitted files between your firm and your clients.

Pricing

Pascal Workflow offers a free forever plan. I think it’s a good proposition, especially if you want to test the waters for yourself first. However, it is quite limited in terms of features.

If you want to experience its full potential, its Unlimited Plan costs $45 per month plus additional charges for premium features like unlimited proposals, client requests, and more. 

Pascal Workflow’s Plans are billed monthly, so there’s no need to worry about annual contracts.

15) BQE Core

You can literally run your entire firm off of this one piece of software if you’re accounting software-savvy.

In addition to project management, BQE Core can act as a comprehensive software for cloud-based accounting firms handling:

• Quoting and billing
• HR management
• Expense management
• Document management (e.g., upload a tax resolution from your tax software)
• Full cloud-based accounting software for small business functionalities

This system is heavily skewed towards cloud-based accounting firms and tax professionals with time-based billing.

If you’re wondering whether it integrates with popular accounting or tax software for small business products, it does integrate with QuickBooks Online accounting software and Xero accounting software.

Task & Project Management Tracking

BQE Core equips your team with tools to complete tasks on time, provide better services, and increase your accounting firm’s productivity. It also helps by allowing you to:

• Access intuitive dashboards and streamlining reports for project tracking.
• Track the task efficiency of multiple team members.
• Easily assign tasks to team members and schedule projects.
• Leverage integrated bookkeeping and project management tools, which help in managing your firm’s profitability.
• Organize and manage your firm’s budget, costs, time, schedules, and tasks saved in one accessible location.

Collaboration

BQE Core helps you get in a good position to generate sales and build good relationships between you and your clients.

It also has administrative and accounting tools that help your team work more easily. This allows you to focus on growing your firm instead of overseeing day-to-day tasks. 

Time & Billing

BQE Core keeps tools for managing your billing, time, and expenses in one place. Here are some of the things you can accomplish with these features:

• Automatically send expense reports and invoices to clients.
• Access 20 invoice types and customize invoice templates.
• Create invoices for fixed fees, hourly rates, unit costs, percentages, or cost-plus arrangements.
• Track individual payments from clients.
• Receive client payments quickly and easily with ePayments.

Reporting   

Reporting is easy with BQE Core—it has customizable dashboards in which you can feature specific reports.

Here’s why I think BQE Core’s reporting is great.

• It gives you a better view of your economic and functional service data analysis.
• Your customized reports can be easily converted to Word or Excel documents and PDFs.
• It gives you a detailed view of your team members’ productivity and billable tasks.
• You can set it to automatically share reports and task updates with clients and team members.
• It can help you increase your earnings and avoid profit loss by keeping track of your firm’s profitability, missed invoices, and financial data.

Integrations

BQE Core seamlessly integrates with several popular business tools like:

• Google
• Xero
• QuickBooks Online
• Microsoft 365
• One Drive
• Microsoft BI
• Dropbox

User-Friendliness

Ease of use is consistent. You have a single place for all your clients’ information and files that isn’t tedious to navigate.

Pricing

BQE Core’s bundle depends on the modules your accounting firm requires and the number of users. You first need to submit a pricing request before they give you a quote for the plan you need.

16) Senta

The first thing that I’ll say about Senta is that it’s a very well-thought-out piece of accounting workflow management software geared specifically for accounting firms and tax practice management.

When you first log in, you’re hit with a pretty massive, customizable dashboard where you can add and remove about 20 different kinds of widgets.

The navigation bar is simple enough:

• The “Clients” tab provides a list of all your client management records.
• The “Work” tab has a bunch of options but generally is there to show you different views of client work, tasks, and jobs outstanding.
• The “Documents” tab allows you to see all uploaded documents.
• There’s a grayed-out email icon that lights up when there are messages that need to be approved (more on that later).
• The cog icon on the right is where you’ll want to spend the majority of your time if you’re just getting set up on Senta.

While there’s a lot of data within the “Clients” and “Work” tabs, everything is highly filterable.

Senta has 3 main building blocks for your projects which you’ll need to be familiar with:

1. Services: A collection of jobs (e.g., a quarterly sales tax filing)
2. Jobs: A collection of tasks (e.g., 1 sales tax filing)
3. Tasks: An individual action within a job (e.g., send sales tax filing for review)

Task & Project Management Tracking

Before you start adding work to Senta, you’ll need to configure your task/job/service templates, as mentioned above.

When creating job templates, you’ll need to add tasks to the job.

For instance, here’s part of the client onboarding job (critical for a good client experience):

Seems simple enough, but clicking on each task brings up a variety of options.

Each task can prompt a whole slew of actions to really help you create a pretty optimized process and workflow.

You can create some powerful workflows if you set up your templates well.

From there, you would take those created jobs to set up your services and select:

• If they recur and how often
• The dates that are applicable
• Whether this service should be automatically added to each new client added (in the “General” tab)

Once that’s done, you’ll be able to start adding small businesses to the platform and then adding work to each small business client.

Here’s what a client record will look like (on the “Work” tab) which shows outstanding and upcoming jobs:

By editing the client record, you’ll be able to add services that we have already set up. And I really enjoyed the process of adding work.

As you add work, a new tab will show up in the client record, as you can see with the payroll service that I just added:

All I need to do is fill in the blanks to get this service added to the “Work” tab. The cool thing here is that these forms and the corresponding fields are fully customizable so that you’re collecting the info you need and getting your work set up properly.

As you can see, there’s a bit of setup required at the beginning, but following that, you’ll have an accounting workflow management system that’s able to track and manage work quite well.

Collaboration

Every contact that you add to Senta can be invited into this accounting workflow management solution to collaborate with you in the client portal for things like:

• Completing tasks
• Document management
• Requesting documents to be signed

Here’s what the client would see on their end in their client portal:

It’s pretty neat that I can just drag files from my desktop directly into this cloud-based app and they’ll be added to the client or job in question (if you’re on that page), which makes document management a breeze, especially through the client portal.

Time & Billing

It’s quite clear that Senta was not designed for accounting firms heavy on time and billing.

To record time, you need to enable time tracking in the settings. Adding time means you need to click on the specific job. Once that’s done, you’ll enter a few details to log time.

Under the “Work” tab in the navigation bar, you’ll then be able to see all-time client work recorded across the firm or you can view the time spent in each client record.

There are no invoicing capabilities within Senta.

Reporting

Other than some pretty basic dashboard widgets, there are not a ton of reports available, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Most of what you’d be looking for would be in the “Clients” or “Work” tab in the navigation bar. There are some pretty strong filtering abilities, which is what I would personally rely on.

One report that gives you an overview of what client work is coming up would be the “jobs summary” report, either in chart view:

Or summary view:

Integrations

In addition to being able to connect your email service to Senta, the app also integrates with multiple accounting software options:

• Xero accounting software solution
• QuickBooks Online accounting software
• GoCardless
• Ignition
• GoProposal
• Dext Precision

User-Friendliness

I thought that this workflow management software for accountants was pretty intuitive and user-friendly. However, setting it up will likely take you a bit of time to master. 

There are a bunch of things that you can toy around with, especially the client portal, but after a few hours, I felt pretty comfortable with the basics of this cloud-based app.

Pricing

Pretty simple. $29 USD per user/month and $278.40 USD per year, paid annually in advance.

17) Thomson Reuters Onvio

Here’s another more enterprise-type accounting practice management software platform that can connect to your tax software.

I don’t have a ton of experience with Onvio. While I sense that this product is geared towards more “traditional” tax practice management firms, at least it does have quite a bit of cloud-based functionality.

It integrates with:

• Dropbox for document management
• QuickBooks Online cloud-based accounting software
• Xero accounting software
• Mobile apps with document scanning, client portals, e-signatures, etc.

18) CCH iFirm

The entire process around finding information on this tax practice management software was difficult and incredibly enterprise-oriented (i.e., I need to talk to a rep to learn more), which frustrates me.

And while I know very little about CCH iFirm, the fact that I can’t see any screenshots and get virtually no information about the product online without talking to a rep, tells me about as much as I need to know about what the expected experience will probably be for tax practice management (i.e., old-school).

I wasn’t able to see if there was a QuickBooks Online accounting software or Xero accounting software integration.

While I’m sure that you’ll get functional accounting practice management software here, I just don’t get a good feeling you’re buying into a modern accounting software experience.

19) Firm 360

Designed by accountants, Firm 360 simplifies operations like billing, reporting, and client communication in a single cloud-based system accessible from anywhere.

Task & Project Management Tracking

With Firm360, you can assign tasks to specific team members, set deadlines, and track progress in real time.

You can also create automated workflows that can trigger next steps based on actions like completing tasks and client submissions.

For example, when a client uploads necessary documents through the secure portal, the system will automatically advance the project status and notify the assignee.

And with visual dashboards, you can easily see upcoming, completed, or overdue tasks. 

Client Collaboration

Clients can upload documents, sign forms electronically, and review their financial information from one accessible location.

Firm360’s client portal also logs all communication, providing an audit trail for every client interaction.

Time & Billing

Firm360 integrates time tracking directly into its billing system.

Team members can log billable hours spent on specific tasks, and the system will automatically generates invoices based on tracked time.

For flat-fee projects, firms can set up fixed billing schedules for consistent cash flow.

Reporting

This tool’s prebuilt reports has all the important metrics like revenue, expenses, and staff utilization, but it also has custom options if you want to drill down into more specific data.

Visualizations like charts and graphs make the data easier to interpret, so you can identify bottlenecks or growth opportunities.

User-Friendliness

Firm360 was developed for accountants by a group of accountants.

It’s designed so that if you’re an accountant, you’ll quickly recognize tools you need to do your most important work.

Features like drag-and-drop file organization and customizable workflows let you tweak the platform to your firm’s needs rather than forcing yourself to fit its mold.

Pricing

Firm360 does not publicly list detailed pricing information on their website.

To get specific pricing for your firm, you’ll need to contact their team directly.

And Now It’s Your Turn…

I hope you enjoyed this accounting practice management software roundup post.

And now I’d like to hear from you.

Which system do you think is the best accounting solution for your firm?

Do you disagree with anything I’ve said?

Am I missing anything?

Comment below to let me know!

Want 19 Templates To Save Time In
Your Firm?

​

Type your email below, and I’ll send you 19 of
my favorite templates to help you save time on marketing, hiring, and client management.

​

Get 19 Time-Saving Templates 

We respect your privacy. Unsubscribe at any time.

Want 19 Templates To Save Time In
Your Firm?

​

Type your email below, and I’ll send you 19 of
my favorite templates to help you save time on marketing, hiring, and client management.

​

Get 19 Time-Saving Templates

We respect your privacy. Unsubscribe at any time.