5 Best Accounting Software Programs for Freelancers in 2022
Tim is a Certified QuickBooks Time (formerly TSheets) Pro, QuickBooks ProAdvisor, and CPA with 25 years of experience. He brings his expertise to Fit Small Business’s accounting content.
Mark has researched and reviewed accounting software at Fit Small Business since 2019 and has developed an extensive knowledge of accounting software features and how unique business needs determine the best accounting software.
This article is part of a larger series on Accounting Software.
The best accounting software for freelancers and self-employed workers must be easy to use since many don’t have deep knowledge of accounting and more valuable things to do than bookkeeping. Moreover, it should have essential general accounting functions, like expense tracking and reporting, and features useful to freelancers, such as tax calculation, mileage tracking, and invoice tracking.
- Zoho Books: Best overall accounting software for freelancers (4.43 out of 5)
- QuickBooks Online: Best for collecting sales taxes and scanning receipts (4.31 out of 5)
- FreshBooks: Best for service- or project-based freelancers (4.27 out of 5)
- QuickBooks Self-Employed: Best for tracking profits and preparing tax returns (3.57 out of 5)
- Lendio Accounting (formerly Sunrise): Best free accounting software for freelancers (3.50 out of 5)
Comparison of Best Accounting Software for Freelancers
| Pricing ($/Month) | Number of Users | Track Expenses | Create Recurring Invoices | Enter Bills From the Mobile App | Call a Support Agent Directly | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 |
$0 to $275 |
1 to 15 |
✓ |
✓ |
✓ |
✓ |
| Visit Zoho Books | ||||||
 |
$30 to $200 |
1 to 25 |
✓ |
✓ |
✕ |
✕ |
| Visit QuickBooks Online | ||||||
 |
$15 to $55+ |
1 |
✓ |
✓ |
✓ |
✕ |
| Visit FreshBooks | ||||||
 |
$15 to $35 |
1 |
✓ |
✕ |
✕ |
✕ |
| Visit QuickBooks Self-Employed | ||||||
 |
$0 or $19.99 |
1 or unlimited |
✓ |
✓ |
✓ |
✕ |
| Visit Lendio Accounting | ||||||
Answer a few questions about your business, and we'll give you a personalized product match.
Zoho Books: Best Overall Accounting Software for Freelancers
Zoho Books is our best overall accounting software for the self-employed because of its strong feature set, capable mobile app, and excellent customer support. It allows you to create and send invoices and track time and project expenses. What’s more, it’s free if your revenue is less than $50,000 per year. When you upgrade to one of its paid plans, you’ll get access to live chat and the option to call a customer support agent, which is rarely offered by accounting software providers.
Zoho Books
Overall Score: 4.43
OUT OF 5
What We Like
- Customer service by telephone
- Manage sales tax collections
- Track time and expenses and add easily to an invoice
- Track project profitability
What's Missing
- Additional charge for receipt capture
- Cannot transfer income/expense to Schedule C
- Cannot calculate quarterly estimated tax payments
Plans & Pricing*
- Free: For businesses with less than $50,000 in annual revenues (includes one user plus one accountant and up to 1,000 invoices per year)
- Standard: $20 per month; limited to three users and 5,000 invoices
- Professional: $50 per month; limited to five users with unlimited invoices
- Premium: $70 per month; limited to 10 users
- Elite: $150 per month; limited to 10 users (includes advanced inventory)
- Ultimate: $275 per month; limited to 15 users
*Elite and Ultimate were added in 2022. Elite offers improved inventory management functions like serial number tracking, while Ultimate includes advanced analytics like collaborative reporting.
Add-ons:
- Additional users: $3 per user monthly
- Receipts scanning: $10 for 50 scans per month
- Snail mail credits for sending invoices: $2 per credit
Standout Features
- Mobile app: Zoho Books has a functional mobile app, which is useful for freelancers who often work out of their home or office space. The app lets you enter bills, send invoices, capture expense receipts, and record time worked using your smartphone.
- Project tracking: Keep track of billable hours and bill clients for expenses incurred in projects. With Zoho Book’s project tracking, you can monitor costs and profits arising from each project accurately.
- Telephone support: With other similar software like QuickBooks Online, you’ll have to submit a ticket first and wait for a call from an agent. With Zoho Books, you can directly make a call, which is helpful if you encounter serious issues that need to be resolved immediately.
Expert Opinion
If you’re a freelancer, it’s a relief that you can stay on top of your profit and expenses anytime and anywhere using Zoho Books’ mobile app. The availability of telephone support is also useful, especially since many freelancers don’t have bookkeeping experience. If you encounter issues with your books, then you can instantly call a support agent for help.
QuickBooks Online: Best for Collecting Sales Taxes & Scanning Receipts
QuickBooks Online’s ability to automatically calculate sales tax to apply to an invoice makes it our top choice for freelancers needing to collect taxable payments. It will accumulate your liability by jurisdiction, help you file the sales tax return, and let you upload receipts to the banking center where the receipt is read and matched to an existing transaction or added as a new one.
QuickBooks Online
Overall Score: 4.31
OUT OF 5
What We Like
- Manage sales tax with automatic sales tax rates based on the customer address
- Includes receipt capture to generate transactions from uploaded receipts
- Track time and expenses and add to customer invoices (requires Essentials)
- Track miles with mobile app automatically
What's Missing
- No customer service telephone number
- Must subscribe to expensive Plus version to track project profitability
- Cannot calculate quarterly tax payments or transfer information to Schedule C
QuickBooks Online Pricing
- Simple Start (recommended for most freelancers): $30 per month for one user
- Essentials: $55 per month for three users
- Plus: $85 per month for five users
- Advanced: $200 per month for 25 users
New users can choose between 50% off for three months or a 30-day free trial with no credit card required.
Standout Features
- Receipt scanning: With QuickBooks Online, you can scan receipts for operating expenses and billable expenses and attach actual receipts to your expense entries for documentation purposes. With just your smartphone camera, you can capture receipts and match them with expense entries easily.
- Sales tax tracking: With QuickBooks, you can track and manage your sales taxes in every transaction. QuickBooks will apply the correct sales tax automatically based on the transaction address you provide.
- Mileage tracking: As a freelancer, you need to travel to give the best service to your clients. You can use QuickBooks Online’s mileage tracking to stay on top of your mileage expenses for client billing. You can also account for non-billable mileage expenses to track your expenses and profit.
- QuickBooks Pro Advisors: If you don’t have time to maintain your books, you can hire an independent QuickBooks Pro Advisor who is trained and certified by QuickBooks.
Expert Opinion
If you need help with collecting sales taxes and organizing your expenses, then QuickBooks Online, our best small business accounting software, is the best solution for you. In today’s digital age, the ability to organize digital receipts is crucial so that you don’t have to scour through pages or emails looking for every sales receipt you’ve received.
FreshBooks: Best for Service- or Project-based Freelancers
FreshBooks does a great job of tracking the number of hours spent on a project. The project module is directly tied to its invoicing feature, so you can easily create invoices from a time entry. The platform also includes collaboration tools that allow you to chat with team members. You can even compare estimated and actual project costs—something you can’t do with other software, like QuickBooks Online.
FreshBooks
Overall Score: 4.27
OUT OF 5
What We Like
- Excellent project management tool
- Track mileage on mobile app
- Customer service by telephone
- Track hours and expenses and add to invoices
What's Missing
- Required to subscribe to an expensive premium plan for unlimited billable customers
- No expense or income tracking by class
- Receipt capture doesn’t generate new transactions
- Must connect bank account to track checking transactions accurately
Plans & Pricing
- Lite: $15 per month for five billable clients
- Plus: $30 per month for 50 billable clients
- Premium: $55 per month unlimited billable clients
- Select: Custom pricing for unlimited billable clients and specialized features
FreshBooks is offered at 70% off for three months for new users.
Add-ons:
- Additional team members: $10 per person monthly
- Gusto Payroll (billed separately by Gusto)
- Advanced payments: $20 per month (for Plus, Premium, and Select plans only)
Standout Features
- Time and project tracking: FreshBooks’ time and project tracking features are among the reasons we recommend this software for freelancers. In addition to monitoring billable time, you can communicate with team members and compare actual versus estimated costs per project to evaluate your efficiency in performing work.
- Customizable and recurring invoices: You can personalize your invoices before submitting them to clients. Moreover, you can let FreshBooks handle recurring invoices so that you won’t have to do it on a monthly or weekly basis.
- Payment reminders: There’s no need to send hundreds of emails or spend hours calling your clients—FreshBooks will automatically send them customized reminders.
Expert Opinion
FreshBooks’ excellent time tracking and project management tool makes it a great option for freelancers who charge based on the number of hours they spend on a project. Another benefit is that you don’t have to purchase and use a separate tool for communication, as it has integrated collaborative tools that let you talk to your team members even when they’re on the field.
QuickBooks Self-Employed: Best for Tracking Profit & Preparing Tax Returns
QuickBooks Self-Employed makes it easy for freelancers to compile their income and expenses. It imports your bank account activity and allows you to separate your income and expenses between personal and business. While it has no assisted tax filing service, it offers some tax tracking features and tools that allow you to estimate your taxes prior to paying and filing.
QuickBooks Self-Employed
Overall Score: 3.57
OUT OF 5
What We Like
- Inexpensive and easy to use
- Calculate quarterly estimated tax payments
- Transfers income and loss information to TurboTax (requires the TurboTax bundle)
- Mobile app tracks miles and saves receipt images
What's Missing
- Invoice functionality is very limited
- No telephone number for customer service
- Doesn’t track assets and liabilities for a balance sheet
Plans & Pricing
- Self-Employed: $15 per month for one user
- Self-Employed Tax Bundle (recommended for most freelancers): $25 per month for one user
- Includes Intuit TurboTax Self-Employed, online quarterly tax payments, and transfer of income/loss information
- Self-Employed Live Tax Bundle: $35 per month for one user
- Includes Intuit TurboTax Live Self-Employed, which provides unlimited year-round advice from a live certified public accountant (CPA), enrolled agent, or lawyer.
Bundling with TurboTax allows for easier tax return preparation, but subscribing to the base self-employed package and choosing different business tax software could save you some money. QuickBooks Self-Employed offers a 30-day free trial.
Standout Features
- Sales tax tracking: QuickBooks Self-Employed will help you track sales tax collected so you know how much to pay the state or local government. While it has an assisted filing feature, it doesn’t mean that QuickBooks Self-Employed files your tax returns. Instead, QuickBooks Self-Employed provides information that you can include in your tax returns upon completion of the forms.
- Income tax tracking: QuickBooks Self-Employed estimates how much income tax you should pay to the IRS each quarter and then will automatically transfer your information to TurboTax to you in the preparation of your return.
- Expense tracking: Expenses pile up and eat away most of your profit if you don’t track them properly. With QuickBooks Self-Employed, you can track your expenses by category and auto-sort them in search of tax-deductible expenses. With this feature, you can maximize your deductions and pay less tax.
- Mileage tracking: Tracking mileage is tedious if done manually. However, you get a mileage tracker with QuickBooks Self-Employed. Using automatic mileage tracking, you can use your smartphone’s GPS to track your miles. You can also classify business and personal trips with just a swipe.
Our Expert Opinion
If all you want to do is compile your net profit to file a tax return, then QuickBooks Self Employed is an inexpensive and easy way to do so.
Lendio Accounting: Best Free Accounting Software for Freelancers
Freelancers who are just starting out can save money by using Lendio Accounting (formerly Sunrise). It offers a free plan that allows you to manage your income and expenses and create and send invoices. There are some other free accounting solutions on the market, but Lendio Accounting is extremely generous as it contains almost all of the program’s paid features.
Lendio Accounting
Overall Score: 3.50
OUT OF 5
What We Like
- Offers a free plan that contains almost all of Lendio’s paid features
- Mobile app performs most accounting functions, including attaching images of receipts
- Ability to create recurring invoices
- Set up taxing authorities and manage sales tax manually
What's Missing
- Cannot track or input business miles
- Cannot extract data from captured receipts to create new transactions
- Cannot track project profitability
Plans & Pricing
- Free: Free forever for one user
- Plus: $19.99 per month for unlimited users and companies
Features
- Competitive free plan: With the free subscription, you can do the bookkeeping yourself—manage income and expenses, send invoices and estimates, and generate an income statement. It fits the needs of freelancers with small businesses perfectly.
- Customized invoices: Invoicing is an important feature for freelancers—and Lendio lets you customize your invoices and make them look professional and personalized. Moreover, the recurring invoices in the Plus tier ensure you don’t miss a payment from clients.
- Accounts payable (A/R) tracking: Lendio Accounting allows you to create new bills and track past-due bills. Unless you don’t need to create recurring bills and apply vendor credits towards unpaid bills, you should do well with Lendio Accounting.
- Sales tax tracking: With Lendio, you can set up multiple sales tax items that you can include in your invoice depending on the location of your customer. Sales taxes will be accumulated by item so that you can easily determine how much you need to pay when your tax return is due.
- Reporting: Lendio enables you to run basic reports, like cash flow statements, balance sheets, and profit and loss statements. If needed, you can also create custom reports, such as expenses by vendor and transaction lists by customer.
- Mobile app: You can use the Lendio Accounting mobile app to send invoices, enter bill payments, accept payments online, and capture expense receipts.
Our Expert Opinion
Lendio Accounting is a good accounting solution with a great version that’s free forever. While it does have a paid plan for $19.95, the free subscription has most of the features a freelancer will ever need. You can send and track invoices, manage unpaid bills, import bank transactions, and perform bookkeeping on the go with its great mobile app.
Tip:
Check out our 10 key bookkeeping tips for self-employed and freelancers so that you can stay on top of every aspect of your business.
How We Evaluated Accounting Software for Freelancers
We considered a wide range of software, based on pricing, features, ease of use, and our own expert analysis. We also evaluated features that are useful specifically to freelancers, such as the ability to transfer information to their Schedule C tax returns. We applied a lower weight (or no weight) to features that may not be relevant to freelancers.
20%
Pricing
25%
Ease of Use
20%
General Features
15%
Freelancer Feature
20%
Expert Evaluation
20% of Overall Score
The most important factors in our pricing score for freelancer software were the price and the availability of a month-to-month subscription. Software that included unlimited transactions was also given a slight advantage, but no weight was given to the number of users since freelancers generally only require one user.
25% of Overall Score
Ease of use includes a subjective evaluation by our accounting expert, but also the availability of customer service, the difficulty in activating online payments, and whether the software requires installation on a local computer.
20% of Overall Score
General features include items that would be expected of any modern bookkeeping software, but those items were weighted according to their importance to freelancers. For example, a good mobile app is important, while payroll and tracking inventory are not.
15% of Overall Score
Freelancer features are items not included in general features that are especially useful for freelancers, such as calculating estimated tax, transferring income/expense to schedule C, tracking mileage, and recurring invoices.
20% of Overall Score
Our expert evaluation is a subjective analysis of the software’s features and mobile app. It also includes the availability of bookkeeping assistance from third parties.
*Percentages of overall score
Features to Look For in Freelance Accounting Software
As self-employed individuals who provide services to multiple companies, freelancers have different requirements for accounting software than most businesses. For example, since freelancers don’t generally have employees, they don’t value integrated payroll when evaluating accounting software. Other features are especially important for freelancers, such as the ability to track time and expenses to bill clients.
Freelance Accounting Software Features | |
|---|---|
Important | Less Important |
Great mobile app with receipt capture and mileage tracking | Payroll integration |
Professional invoices | Inventory tracking |
Manage sales tax if providing a taxable service | Advanced tracking of income and expense by location or class |
Assign hours and expenses to customers | Multiple users |
Track project profitability for fixed-fee contracts | |
Transfer income and expense to Schedule C | |
Calculate quarterly income tax payments | |
If you need more features than a typical freelancer, such as payroll or inventory tracking, see our guide to the best small business accounting software.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Can I use QuickBooks as a freelancer?
Yes, QuickBooks Self-Employed at $15 per month is designed exclusively for freelancers. However, you may wish to use QuickBooks Online Simple Start for $30 per month if you send many invoices to customers.
What is the simplest bookkeeping software?
While not as feature-packed as QuickBooks Online, many freelancers love FreshBooks for its simplicity and great customer service.
Bottom Line
While Zoho Books is our highest-rated accounting software for freelancers, QuickBooks Online might be better for freelancers who want to scan receipts or are required to collect sales taxes from their customers. FreshBooks is great for project or service-based freelancers, whereas Lendio Accounting provides a nice list of features for free. Finally, for freelancers who only want to compile their income and expenses and file a tax return, QuickBooks Self-Employed may be optimal.
