Freelancers need an accounting software program that can help them organize their transactions without giving them a headache. Since some freelancers don’t have deep knowledge of accounting, the best accounting software must be easy to use, even for nonaccountants. Moreover, it should have features, such as expense tracking, receipt scanning, project and time tracking, and report generation.
Let’s check out our choices for top accounting software for freelancers in 2022:
- Zoho Books: Best overall accounting software for freelancers (4.43 of 5 points)
- QuickBooks Online: Best for freelancers collecting sales tax or scanning receipts (4.31 of 5 points)
- FreshBooks: Best for comprehensive and customizable invoices (4.27 of 5 points)
- QuickBooks Self-Employed: Best for tracking freelance profit and filing a tax return easily (3.57 of 5 points)
- Sunrise: Best free accounting software for freelancers (3.50 of 5 points)
Top Accounting Software for Freelancers Compared
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Monthly Price | $0 to $70 | $25 to $180 | $15 to $50 plus custom pricing | $15 to $35 | $0 and $19.99 |
Number of Users Included | 1 to 10 | 1 to 25 | 1 | 1 | 1 to unlimited |
Mileage tracking | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | N/A |
Time Tracking | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | N/A | N/A |
Project Tracking | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | N/A | N/A |
Expense Tracking | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
Customizable Invoices | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
Receipt Scanning | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
Invite an Accountant | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
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Zoho Books: Best Overall Accounting Software for Freelancers
Zoho Books
What We Like
- Customer service by telephone
- Manage sales tax collections
- Track time and expenses and easily add 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
Zoho Books Pricing
- Free: Free for businesses with less than $50,000 in revenue per year
- Standard: $20 per organization monthly
- Professional: $50 per organization monthly
- Premium: $70 per organization monthly
Add-ons:
- $3 per additional user monthly
- 50 auto-scans per month at $10
- $2 per snail mail for sending customers’ invoices
Features
- Client and Vendor portal: Customers and vendors can view their transactions in a dedicated portal, which allows you to coordinate with them easily. In the customer portal, you can send estimates, collect payments, and send invoices. In the vendor portal, your suppliers can upload bills and send statements of account.
- Automation: Eliminate repetitive tasks with Zoho Book’s automation workflow. Say goodbye to repetitive transactions by using recurring invoices, bills, and journal entries.
- Multiple reports: With Zoho Books, you can generate different kinds of reports, from basic financial statements to specialized financial reports. Analyze tax liability or product performance with these special reports.
- 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 profit arising from each project accurately.
Our Expert Opinion
Zoho Books received our best overall score when evaluating accounting software for the needs of freelancers. It scored high in ease of use because customer support is available by either live chat or phone—something that is becoming rare among accounting software companies. If you’re a freelancer, you’ll love that you can set up recurring invoices and accept payments online easily from Zoho’s great mobile app. The mobile app also tracks your business mileage and allows you to create transactions by taking pictures of receipts.
Zoho Payroll isn’t yet available in all states, but most freelancers don’t have employees. QuickBooks Online is a good alternative if you do have employees.
QuickBooks Online: Best for Freelancers Collecting Sales Tax or Scanning Receipts
QuickBooks Online
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
PricingQuickBooks Online Pricing
- Simple Start (recommended for most freelancers): $25 per month for one user
- Essentials: $50 per month for three users
- Plus: $80 per month for five users
- Advanced: $180 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.
Features
- Estimates: Sending estimates to clients is an important part of most freelancing jobs. With QuickBooks, you can create professional, customized estimates that can help boost your credibility and confidence as a freelancer.
- 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.
- 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: Tax is something that most freelancers struggle with due to its tedious procedural requirements. In 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.
- 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.
Our Expert Opinion
All editions of QuickBooks Online come with an outstanding feature that pulls the correct sales tax rate automatically to apply based on the address of the customer. In addition, it will accumulate your liability by jurisdiction and even help you file the sales tax return. All editions also come with a great mobile app with the ability to perform virtually any bookkeeping function, including tracking miles, sending invoices, recording online payments, and uploading receipts to generate transactions.
Instead of a customer support phone number, QuickBooks requires customers to contact them through the QuickBooks Online program. If customer service is important to you, FreshBooks’ customer service has a good reputation and is accessible by phone.
FreshBooks: Best for Comprehensive and Customizable Invoices
FreshBooks
What We Like
- Incredible-looking invoices
- 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
FreshBooks Pricing
- Lite: $15 per month for five billable clients and one user
- Plus (recommended for most freelancers): $25 per month for 50 billable clients and one user
- Premium: $50 per month for unlimited billable clients and one user
- Select: Custom pricing for unlimited billable clients and specialized features
FreshBooks provides a 30-day free trial with no credit card required.
Add-ons:
- Additional team member at $10 per month
- Gusto Payroll (separately billed from Gusto)
- Advanced payments at $20 per month (for Plus, Premium, and Select plans only)
Features
- Customizable and recurring invoices: One of FreshBooks’ strengths is its professional-looking invoices. This feature allows freelancers to personalize their 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: Freelancing means you do all the busywork. With FreshBooks, you can simplify payment reminders to forgetful clients. No need to send hundreds of emails or spend hours calling your client’s mobile. FreshBooks will send customized reminders to your clients automatically.
- Time and project tracking: FreshBooks’ time and project tracking feature is one of the reasons we recommend this software for freelancers. Considering that tracking billable hours and expenses is important when sending invoices to clients, we recommend FreshBooks to freelancers because it can assist in making time tracking easy. Aside from that, you can compare actual versus estimated costs per project to evaluate your efficiency in performing work.
- Easy payments: FreshBooks can accept credit cards from clients to make payments faster and easier. You can also set recurring payments, which are directly charged to your client’s credit cards—there’s no need to bill them monthly.
- Basic reporting features: With FreshBooks, you can generate basic financial statements and reports like profit or loss statements, general ledger, aging schedules, and sales tax summaries. In case you don’t have time to do the books, FreshBooks also has a feature called “Accountant Access” so your accountant can access your account and manage it.
Our Expert Opinion
FreshBooks has the most customizable invoices of all accounting software we’ve reviewed. FreshBooks’ invoice generator enables users to create invoices that reflect their business personality and branding. Time and expenses can be added to customer invoices automatically, and invoices can be designated as recurring to minimize your monthly work. FreshBooks is also a capable bookkeeping system with a great mobile app that allows you to issue invoices, track mileage, and attach images of receipts to your existing transactions.
Assigning transactions to checking and cash accounts in FreshBooks is part of the reconciliation process, which requires a live bank connection. If you’re unwilling or unable to allow FreshBooks access to your bank account, then you should choose QuickBooks Online. While QuickBooks allows a bank connection, it’s not required to fully utilize the features.
QuickBooks Self-Employed: Best Accounting Software for Freelancers to Track Profit and File a Tax Return Easily
QuickBooks Self-Employed
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
QuickBooks Self-Employed 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 a different business tax software could save you some money. QuickBooks Self-Employed offers a 30-day free trial.
Features
- 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 bill them to clients when appropriate. Moreover, QuickBooks Self-Employed auto-sorts your expenses 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.
- Receipt scanning: With the QuickBooks app, you can scan receipts and match them to your expenses. No need to keep physical receipts only to find out that they’ve faded over time. Instead, you can scan them using QuickBooks and store them in the cloud for safekeeping. And if the IRS asks for copies, you can confidently produce the receipts without worry.
- Tax tracking and assisted filing: QuickBooks Self-Employed has tax tracking features that estimate and account for your tax obligations. This feature helps you project how much you’ll pay to the IRS when filing taxes. However, its assisted filing feature 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.
Our Expert Opinion
QuickBooks Self-Employed is one of the easiest ways for freelancers to compile their income and expenses, but the program does little else. It imports your bank account activity and allows you to separate your income and expenses between personal and business. You can email invoices and accept online payments but, otherwise, the invoicing functionality is very limited. For instance, you cannot save customer or product/service information, so you’ll need to retype it on each invoice. Also, payments from invoices don’t flow to your profit and loss (P&L) report. P&L is calculated strictly from the bank accounts you connect to the software and transactions you manually input.
In addition to a poor invoicing function, QuickBooks Self-Employed is missing many features that freelancers might need, such as managing sales tax, tracking assets and liabilities, managing unpaid bills, and tracking project profitability. However, if all you want to do is compile your net profit to file a tax return, QuickBooks Self Employed is an inexpensive and easy way to do so. For more features like simple accounting with project management, FreshBooks is our next best recommendation for you.
Sunrise: Best Free Accounting Software for Freelancers
Sunrise
What We Like
- Mobile app performs most accounting functions, including attaching images of receipts
- Send nice-looking invoices, including recurring invoicing
- 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
Sunrise Pricing
- Self-Service: Free
- Sunrise Plus: $19.99 per month
You can try Sunrise Plus for 14 days. Sunrise offers monthly bookkeeping assistance with plans starting at $149 per month. However, there is no obligation to purchase bookkeeping assistance to use the free software.
Features
- Free self-service plan: With the free plan, you can do the bookkeeping yourself—manage income and expenses, send invoices and estimates, and generate an income statement. Sunrise’s free plan perfectly fits the needs of freelancers with small businesses.
- Customized invoices: Invoicing is an important feature for freelancers. Sunrise lets you customize your invoices and make them look professional and personalized. Moreover, the recurring invoices in Sunrise Plus make sure that you don’t miss a payment from clients.
- Assisted bookkeeping: Bookkeeping can take up much of your time—Sunrise offers the services of a personal bookkeeper to manage your books. This feature is separately priced but helpful for freelancers who can afford the extra expense.
Our Expert Opinion
Sunrise by Lendio is a good online bookkeeping program with a great free version. Sunrise makes money by selling bookkeeping services to accompany its software. However, if you’re comfortable using the software yourself, it’s free forever. Sunrise 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.
You’ll need to print a P&L statement to calculate your quarterly estimated tax payments and file your annual tax return. Since you can’t input business miles driven, you’ll need to calculate the deduction manually and make a journal entry to record the expense on your books. However, for freelancers who don’t mind a few manual calculations, this free software will work great. Consider QuickBooks Self-Employed for help calculating your taxes due and tracking mileage.
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.
Here is a summary of accounting software features that most freelancers will find either important or unimportant:
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.
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 return. We applied a lower weight (or no weight) to features unimportant to freelancers.
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.
Bottom Line
We’ve rated five great accounting software programs based on how well they meet the unique accounting needs of freelancers. While Zoho Books is our highest-rated accounting software for freelancers, QuickBooks Online also scored extremely well and will be a better fit than Zoho Books for freelancers who scan over 50 receipts per month or are required to collect sales tax from their customers. FreshBooks is great for freelancers wanting the most customizable invoices, while Sunrise 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 might be best.
