Accounting Software for Small Businesses: An Honest Comparison
What Xero, QuickBooks, FreshBooks and a spreadsheet each really cost once you add users, payroll and your bookkeeper's time.
11 min read
For owners, operators and independent professionals
What a website quote should actually contain. What a click is worth before you set a Google Ads budget. What accounting software costs once payroll and your bookkeeper's time are in the total. What your own hour has to earn.
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Cash flow, ROI, loan payments, valuation, debt, profit, markup and growth — each one runs in your browser and gives you a straight answer.
What Xero, QuickBooks, FreshBooks and a spreadsheet each really cost once you add users, payroll and your bookkeeper's time.
11 min read
Real price bands, what drives them, and the line items worth paying for versus the ones quietly padding quotes.
12 min read
How to work backwards from your average job value to a daily budget, and what to do in the first 30 days.
11 min read
The billable-hours arithmetic most freelancers get wrong, and how to price from target income instead of guesswork.
10 min read
Seven measures that stop the attacks small businesses actually experience, in the order worth doing them.
10 min read
Tools that earn their monthly fee
What a site should cost and do
Spend that can be measured
Pricing, cash flow and process
Prices are taken from vendors' own published rates, quotes owners have shared with us, and figures we have worked through ourselves — and each guide says which is which. Every calculation on the site is shown rather than asserted, so you can swap in your own numbers and disagree with ours. Pages carry the date they were last checked. Coverage is not for sale; the editorial policy sets out the rest, including how we are paid.