Practice Management software for accounting firms

Decide first whether you are buying a workflow tracker or the firm's client system of record, because they are priced similarly and do very different jobs. Jetpack Workflow at $40 to $50 per user per month tracks jobs and has no client portal, document requests or e-signature at all. Karbon, Canopy, TaxDome, Client Hub and Financial Cents all want to be where the client logs in. Buy a tracker while you still need a portal and you have committed to running two systems.

Look hard at the pricing unit, because it changes the answer by an order of magnitude at 12 staff. Canopy Premium at $149 per user per month is about $21,500 a year. Aero Workflow charges a flat $200 a month on annual billing for 6 to 25 users. Zoho Practice prices per organization rather than per seat, at $49 a month on annual billing with a genuine free tier. TaxDome sells seats by the year, $800 for Essentials, $1,000 for Pro and $1,200 for Business on a one-year term, less on a three-year prepay.

Check what e-signature really costs, because almost nobody includes the signature you actually need. TaxDome gives unlimited e-signatures but charges $1 per knowledge-based authentication signature, and KBA is what Form 8879 requires. Canopy charges $1.25 per KBA credit. Karbon does not include e-signature in the seat price at all and sells credit bundles running from $100 for 100 credits to $2,000 for 4,000. On 400 individual returns with two signers each, that is a four-figure line nobody quoted you.

Work out whether it reaches into the client's ledger or only holds files. Client Hub pulls QuickBooks Online uncategorized transactions into the client portal and writes the client's answer back to QuickBooks, but only on the Practice Manager Plus tier at $79 per user per month. Financial Cents sells month-end close as a $5 per client add-on. Double, formerly Keeper, prices per connected client with unlimited users, which flips the economics for a firm with a lot of staff and a stable client count.

Read the exit terms and price the exit before you read the feature list. Canopy's terms auto-renew for a term of the same length, state that all fees are fully earned on payment and non-refundable, and make the firm solely responsible for backing up its own client content. TaxDome and Client Hub are also non-refundable and auto-renewing, Financial Cents puts every plan on a 12-month agreement, and Karbon, Uku, Basil and Pascal Workflow require no long-term contract. On the way out, TaxDome exports client lists, contacts, invoices, time entries and documents cleanly but not email history or automation rules, and firms report roughly 20 to 40 hours of data migration plus another 10 to 20 rebuilding workflow templates.

Treat the legacy suites as a separate market with a separate buying process. CCH Axcess Practice, XCM (now owned by Wolters Kluwer), IRIS Practice Engine, Onvio, Practice CS, OfficeTools (now CARET, which answers pricing questions with a phone number), Accelo, BQE Core and Aiwyn all publish no price. Senta has been folded into IRIS Elements Practice Management. Xero Practice Manager is now Xero Partner Hub Practice Management, free at Silver partner status and above and $149 a month for up to 10 users otherwise.