Best Accounting Software for Self-Employed People SBHQ

In summary, FreshBooks is an excellent option for freelancers and small businesses looking for a straightforward accounting solution. It combines essential features with a user-friendly interface, making it a top choice for many self-employed individuals. With its intuitive design, FreshBooks is incredibly easy to use and will meet the needs of most small businesses or freelancers.

The platform lets users calculate and forecast their tax liabilities with ease, which will be a huge boon for self-employed workers who don’t want to outsource these tasks to professionals. One of FreeAgent’s biggest accolades is its sophisticated cash flow management features. The platform’s cash flow graph provides users with a visual representation of their forecasted cash flow over the next 90 days. You’re also able to edit the graph to show your balance or ongoing and ongoing transactions, and customize the data available, to glean detailed insights into your finances. Zoho Books also offers a free plan catered toward solo entrepreneurs, which self-employed workers can use to create invoices, track mileage, and more.

• You’ll pay for access to fundamental invoicing tools, expenses, bank reconciliation, estimating and cash flow management features.
• If QuickBooks Self-Employed was made specifically for self-employed freelancers, why does it only get an honorable mention while QuickBooks Online makes our top five?
• This tool is part of the broader QuickBooks Online ecosystem and seamlessly integrates with its full suite of accounting products.
• Undeniably one of the best accounting software for self-employed individuals and solopreneurs, Wave provides a massive basket of features, including invoicing and payroll management, at a low cost.
• Second, freelance accounting software includes basic financial statements that break down tricky financial concepts for freelancers with little accounting experience.
• Another huge perk of FreeAgent is that it doesn’t charge businesses to register extra users.

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From here, they’ll be able to accept quotes, pay invoices, leave comments, and more. Once you connect your bank and credit card accounts with Xero, you’ll be able to categorize your expenses, split transactions, and more. Xero also remembers the past transaction categories you used, and it automatically categorizes new transactions for you, helping you save time doing manual work.

FreeAgent accepts your receipts as attachments to bills or expenses, and if you use the mobile app, it’ll extract data using OCR feature. The user interface is bright and tidy, with some quotes about life and business to shake up your day. The onboarding is fast, as QuickBooks only wants to know your industry to give you some advice on expenses folks in your industry usually write off. From then on, you’ll have a set of messages on the dashboard to help you set everything up, from adding your business details to checking whether you’re married or not (relevant for taxes). There are five plans you can opt for, although the Self plan is the most suitable for self-employed individuals who are operating with a tight budget. The good thing about the monthly plans is that each plan offers the same features, but only supports a different number of users.

These financial relationships support our content but do not dictate our recommendations. Our editorial team independently evaluates products based on thousands of hours of research. If you’re registered as a U.S. sole proprietor, you can use this worksheet to simplify your tax season. When I tried changing my business type to all the other options, there weren’t equivalent features. FreeAgent feels more serious, like it’s aimed at folks who are more established in their careers, handling larger projects and bigger financial decisions.

The 7 Best Accounting Software for Freelancers in 2025

We like how accessible this makes Zoho Books for new freelancers, whose annual income may initially fall under this cap. If this sounds like you, we recommend Zoho Books for state-of-the-art accounting tools that far outperform other free platforms. For instance, Xero’s cash flow forecasting tool provides users with visualizations of their business’s bank balance in real time, including cash flow predictions for the next seven or 30 days.

QuickBooks Self-Employed: Best tax tracking

OneUp is a lesser-known accounting software that is great for self-employed individuals and small business owners. It offers a user-friendly interface that makes managing finances simple and efficient. With OneUp, users can easily track their income and expenses, making it a solid choice for those who sell products. If you sell handmade products on Etsy or plumbing supplies out of your home, try Xero. It’s one of the only accounting software providers to offer inventory tracking with each plan. Xero also helps sales-based businesses stay afloat with features like customized purchase orders for fast, clear communication with suppliers.

We also liked that you can use both mobile and desktop to sort, match and import expenses, including from paper receipts. On top of all this, for the Solopreneur self-employed accounting platform, the breadth of reporting features impressed us. You can run and export profit and loss reports, sales reports and taxable sales, while seeing where you make and spend money.

• Time tracking works really well, with a start button accessible from the top menu.
• All of these capabilities are available on FreshBooks’ entry-level Lite plan too, making the platform a good choice for solo entrepreneurs with tighter budgets.
• OneUp’s cloud-based platform and easy-to-use interface help simplify your accounting tasks.
• You may also handle your payroll with Wave, for a $35 base fee plus another $4 per employee.

QuickBooks Online: Most user-friendly accounting software

Kashoo is a simple and straightforward accounting software designed for freelancers and small businesses. It provides features like invoice creation, expense tracking, and financial reporting. Kashoo’s user-friendly interface and affordable pricing make it an attractive option for self-employed individuals.

One major advantage of Wave is that its accounting, banking, and invoicing software is completely free to use. However, if you’re billing more than five clients and need more advanced features like bank reconciliation and accountant access, you’ll need to upgrade to the Plus plan that stands at $30 per month. However, if you require extra features like VAT reporting and budgeting tools, you’ll have to upgrade to its Medium plan. It was particularly easy to edit aspects with FreshBooks too, with one member of our user testing team mentioning that once you customized items like invoices, you “always knew where to look next time”.

FreshBooks allows you to create professional-looking invoices that you can customize and set to populate automatically with a triggering event. The program also syncs with time-tracking software like Woocommerce and payroll software like ZenPayroll, as well as integration with PayPal for easy payments. In addition, there are a number of internal add-ons, such as project time-tracking, that can help you to keep better track of your work and expenses. You can also easily accept online credit card payments through FreshBooks, and the program will automatically send late payment reminders and fees. In this modern digital age, relying solely on manual record-keeping or outdated spreadsheets can be both time-consuming and error-prone. Thankfully, an array of robust bookkeeping software is available, tailored specifically for the self-employed.

You can even add a “pay now” button to your invoices so that customers can pay instantly from their own devices. You can track the status of your invoices, so you always know if a customer has missed a payment. There is a good deal of reports, including Overdue Invoices & Bills, and Profit & Loss.

Sage Business Cloud Accounting: Best customer service

QuickBooks Self-Employed, a dedicated platform separate from QuickBooks Online, is designed for self-employed people and freelancers. We recommend the former for self-employed and freelance users, whereas we recommend the latter for full-on businesses. The best platform for your precise business finance needs balances all these scales. Plus, since you’ve taken this longer-term approach to choosing a platform, chances are you’ll be happy with your choice from the get-go. Sure, you might be tempted to just dive right into using a platform that sounds appealing.

We are compensated in exchange for placement of sponsored products and services, or by you clicking on certain links posted on our site. While we strive to provide a wide range of offers, SelfEmployed does not include information about every financial or credit product or service. In summary, OneUp stands out for its ease of use and all-inclusive plans, making it a top choice for those managing their own businesses.

Accounting software mobile apps are good for more than just tracking miles. The best apps also include tools for snapping photos of receipts, invoicing clients on the go and more. The more a platform’s mobile features overlap with those of its desktop suite, the better. That’s because this feature-rich accounting platform comes with a free monthly subscription for users with annual best bookkeeping software for self employed business revenue of at most $50,000.