When you’re putting a budget together for accounting software, you may not be aware that there are affordable solutions available — some are even completely free. But can you really trust these free platforms to handle all your accounting needs?

Compare Top Accounting Software Leaders

In this article, we’ll go over some of the top free and open-source accounting software available on the market according to our team of analysts. We’ll also explain the difference between free and open-source software, and answer a few frequently asked questions about these solutions.

Free vs. Open-Source

Free and open-source accounting solutions share several similarities, but it’s important to recognize that not all free software is open-source. Free accounting software means you can use it at no cost to you; open-source software means it’s not only free, but you can access and modify its source code to fit your needs.

If customizability and coding is important to you, be sure to ask your potential software vendors if they offer open-source capabilities.

Best Free Accounting Software

Let’s go over some of our top picks for accounting software that’s available at no cost to you.

Wave Accounting

Wave is a small business-focused, cloud-based accounting solution with a robust free tier if you’re just looking to get your feet wet. The free version of this software consists of the accounting, invoicing and receipt features, but you can upgrade to a paid version later on if you’d like access to modules that handle taxes and recurring purchases.

A preview of Wave Accounting’s invoicing tool.

Top Benefits

• Obtain Easy Customizations: Make revisions easier by customizing expense and income categories to suit your needs.
• Centralize Bank Accounts: Link all of your business accounts to Wave’s dashboard and access them all from a single location.
• Perform Swift Item Transfers: Drag and drop items to easily transfer them between invoices.
• Conduct Instant Employee Payments: Set paychecks to automatically send to employee bank accounts for streamlined salary payouts.
• Implement On-the-Go Access: Leverage the cloud to give your business access from any connected device, allowing for mobile notifications when important tasks need to be addressed.

Primary Features

• Bookkeeping: Wave Accounting uses double-entry bookkeeping, meaning all credit and debit transactions are logged in two databases for maximum consistency. This module also automatically calculates exchange rates and handles bulk transactions.
• Bills: Wave’s dashboard showcases bills and amounts owed, and allows you to add currency and vendor information to each. This accessory also notifies you when payments are due so you don’t miss any.
• Receipt Scanning: Wave lets your employees scan receipts and have their data automatically added to accounting databases, cutting back on the time required for data entry.
• Invoicing: Wave’s invoicing module lets you create and personalize invoices with pre-made templates. You can also set up notifications to remind you if a client or partner is late paying you, as well as automate payment processing when it’s time to collect.
• Multi-currency: Wave supports currencies in several different locations, enabling users to automatically calculate exchange rates and tax rates.

Limitations

Some of Wave Accounting’s limitations include:

• No function for purchase or sales order creation.
• No tools for time tracking.

Compare Top Accounting Software Leaders

Odoo

Odoo offers a completely open-source business suite with a powerful free accounting module. It comes with customer relationship management (CRM), eCommerce, inventory management, point-of-sale (POS) and project management tools out of the box, and its open-source status allows you to modify and customize your experience to meet your business needs.

An example of Odoo’s configuration and invoicing features.

Top Benefits

• Find Client Data Quickly: Track trends with easy-to-locate customer data and make adjustments to boost satisfaction and revenue.
• Make Instant Payments: Pay other parties at the touch of a button or the scan of a QR code.
• Obtain Operation Visibility: Create personalized KPIs with any trackable metric to define your own terms for success and see where you can improve or cut costs.
• Enhance Bill Formats: Use Odoo’s built-in AI document design tools to create professional bills with company letterhead and format them for easy understanding.
• Maintain Global Clients and Partners: Convert between global currencies with current exchange rates and use country-specific documents and statements to keep global business efficient.

Primary Features

• Analytical Accounting: Read into basic accounting tasks using powerful analytics to trace trends and optimize financial operations.
• Invoicing: Create and distribute professional invoices with company letterhead and accurate estimates with automatic calculations. Odoo allows for recurring invoices to be automated as well.
• Billing: Reconcile short-term debts and make it easy for partners to reconcile theirs with payment processing. Odoo can also accept wire transfers that meet single euro payments area (SEPA) restrictions on correct payment deadlines.
• Reconciliation: Odoo can handle automatic bank reconciliations for approved payments, but also allows you to perform manual reconciliations for invoices that need your attention. You can also examine documents to make sure there aren’t any differences that may need to be audited.
• Dashboards: Create custom dashboards to highlight the information you require at a glance and translate your financial status into easy-to-read visuals.

Limitations

It’s critical to observe a program’s limitations as you shop. Some of this cheap accounting software’s shortcomings include:

• Lacking a payroll module.
• Experiencing technical bugs and glitches.
• The support team needs improvement.

Compare Top Accounting Software Leaders

Manager

If you’re looking for a complete small business accounting solution available at no cost to you, Manager has you covered with a fully featured package to handle any financial management need you may have. There are no usage limits or ads, making it a perfect solution for any business looking to try accounting software for the first time.

A preview of Manager’s reporting accessory.

Top Benefits

• Work on Any Operating System: Manager is not only compatible with Windows, MacOS and Linux, but allows you to share information between operating systems if your company is using different ones.
• Manage International Clients and Partners: Manager is compatible with 64 languages for creating correspondence and writing invoices, making it much simpler to collaborate between countries.
• Simplify Payments: Using Manager lets you keep an accurate record of every payroll transaction to ensure you haven’t come in late with any paychecks, as well as create separate payroll accounts to classify different employees in different categories.
• Assess and Consolidate Organizations: If you’re a business with several sub-organizations, Manager allows you to create connected yet separate accounts to define and unify them, as well as create prototype sub-organizations to see if adding a new one would benefit you.
• Leverage Speedy Data Retrievals: Manager makes it easy to search for specific data and retrieve it quickly.

Primary Features

• Accounting Basis: Manager gives you access to both accrual accounting – which facilitates the documentation of revenues and expenses whether or not you exchange cash – and cash basis accounting, which records revenues and expenses when cash is received or paid out. Alternate between both accounting methods as needed and create reports as required.
• Chart of Accounts: Easily index your financial records within your company’s general ledger using Manager’s chart of accounts function, making sure all transactions are being allocated to the correct accounts and indexed according to metrics you define.
• Tax Codes: Use local and regional tax codes to ensure your tax documentation is up to standard, and allocate international taxes to transactions based on country.
• Cashbook: Manager lets you install cash accounts and easily transfer money between bank and cash accounts. You can also compare receipts against sales invoices with balance due dates from oldest to newest.
• Inventory: Manager makes it easy to define, export and modify your product and supply inventory. Make reorders, track amounts and sort by predefined dimensions.

Limitations

Like all software, Manager has a few drawbacks. These shortcomings include:

• Excludes a mobile app.
• Invoices don’t have an array of layout options and custom fields.
• It’s complicated to customize invoices.
• You can’t change account labels.

Compare Top Accounting Software Leaders

ZipBooks

ZipBooks is a cloud-based accounting solution built for small businesses and offering a free version with several of its most important features. The entry-level tier of the software allows you to send quotes and estimates, manage multiple business partners and create simple reports from your data.

An example of ZipBook’s financial performance component.

Top Benefits

• Automate Transaction Sorting: ZipBooks’ uses machine learning to automatically sort transactions as you import them, giving them confidence scores based on other data to help you improve business decisions going forward.
• Improve Company Practices: ZipBooks can create a general business assessment by comparing your business activity against best practices, as well as manage repetitive clients, timely transactions, in-sales growth, recurring revenue and other components to gauge success and develop a business health score.
• Receive In-depth Fund Feedback: Use the business health score that ZipBooks derives for you to inform suggestions and evaluations for improving business, including fee management and client preservation to improve transaction and customer satisfaction processes.
• Enhance Invoice Formats: ZipBooks can score your invoices on quality to help you improve readability and payment processing, further upgrading your business efficiency.
• Detect Financial Data Quickly: ZipBooks’ search tools allow you to easily retrieve specific data with minimal hassle,

Primary Features

• Project Accounting: ZipBooks lets you categorize accounting activity based on specific business projects and separate accounts to ensure everything is allocated to the correct organizational activities.
• Recurring Billing: ZipBooks makes it simple to send repeated bills to customers and clients who make regular orders or subscriptions by automatically assigning them and having them sent without manual intervention.
• Custom Invoices: Design and send custom invoices with the touch of a button, and collect payments using payment processing platforms you connect.
• Receipts: Use ZipBooks’s mobile application and document design features to create and store receipts for customer transactions.
• Customer Management: ZipBooks allows you to create and define customer profiles to track their purchasing history and help them with support requests.

Limitations

Free accounting tools typically come with a few drawbacks. This solution’s limitations include:

• Lacking inventory tracking.
• Lacking payroll support tools.
• Bugs and inaccurate account balances in the iOS app.
• Lacking an app for Android devices.

Compare Top Accounting Software Leaders

How We Choose Products

Our team of writers and analysts at SelectHub is committed to giving you the best recommendations based on our data. To make our list, products had to meet two criteria:

1. Closely match the topic
2. Earn a top-5 analyst score in our selection platform

Our analyst scores are based on an in-depth research process using primary and secondary sources. This includes SelectHub Analyst Briefings, direct communication with vendors, and reviewing materials such as user reviews, product brochures, specification sheets, case studies, user manuals, and technical documentation.

Our platform’s Scoring Engine processes the research and computes the analyst score. The score also factors in platform settings such as industry and company size.

Learn more about our research methodology and editorial standards

FAQs

Several questions arise when browsing free accounting tools. Here’s a quick rundown of these questions and our responses.

Compare Top Accounting Software Leaders

Next Steps

By now, you should have a good enough understanding of how free accounting software can fill your needs on a budget. If you’re looking to dig even deeper, our free comparison guide offers an in-depth look at all the best accounting software.

Which affordable/free accounting software solution is your top pick and why? Did we miss any? Let us know in the comments!