What Are the Different Types of Accounting Software? 6 Kinds Explained

Different types of accounting software have revolutionized the way businesses manage their financial information. With the advent of these advanced tools, managing accounts and tracking finances has become significantly easier and more efficient. 

In this article, we will explore the six different kinds of accounting software available in the market. Whether you’re a small business owner or a large corporation, this comprehensive guide will help you make an informed decision on which accounting software to choose. 

So, get yourself a cup of coffee and get ready to explore the world of accounting software.

How many types of accounting software are there?

Most articles on this subject claim there are only 3 major types of accounting software: billing and invoicing, ERP accounting, and payroll accounting tools. However, some people like to include spreadsheets as an option for your accounting tool, though it must be said this is not really software.

For our purposes, we will list not three, not four, but SIX types of accounting software, because we will discuss the difference between accounting tools used for small businesses and ones for enterprise-level operations.

What are the different types of accounting software?

Let us look at what are the different kinds of accounting software. These different types can be serviced by the same vendors. For example, many small business accounting systems can be scaled up to do the software work at the enterprise level. 

Likewise, there are some made-to-order accounting platforms that include modules which can then be customized by business owners to meet their needs, like Intuit Quickbooks Online, Zoho Books, Freshbooks and Xero. 

What’s more, when it comes to specialized accounting functions, like bookkeeping, billing and invoicing on one hand, or payroll on the other hand, many of the best accounting software does it all.

Last but not least, there are also specialized types of software such as the best crypto tax software as well as accounting software for enterprise purposes.

However, the six types of the most common accounting software are:

• Billing and invoicing accounting software

• Payroll accounting software

• Small business accounting software

• ERP accounting software

• Spreadsheet software for accounting

• Custom accounting software
   

Billing and invoicing accounting software

Billing and invoicing software is also known as a regular commercial accounting solution. It is our first, and most common type of account system. It is popular with individuals and households but also some small businesses.

Bank accounts and credit cards

One of the first things you’d set up when using basic accounting software for billing and invoicing is the syncing of all your bank accounts. This allows you to monitor and control various accounts from a single dashboard, instead of toggling between different browser windows or apps. 

You can track all your online payments, debit, credit card and other financial transactions in a user-friendly way. More premium bank account syncing in commercial accounting platforms can also display real-time data on your investments.

Balance sheet and general ledger

Balance sheet management is another major module of commercial billing and invoicing software solutions. You can have an at-a-glance balance sheet with your key financial information like account balances. 

But many apps also give you more detailed general ledger features, which includes data of every financial transaction like online payments. Another common tool is double entry bookkeeping. This balances your assets, liabilities and equity, and is more often only included in just the expensive versions. 

Purchase Orders

Purchase orders, more commonly referred to as POs, are formal financial documents that a buyer gives to the seller. POs contain detailed lists of all the items the buyer intends to purchase, along with other specifications like delivery information or payment agreements. 

Accounting software lets you create POs, use PO templates and customize them at will. Businesses, especially e-commerce, can save and reuse POs, and even connect purchase orders to various workflows where they will be automated upon being triggered by an event in the purchasing department.

Billing

Like invoicing, which will be discussed next, billing is a key accounting task and one that is greatly facilitated with commercial accounting software solutions. Every business needs to purchase stuff to get going, and the billing department is in charge of making sure your suppliers get paid the right amount and on time. 

Billing can be automated, for example, by sending out alerts upon receiving bills, or sending automatic online payments to the seller. Billing is one simple accounting task that can often be done with an accounting tool’s mobile app. 

Invoicing

If billing is when you get the bill, invoicing is the other side of that equation, when you send one. Sellers can get decent invoicing management with their accounting system. They can create branded invoices with their logos. You can save and reuse invoices, or customize invoice templates. 

With an accounting system, you can streamline the workflow between invoicing and other departments like inventory and shipping if it’s that kind of business. For more service-oriented businesses, accounting apps let you do your invoicing and billing in a totally paperless way, like on a mobile app.

Expense tracking

When it comes to your accounting needs regarding expenses tracking and budgeting, billing and invoicing software has many useful tools. You can create budgets as part of project management planning and measure results against expectations in real-time reporting. 

You get an instant overview of all your expenses and see how much you are spending based on different factors, like expense type, department, timeframes, project or client. Staying on top of expenses and budgets is a crucial part of maintaining the financial health of your organization.

Accounts payable

Accounts payable might be more often included as a tool in more premium versions of billing cloud accounting software, or in enterprise accounting software. Accounts payable is the department or business process that oversees the entire payment process from start to finish. 

When you use account payable tools in accounting platforms, this becomes a set of workflow instructions on what happens at every step from a purchase to the settling of the bill.

Accounts receivable

As the name suggests, accounts receivable is the opposite side of accounts payable. This is the business process that manages the claims your company will have with the businesses you are selling goods or services to. 

AI-based workflow automations can recognize repetitive tasks and take them over, streamlining the process of invoicing and getting paid. Again, you are more likely to see this in ERP accounting solutions. 

Tax and sales tax

Accounting processes for businesses need to take into account their taxes, and instead of having a dedicated accountant or CPA, good accounting software can help with tax management. This helps businesses prepare and file their tax statements. 

It can help make tax calculation suggestions to minimize payments or maximize deductions. Many tax accounting platforms are IRS compliant. Businesses can also use tax accounting tools to manage their sales tax. This is an incredibly beneficial tool to small business owners and startups.

Forecasting

Knowing the financial health of your business or personal finances today is one thing, but the best accounting software can help you get an idea of where it is going to be tomorrow. Forecasting is a great feature of billing and invoicing systems. 

By reviewing all the past data as well as real-time current data on your income, expenses and general spending habits, accounting tools can show you the future using raw figures or graphic charts to display the forecast of your bank accounts, savings and debts. 

Reports and analytics

All your banking and accounting activity produces valuable financial data, and this is used by accounting software for analytics and financial reporting. You can get a broad bird’s eye view of your entire portfolio, or get highly specific insights into specific accounts, financial statements, transaction types, expense categories, timeframes, and more. 

Accounting solutions for billing and invoicing use a variety of charts, graphs and other visual tools, which you can modify and customize. What’s more, reporting uses real-time data and you can watch the updates happen as they take place, even with a mobile app to stay abreast of your financial performance anywhere.

Workflows

As regularly mentioned above, workflows and automation is a massive component of any tax or accounting system. The best tools will come with workflow templates which you can easily customize, save, reuse and share. 

And you do not need to be a software developer to create and use workflows as they are often built with visual drag and drop functionality. Some common accounting workflows include automated reports, sending notifications, updating accounting project statuses, sending a bill or invoice, updating records, etc.

When is this type of accounting software appropriate?

Billing and invoicing accounting software, or commercial accounting tools, are most appropriate for individuals and households. This is not meant to say that small businesses and startups never use this type of accounting software. They do, especially if they are on a budget. 

What’s more, many of the biggest names in accounting apps service both individuals and small businesses, like Xero, FreshBooks, Intuit Quickbooks Online and Zoho Books. This type of accounting software is basically used for managing your bank accounts, income, expenses and spending, and to help prepare your taxes.
 

Payroll accounting software

Payroll accounting systems is our second type of accounting software. This can be its own system or a module of a larger accounting solution.

Basic payroll

Companies need workers, and workers have got to get paid; so the system works. Payroll accounting software can do the work of what used to be large payroll departments with many more workers needing to get paid. 

Some of the best payroll software can automatically pay workers their wages based on hours worked or individual contracts. Payroll tools also help with worker time-off management, reducing a lot of the paperwork when it comes to things like people calling in sick, showing up late or leaving early.

Employee profile

Payroll solutions are a big help to human resources. HR departments can use payroll accounting tools to keep detailed employee profiles. This can include basic information like age, seniority, marital status, position, salary, hours and availability, special concerns, and other data. 

You might consider it a CRM for your workforce, or rather, an ERM, employee relationship management. But for now, we just call it payroll management. Employees can also get access to an employee portal to manage their own data.

Hiring and onboarding

Payroll tools for accounting systems can sometimes include features for HR when it comes to hiring new employees. It can manage the application process, help schedule interviews, and most importantly, get the new employees set up to work and get paid legally and on board regarding all relevant income taxes. 

There could even be onboarding tools in accounting software to help the new hires ease into their jobs and learn their way around their pay stubs with the taxes and other deductions.

Health insurance

Health insurance is one of the specific needs of a company doing payroll with an accounting platform. Tools and templates can be employed to help fill out forms and review all the health insurance info. 

It will help process health insurance claims, and sometimes use automation to speed the settling of the claims along with less administrative work. Some tools can even help companies shop and compare health insurance plans to save money.

Employee financial benefits

Accounting software for payroll management includes features to handle employee financial benefits. Depending on the size of your business or the organizational structure of the company, you could have a very simple benefits package or a highly complex and differentiated one. 

Benefits tools let you manage benefits by employee, by season, by department or project along with other metrics. It can keep track of employee performance stats for variable benefits or other financial contests inside the company. 

Time tracking and project management

Payroll accounting software is great for determining payments based on how long individuals or departments spent on specific tasks and projects. This is useful for keeping your stakeholders engaged and in the loop, and also for being a good motivator for your employees to work as efficiently as possible. 

Employees can clock their hours manually or it can be automated based on certain work triggers. Time tracking tools are also useful for project planning and budgeting, giving you insights into past performance to make sure your estimates are accurate.

Workforce costing

Workforce costing, or workforce cost optimization, is about keeping your expenses as lean as possible when it comes to money paid out in labor-hours. Many of the best accounting software have tools to help with this task. It can make floating calculations of TCOW, or total cost of work, based on pinpointing any moment in time or in the business process, or it can give aggregate TCOW figures for the bigger picture.

Workforce costing takes into account wages, salaries, but also benefits, money spent on HR hiring, training and onboarding, equipping, as well as helping your team further develop their skills with extra training.

When is this type of accounting software appropriate?

Payroll accounting tools are appropriate for many reasons. First and foremost, you use payroll software to manage employee payments as wages or salaries, and sometimes for benefits too. 

Many SMBs use payroll accounting features as part of larger accounting platforms, like Gusto, Quickbooks and Flex, although apps like Xero, FreshBooks and Zoho Books have tools for managing payroll accounting as well.

It is also appropriate for HR departments to use payroll software collaboratively with accounting departments since so much of this information is crucial to both departments.
 

Small business accounting software

For our third type of accounting software, we have solutions for the small business owner, any SMB, but also startups, independent workers, self-employed people, and even freelancers. Some excellent examples include QuickBooks and GnuCash. If you're interested in these tools, read our QuickBooks vs GnuCash comparison for more details.

Income and expenses

Small businesses and startups could really use the benefits of accounting software, such as Mercury when it comes to managing income and expenses. Income tracking takes into account all payables and money generated through sales and other business activities. 

Expense tracking can categorize expenses automatically by type, quantity, cost, date, project or client. Income and expense management tools can give you comparative charts on your earnings versus your cash outflows. This is likely the foundational module of small business accounting systems.

Invoice and payments

Invoicing and payments is where you get into the finer details of basic SMB income and expense tracking. As with commercial accounting tools, you can use automations to regularly create and send invoices, including having your company’s branding and logo on the invoices. 

Payments can also be done through workflows, coordinating through notifications departments like billing and accounts receivable. The best small business accounting software tools can save a small business time and money through automation.

Tax deductions

Depending on which jurisdiction you are doing business in, there are numerous kinds of tax deductions you can take advantage of to minimize your tax payments at the end of the tax year. 

Tax accounting tools can show you how to structure your purchases and financial statements to meet the requirements to write off as much of your business expenses as possible. There are even tools which show you how to manage your expenses at the end of each tax period to further minimize payments, as well as to structure tax payment installments. 

Financial reporting

The depth and detail of financial reporting when it comes to small business accounting software versus more commercial accounting software is deeper and more complex. This is because the financial management of a business is not the same as an individual or household. 

As part of an online accounting software platform, you can access your financial reports in a browser or often with a mobile app like the iPhone or Android phone. Get forecasting and other business insights as well based on past and current real-time financial data.

Receipt capture

This is a nifty little tool that is regularly found with small business accounting software, but also sometimes in commercial accounting tools or ERP accounting solutions, and even as an add-on. It’s the receipt capture option. It lets you use a mobile app to snap a photo of a receipt. The system can then read the receipt and convert the data to digital figures and automatically input this into your accounting system as well as into other platforms like your CRM.

Mileage tracking

If your small business includes traveling salesmen, field service, employees on the road to visit conferences or other networking events IRL, then the mileage tracking feature of many SMB accounting systems is a wonderful little tool. 

It can automatically track the geo-location and movement of your employees, often using a mobile app, and use this data to update the employee travel expense account as well as figure into the job or project total cost. If there is no mobile GPS tracker, employees can manually enter in their mileage and the system will do the rest.

Cash flow

For keeping track of the monetary inflows and outflows across your total operation or company, accounting tools include cash flow analysis and cash flow optimization. Cash flow tools are one of the ways companies can keep their stakeholders informed of the financial health of a project or business, and is often a metric for evaluating the fundamentals of a company, for example, for its stock valuation. It contains more than just income and expenses, but also investment financial data, debts, and sometimes even depreciation for a company’s fixed capital assets.

Sales and sales tax

Accounting software works hand in hand with CRM, or customer relationship management, especially when it comes to sales. Every sale made by a company is a data point in the accounting system, which can automatically separate costs from surplus and other ways to break down income. 

Additionally, calculating sales tax is another key part of SMB accounting software, which can take into account different sales tax regulations for states or at the federal level. Good accounting tools can suggest insights for optimizing your sales tax management.

Estimates

Sometimes not every order is priced up front, especially if your business provides services instead of selling mass-manufactured goods. To speed up the process of getting the invoice out to start work and get paid, you need to be able to create estimates quickly. But you do not want to give up on accuracy, because a poorly planned estimate can mean wasted time or money.

These are the advantages that estimation accounting software can bring to your operation. Create estimates with templates, organize them by project, reuse and share them. Estimated data can then feed into financial reporting to compare planned with actual results.

Contractors

Not everyone contributing to a task, job or project will necessarily be regular workers on your payroll. With contractor account management, you can easily handle the hiring and paying of third parties like subcontractors, freelancers or outside agencies. 

Often, remunerating contractors is both an expense and deduction, so it’s great to have accounting calculator features to make sure you are on board when dealing with the tax situation of contractors or freelancers. Some of these tasks can be automated too.

Bill management

You get more advanced bill management features when you upgrade from individual accounting tools to the ones meant for small and medium sized businesses. This will give you greater transparency and control over your billing cycle and processes, helping reduce errors or duplicates, and cut down on unnecessary wasted time with paperwork.

Automated time track to invoicing

When you are invoicing certain clients or stakeholders based on specific tasks or projects, you can use accounting software for small businesses to automate this process a bit more. Employees can enter their own time into the system based on the job, which will get automatically added to invoices via workflow. 

Some more sophisticated small business accounting systems can even track employee time without requiring them to manually input their work hours, but this depends on many factors, mainly, what apps they are using. Overall, this saves administrative time in project management and invoicing.

Inventory management

Accounting software can sometimes include inventory management, especially with SMB platforms or systems dedicated for enterprise accounting. Such features include keeping track of inventory based on item type, quantity, and location. 

It also keeps track of the value of your inventory as it changes over time, along with the value of individual items which may depreciate the longer they sit there. Inventory and other asset management is key for tax filing and basic general ledger bookkeeping.  

Portfolio accounting management

In the realm of project management, a portfolio is a collection of interrelated projects, or a collection of all your projects. Regarding accounting tools, you can aggregate the accounting and financial data of your entire work and project portfolio in one dashboard. 

This can help you envision ways to shift costs, expenses, budgets and other project factors around to maximize efficiency or minimize potential tax liabilities which arise from poor or shortsighted portfolio management. Expect this tool mostly in premium packages.

Business analytics 

There is always a good deal of standard accounting reporting with any accounting SaaS. But sometimes you want something more intelligent and with more capabilities. BI, or business intelligence, is a big part of sophisticated accounting analytics software. 

It is much more than basic income and expenses, but can perform things like financial forecasting, comparative analysis, and above all offer insights and suggestions based on artificial intelligence to assist you in ways to speed up operations, cut down costs and streamline the business process. 

Employee expenses

Some businesses have employee expense accounts. These are mostly used in the service of sales teams and account managers in agencies who handle big clients. Employees also need expenses if they are to source their own equipment, or if they need to travel a lot for the business. 

Accounting management software for small businesses can help manage employee expense accounts. See who is spending how much on what kinds of expenses, and get automated alerts if things go over budget or look suspicious. Workflows can connect expense data to invoicing and project planning too.

Batch invoices and expenses

Batch tasks are truly an innovation given to us by the digital software age as this is the exact type of thing that requires hours of tedious labor to normally do. With accounting software, you can create many invoices and expense reports at the same time, as well as send them out or update them as all a single batch task. You can even set up workflows to perform batch invoicing or batch expenses automatically based on timeframe, task completion or project close. 

Workflow automation

If you haven’t yet noticed, workflow automation is everywhere in this article and a necessary aspect of all accounting tools and any business SaaS. Most platforms do not need software developers to create workflows as they are easy and follow simple logic, like ‘when-then’ or, when this happens, do this. 

Workflows on average save companies 30% to 60% on worker hours and by extension lots of money paid out in wages. SMBs competing in the modern age cannot afford to ignore workflows.

Data restoration

Data restoration or data recovery can be a very advantageous feature to employ as part of a larger small business accounting system, or else it could be an add-on to another software. 

Accounting practices create a lot of data and you never know what might go wrong in keeping it secure and organized, especially if a computer is damaged or lost. Data restoration can do things like backup your data on an online accounting software or recover lost or corrupted data and set things right again.

When is this type of accounting software appropriate?

Clearly, this kind of accounting solution is best used for small businesses and medium sized businesses, as well as startups. This kind of software is appropriate when basic billing and invoicing tools seem a bit lacking to fully run your small business. The standard vendors apply here, from Quickbooks and Xero to FreshBooks and Zoho Books. 

These platforms will provide you with many tools, templates and workflows but also allow for a degree of customization for your business needs. There are also many pricing options so you can start cheap and scale up to premium packages when you need them.
 

Enterprise resource planning accounting software

Accounting software for enterprise is normally considered the third of the big three types of accounting software, but for our list, it is fourth. This is for large corporations, often with manufacturing departments. 

General ledger

General ledger features as part of an ERP accounting software is the most sophisticated general ledger and bookkeeping module from most types of accounting SaaS. 

You can track financial data and cash flows at many different levels of operations and based on a wide variety of metrics including custom metrics. You can structure it with sub-ledgers for things like accounts payable and accounts receivable, cash management, purchase invoices, credit notes and liabilities. 

Bank reconciliation

Bank reconciliation is when you make sure that the bank statements in your local bookkeeping accounts match those in your financial institution’s account, like your bank account. Accounting software can automate this process which drastically reduces errors or bad inputs, which will save you money and time down the line. When there is a discrepancy, the system can alert you, examine the details of the problem and help reconcile the difference. 

Cash management

Cash management, or cash flow management, is how a company organizes and manages its cash and financial situation. It combines outflows to entities like suppliers, labor, asset acquisition and maintenance and other areas of expenditures. 

On a higher level, it can show you market information, related to your trading patterns and offer forecasting and risk assessment insights. One of the ways it does all this is by analyzing bank and financial statements as well as overall profitability trends in your business and industry.

Accounts payable and accounts receivable

We’ve already briefly mentioned accounts payable and accounts receivable when we spoke of basic commercial billing and invoicing accounting systems. When you have these modules as part of an ERP accounting tool, you should expect a slew of more advanced features and capabilities. 

You can set up custom key performance indicators, or KPIs, to monitor the balance between payables and receivables. Here, the process of invoicing, billing, payments and tax calculations are analyzed by things like velocity and volume.

Tax Management

Enterprise operations, like multinational companies, government organizations, and other huge businesses, have much more complex tax management business needs than startups and SMBs.

This is especially true if the areas of your business operations span more than one national jurisdiction with different tax laws and compliance regulations. ERP accounting software can help navigate this complicated path and even offer tips for how to minimize tax liabilities in certain areas of work or locations around the globe.

Close Management

FCM, or financial close management, is all about producing and sharing accurate financial reports every so often, like at the close of a quarter or year or financial period. It is the process by which accountants check their books and account balances and make sure everything adds up on both sides of the ledger. 

This is a key feature for stakeholder management and for investor awareness of the company’s fundamentals. ERP accounting software can streamline FCM and automate the regular reporting.

Fixed Assets Management

In the business world, you’ve got fixed assets and variable assets. Variable assets mostly refer to workers whose pay is variable. Fixed assets usually refer to heavy machinery, equipment, and other assets whose cost and value do not fluctuate except for depreciation. 

ERP accounting management software can manage depreciation when planning your tax expenses, so that the cost of a fixed asset is not going all into one year’s statements. It can also help you stay on top of maintenance and repair costs, and how those play into your tax deductions.

Payment Management

Enterprises need more flexible processes for managing their payments because of the wide scope of their operations. There are many advanced templates and workflows that streamline the payment process and cut down on manual data entry and other admin. 

Outbound payment tools in ERP accounting platforms can handle regular transactions as well as online payments, and can be set up for regularly repeating payments. Payment data is also necessary for cash flow analysis and financial reporting. 

When is this type of accounting software appropriate?

ERP accounting solutions are most appropriate when you have an enterprise-level of a company or organization. These kinds of companies, with their massive sizes, scales, budgets and workforces, require a much higher level of complexity and sophistication from their accounting tools.

If your business runs in multiple locations or countries, or deals in a variety of industries either vertically related or horizontally, then you’ll be looking at ERP accounting platforms. In this case, vendors like Microsoft Dynamics 365, Sage, SAP, Oracle NetSuite and others might be more suitable for your enterprise business needs.
 

Spreadsheet software for accounting

Whether or not you consider spreadsheets sufficient for cloud accounting software is up to your business needs. Sure, you can use Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets to manage your accounting if it is simple enough.

Microsoft Excel

While Microsoft does offer ERP software called Microsoft Dynamics 365 that you can use for all your accounting purposes, Microsoft Excel is one of the industry standards when it comes to spreadsheet software. You can customize fields and set your own formulas for the exact kind of instant spreadsheet reporting you need. Sure, you are going to be lacking a lot of advanced tools, like workflow automation and AI insights. But this can be a cheaper option.

Google Sheets

Google Sheets is another option when it comes to using spreadsheets for your accounting system. More people are familiar and comfortable with Google over Microsoft, and sharing spreadsheets is very easy for collaboration. 

You can even set someone’s status from being able to edit directly to only making suggestions and comments, versus people who can just have read-only status. Like Microsoft Excel, Google Sheets uses formulas for advanced accounting calculations. 

Templates

Many accounting tools have templates for you to use which are basic spreadsheets with many of the categories, columns, rows and formulas already plugged in. This saves time in setting up your own brand new spreadsheets. 

You can always customize these spreadsheet templates, save them, reuse them, and share them with work colleagues. It is also sometimes possible to find free accounting spreadsheet templates online.

When is this type of accounting software appropriate?

The situations when a spreadsheet is appropriate or sufficient as our main accounting tool depend on the level of your operations and the complexity of your needs. Spreadsheets are most appropriate when you are doing very simple bookkeeping, like basic double-entry accounting in your general ledger, but not much more. 

You can use spreadsheets when you need simple accounting calculations, but not if you are looking to implement automation workflows into your business process, as spreadsheets cannot handle that task.
 

Custom accounting software

If you are not in the market for a known accounting SaaS from a familiar vendor, you always have the option to have a custom accounting software built specifically for your business needs. Here we’ll go over the steps for building custom accounting systems.

Research

The first step in setting up a custom accounting software is to do your research. What are your needs and business goals? What metrics do you most want to keep track of? How much do you want to spend on the software, and who in your organization will be using it? 

These are all important things to research and know before proceeding to the next steps of building custom accounting software. Then you can move on to estimation.

Estimation

Once you’ve laid out the scope for your custom accounting tool, you can begin estimating how much it will cost and how long it will take, as well as how many software developers need to work on producing the system. 

Having a good estimation is important for making sure you don’t get scope creep, run over budget, or go over deadline. Estimations will guide the rest of the development process as you design your custom accounting solution.

Design

The follwiong stage of building your own custom accounting system is to actually design the thing now that you have your research, needs and estimates all planned out. Hopefully you’ve got a crack development team or maybe you are outsourcing this part. 

Either way, the advantage here is that you can keep a close eye on the design and make sure it adhered to your plans before it goes into the actual development stage.

Develop

The design stage naturally evolves into the development stage of building a custom accounting tool for your business. This is the work of software development, but as a business owner and stakeholder in this project, you should have a bit of a hands-on involvement in making sure everything goes according to the design, stays on budget, and comes in on time. This is probably the longest and most costly stage of building your own custom accounting platform.

Maintenance

The final part of designing and developing a custom accounting system is maintenance. This means the software is complete and it is already up and running. As you use it, you may find bugs or think of new features to include, and regular maintenance and upgrades are how you make sure you get everything you want and have minimal issues. 

Maintenance can be regular or it can occur only when needed. You can also set up the custom accounting tool to automatically notify the development team when it is time for software maintenance. 

When is this type of accounting software appropriate?

If you do not necessarily want a cloud accounting SaaS, you can consider having your own custom accounting system created for you, which will likely be hosted on-premise instead of the cloud.

This is one main reason to get a custom accounting system, as you can be in more control over your data security, though it has its downsides. Other reasons a custom accounting tool is appropriate is when your business needs are very unique, or if the accounting team at your company has a specific way they like to do things.

Our key takeaways about the different kinds of accounting software

In conclusion, we have many different types of accounting software solutions, and some are more appropriate for your business needs than others. 

Remember, what is important is to take advantage of the technological optimization that accounting SaaS brings, whether you are a small business or an enterprise. Leveraging the right type of accounting solution will surely make a difference in having a more accurate and efficient accounting process for your household or company.

One more thing to keep in mind is that not all of these tools are compatible with Apple devices. For all our Mac users, we wrote a separate article on the best accounting software for Mac. Make sure to check it out!