Best productivity apps for accountants

Accountants are among the busiest professionals working in the finance industry. They’re in charge of compliance, financial reporting, bookkeeping, filing taxes, getting tax breaks, etc. However, what they do for their clients, they must also do for their practices.

That’s why staying organized, productive, and accurate are the secrets to running a successful accounting practice. Unfortunately, these tasks aren’t easy to fulfill. You’ll need some help from specialized productivity apps and accounting software beyond the capabilities of Excel and Google Drive.

If you want to improve productivity in your practice, here’s a list of apps that can help.

Quickbooks

Quickbooks is one of the most popular accounting productivity tools. It’s available as a desktop app and a browser-based version, with the latter being the more advanced product.

Accountants often use a wide range of apps. But what makes Quickbooks an enticing solution for productivity management? The platform is a lot like the WordPress of accounting software due to its multiple app integrations.

It’s a complete CRM solution that integrates some of the best apps, like PayPal, Dropbox, and Trello.

It enables professional accountants to respond to clients faster, bill them, maintain records, access live feeds of bank accounts, and manage multiple client accounts from anywhere. It also helps that it has affordable pricing for all three subscription plans, unlike Xero, Zoho, and similar accounting software.

AuditFile

Accounting firm business owners need a solid auditing process for both internal use and their clients. This is where AuditFile proves most helpful.

Certified public accountants and small to medium-sized accounting firms can use AuditFile to comply with various industry standards. It can help accountants review their processes and stay true to the highest professional standards.

Simultaneously, the app enables accurate reviews of various client companies with access to real-time data. Generating financial statements is easy enough, even for less tech-savvy users.

Fyle

Fyle is an expense management software used in various companies, including accounting firms. It can be a reliable accounting app when managing the expenses of multiple employees.

Every accountant knows the importance of detailed and accurate importing. After all, expenses are a crucial aspect of every business, especially during tax season and budget meetings.

Fyle sets itself apart through integrations of everyday software like Slack and accounting apps that employees and clients use. Its design helps automate credit card reconciliations, generate bank statements, and monitor real-time financial activities.

It does the job of several apps and eliminates a lot of manual labor under a centralized productivity platform.

Canopy

Canopy is part of a long list of accounting practice project management tools for professional CPAs. The platform offers multiple tools accountants need to manage their firm without switching between different cloud-based services and desktop productivity apps.

The platform allows users to maintain client records, share to-do lists, and receive client notifications.

In addition, it has customizable document storage and a comprehensive file management dashboard. Overall, Canopy does a good job of automating some accounting processes and client interactions and can streamline the workflow of all team members.

As a bonus, the platform comes with an online payment service complete with billing data collection and invoice generation. It’s a productivity app that helps accountants receive payments faster.

Workzone

Accountants are in charge of managing their practices while taking care of their clients’ financial records. It’s a lot of work, often involving micromanaging. Therefore, good organizational skills are crucial to success.

Workzone is the type of productivity software that can track, manage, and organize projects within a company and help different departments collaborate efficiently.

It has a visual-focused interface relying heavily on graphs and charts to create project roadmaps and track progression. Accountants can use Workzone to delegate, develop assignments, monitor tasks on Kanban boards, stay on top of due dates, or as a note-taking app.

It’s also a good tool for analysis and report generation, regardless of how many team members are involved on a project.

actiTIME

Maximizing productivity comes down to a simple concept. Every stakeholder must use their time as efficiently as possible. However, it isn’t easy to know if that is the case without a good time tracking process.

Innovative software, actiTIME, is a time tracking tool with impressive functionality and an interactive interface design. It automates many tasks like cost tracking, payroll assessments, custom invoice generation, billing, and data analysis.

actiTIME can work with large data sets, create presentations and spreadsheets, boost productivity, and save time by eliminating many low-value administrative tasks.

What’s even more helpful is its pricing strategy. Self-employed accountants and small businesses with up to three members can use the free version of the software. Larger teams must pay but can also test out the product for 30 days.

Speechify

Speechify is a non-traditional accounting software. It can serve firms in a record-keeping capacity by turning their articles, reports, docs, and checklists into audio files. Having client records and internal records in an audio format can prove helpful in many scenarios.

Thanks to its text to speech technology, Speechify can turn everything into an speech– from images to scanned documents to web pages.

Many accountants and CPAs use Speechify to make their reports easier to check on smartphones. Imagine having to review an internal audit, a client project, a report on the expenses of your team members, or go through social media and LinkedIn messages.

But it’s all last-minute work, and you don’t have time to read mountains of paperwork.

Speechify can turn those reports into high-quality audio formats. You can listen to human-like voices, select different dialects, and even increase the playback speed.

You can breeze through your reports five times faster than the average reading speed.

Even better, it can help you catch up on vital reports when your eyes are too tired to look at the screen. Speechify is available on iOS mobile devices, as an Android mobile app, and on Microsoft Windows and Mac devices.

You can also scan hard copy content into the accounting software without worrying about manual data entry. From there, it’s simple to share the audio file to your preferred device.

If you want to try Speechify in your accounting firm, prepare for a quick registration process.