Accounting Solutions: The Top 7 Ways to Get Your Accounting Done
Whether you’re running a side hustle from your laptop or scaling a fast-growing startup, you have a few reliable paths to keeping clean, accurate books. But which one is right for you? The best solution depends on your budget, your technical comfort, and how much control you want over your financial data.
Here’s a clear-eyed guide to the seven most common accounting options—what they’re good at, where they struggle, and when a modern solution like Beancount.io is the perfect fit.
1) Excel
This is often the first stop on the accounting journey for its sheer simplicity and universal availability.
- Good for: Builders and DIY founders who love total control and already know their way around a spreadsheet.
- Pros: The barrier to entry is practically zero, and thousands of free templates are available online. Its flexibility allows you to build custom financial models and track unique workflows that off-the-shelf software can't handle.
- Cons: The biggest drawback is the immense manual workload. Every transaction must be entered and reconciled by hand, which is a massive time sink. Worse, it’s dangerously easy to introduce silent formula errors or typos with no guardrails to catch them. Collaboration and maintaining a clear audit trail are clunky without rigorous discipline.
- Best if… you want a quick, no-frills start for a very simple business and you are exceptionally meticulous.
2) Google Sheets
The cloud-native cousin of Excel, Google Sheets offers the same core functionality with a collaborative twist.
- Good for: Teams that need simple, shared spreadsheets for tracking income and expenses.
- Pros: Built-in cloud backups and dead-simple sharing are the main advantages. You can work from any device with a web browser, making it accessible for teams on the go.
- Cons: It suffers from the same fundamental flaws as Excel: a heavy manual workload and a high risk of user error. You may also run into compatibility quirks with certain templates and add-ons designed for the Microsoft ecosystem.
- Best if… your team already runs on Google Workspace and you’re willing to accept the trade-offs of a manual system.
3) QuickBooks Online
For decades, QuickBooks has been the default choice for small businesses looking for dedicated accounting software.
- Good for: Small businesses that want a "classic" SMB software experience with a large ecosystem of integrations.
- Pros: Its signature feature is bank feeds, which automatically pull in transactions from your bank and credit card accounts, drastically reducing manual data entry. It provides a wide range of financial reports out of the box and is supported by a massive community of accountants and app developers.
- Cons: While transactions are imported automatically, the system still requires your weekly attention to categorize expenses and reconcile accounts correctly. The interface can have a steep learning curve, and the cost can grow with add-on features. Most importantly, it creates vendor lock-in, making it difficult to export your financial history if you ever decide to leave.
- Notes & Sources: As QuickBooks promotes, automated bank feeds are a core feature, but you’ll still be responsible for the review and categorization needed to keep your books accurate.
4) Xero
A popular, modern alternative to QuickBooks, Xero offers similar capabilities with a focus on clean design and user experience.
- Good for: Business owners who prefer a more modern UI but need the same core capabilities as QuickBooks Online.
- Pros: Xero also has robust bank feeds and powerful reconciliation tools that make matching transactions straightforward. Its clean design is often praised by users, and a large number of accountants are fluent in the platform.
- Cons: The lower-priced tiers can have feature gaps (like limits on invoices or bills) that push you toward more expensive plans, and add-ons increase the total cost. And just like QBO, it faces the same "you still do the work" reality when it comes to the final categorization and review.
- Notes & Sources: According to Xero, its automated bank feeds connect to thousands of financial institutions worldwide to power its core reconciliation workflows.
5) Accountants (CPAs)
Certified Public Accountants are highly trained financial experts who provide strategic advice, tax planning, and compliance services.
- Good for: Tax strategy, navigating complex financial situations, handling audits, and getting one-off advisory.
- Pros: A good CPA provides expert guidance on critical decisions like entity structure, tax optimization, and complex accounting treatments. Their oversight significantly reduces your risk on high-stakes financial matters.
- Cons: Hiring a CPA firm for day-to-day bookkeeping is prohibitively expensive for most small businesses. To be effective, they still need you to provide timely, organized financial records.
- What’s the difference from bookkeepers? In short, bookkeepers record and organize historical transactions, while accountants and CPAs interpret, report, and advise based on that data. (Investopedia, Intuit)
6) Traditional Bookkeepers
A bookkeeper is a professional responsible for the weekly or monthly task of recording and reconciling your financial transactions.
- Good for: Business owners who want a dedicated person handling the weekly grind of bookkeeping.
- Pros: Human oversight greatly reduces common categorization errors that software alone can miss. At the end of each month, they produce a clean set of financial statements for you to review.
- Cons: This option is costlier than DIY software, with monthly retainers often starting in the hundreds of dollars. The turnaround time for reports and answers depends on your bookkeeper's availability and process.
- Reality Check: For many small businesses, the combination of a great bookkeeper for weekly tasks and periodic CPA support for tax and strategy is a durable and effective combo. (Pioneer Accounting Group)
7) Beancount.io (Plain-Text Accounting, Supercharged)
This modern approach combines the control of spreadsheets with the automation of software and the precision of double-entry accounting.
- Good for: Developers, finance pros, and detail-oriented founders who demand precision, transparency, and automation without black boxes.
- What it is: Beancount.io is a platform built on the open-source Beancount methodology. Your entire financial ledger lives as human-readable plain text, which the platform transforms into real-time analysis, hosted Fava dashboards, and AI-assisted workflows.
- Why teams choose it:
- Scriptable & Auditable: Version-control your books with Git. Every single change is reviewable in a
diff, just like code. - Hosted Fava UI: Instantly generate income statements, balance sheets, and interactive charts directly from your text-based ledger. No manual report building.
- AI Assistance: Speed up transaction categorization and anomaly detection while keeping humans in the loop for final approval.
- True Portability: Your core data is a simple text file. You can export it anytime. There is zero vendor lock-in.
- Scriptable & Auditable: Version-control your books with Git. Every single change is reviewable in a
- Tradeoffs: There is a learning curve if you’ve never used double-entry accounting in a plain-text format. It's best suited for those who value absolute accuracy and control over the illusion of "push-button" convenience.
Prefer pure open source and self-hosting?
You can always run the Beancount open-source engine on your own machine and use Fava as the web UI. It’s incredibly powerful and free, but you will be responsible for managing the setup, backups, and data integrations yourself. Beancount.io handles all of that for you.
Quick Comparison (At a Glance)
| Solution | Your Time Investment | Automation Level | Human Help | Data Control |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Excel | High | Low | None | Medium |
| Google Sheets | High | Low | None | Medium |
| QuickBooks Online | Medium | Medium-High | Optional | Low |
| Xero | Medium | Medium-High | Optional | Low |
| Accountants (CPAs) | Low | N/A | High (Advisory) | Medium |
| Traditional Bookkeepers | Low | N/A | High (Weekly) | Medium |
| Beancount.io | Low-Medium | High | Optional | High |
How to Choose
- Want maximum control, auditability, and developer-grade workflows? Choose Beancount.io. You get hosted Fava dashboards, AI assistance, and the freedom of plain-text portability.
- Want someone to “just handle it”? Hire a bookkeeper and keep a CPA on call for taxes and strategic questions.
- Comfortable in traditional SMB software ecosystems? QuickBooks or Xero are fine choices—just be sure to budget time each week to review and reconcile your transactions.
- Just testing the waters on a tight budget? Spreadsheets can work for a short time. Treat them as a stepping stone to a real system, not the final destination.
Why Plain-Text Accounting is Having a Moment
Plain-text accounting (PTA) tools like Beancount are gaining traction because they emphasize reproducibility, version control, and transparency. These are values that resonate deeply with engineers, data scientists, and finance pros. If you believe your company's books should be as clear and reviewable as your code, you’re in the right place. (plaintextaccounting.org)
Ready to see your ledger come alive?
Spin up a free Beancount.io workspace, import a small sample of last month’s transactions, and open the hosted Fava dashboard. You'll see your income statement and balance sheet appear instantly—then you can refine your categories with AI assistance.
