An app can be an accountant’s most powerful tool, depending on its function. When we think of apps, we often think they might be distractions. But with accountants juggling so much in their daily work, technology can lend a helping hand.
These days, every modern-day accountant needs an updated tech stack to stay productive and sane. But app marketplaces are heavily saturated, and finding the right accounting tools for your exact needs can be overwhelming.
How do you search for the right accounting apps that will simplify your life, your practice, and your cash flow?
We’ll take the guesswork out of this one. This blog gives you a rundown of all the best apps for accounting firms to boost productivity at work, make your team’s life easier, and keep their mental health in check, too.
AI apps for accountants
Commercial AI chatbots can supercharge your accounting tasks. It can help with various aspects of your work, like research, organization, and report generation, to cut down your work time significantly.
A whopping 81% of accountants improved their productivity using AI alone, according to the 2025 Intuit QuickBooks Accountant Technology Survey. In a few keyboard strokes, you can offload a lot of manual and repetitive tasks to an AI chatbot like ChatGPT, Copilot, or Gemini.
While these platforms offer free versions, your team should always use the plan that includes enterprise-grade security and SOC 2 compliance, especially when handling sensitive or client-related data. It’s also important to always validate the output it generates and the sources it cites.
1. ChatGPT
ChatGPT is arguably the most popular AI chatbot available. It’s a general-purpose AI assistant that can help with content creation, analyses, reporting, research, and workflows.
2. Copilot
Copilot is Microsoft’s proprietary AI assistant. It’s integrated with Microsoft 365 and Windows—so if you work on these systems, this might be your best option. Because it can see your real documents or emails through integrations, it can execute its tasks with better context. For example, it can summarize email threads more accurately for you if it can access your Outlook.
Download your free guide to choosing the best AI for you and your team:
Copilot vs ChatGPT for Accountants
Accounting apps to enhance collaboration and communication
3. Slack
Slack is an all-in-one communication and file exchange platform for business teams. It integrates with other apps like Google Suite, Asana, Miro, and Notion. It’s free for individuals and small teams, but they do offer paid upgrades.
4. Microsoft Teams
Teams is another all-in-one business messaging platform. It’s ideal for organizations that operate on Microsoft, since it integrates with the Microsoft 365 Suite. This makes collaboration on files and documents seamless. One handy feature it offers is the ability to simultaneously live-edit documents and files. This eliminates sending back and forth various iterations of a file.
Microsoft Teams is free for personal use, but it offers free upgrades for businesses.
Best bookkeeping apps with great accounting features
5. Snyder
Snyder is a powerful bookkeeping and accounting app that can automate invoicing and migrate and sync financial transaction data directly from online payment platforms like Stripe, PayPal, and Shopify. This can save you a lot of time when tracking expenses and revenue.
6. Xero
Xero is a comprehensive accounting app. It covers everything from accepting payments, expense tracking, invoicing, bank reconciliation, payroll, reporting, analytics, and project tracking.
You can also integrate many apps into Xero, like Snyder. Xero can also natively accept online payments. Access to financial data in real-time makes reporting convenient so that you can make smarter decisions for your business.
7. QuickBooks
QuickBooks has a comprehensive accounting system that spans invoicing, bank reconciliation, payroll, expense tracking, reporting, analytics, and project tracking. Like Xero, it can natively accept online payments and integrate with other accounting apps. However, it differs in its scalability; it can work better for individual freelancers and growing businesses.
Anti-money laundering software for accountants
8. Ondato
Ondato helps accountants fight fraud and ensure compliance with regulations. It has several features, like age and identity verification, transaction monitoring, due diligence, and a virtual branch so you can communicate with clients remotely and securely. Use this app to screen your clients’ financial activities for legitimacy.
9. LexisNexis
LexisNexis offers a huge selection of security solutions. In particular, RiskNarrative is a powerful tool that helps accountants onboard large amounts of customers in a combined AML, fraud, compliance, and risk management platform. The best part is that it’s easy to set up and requires no coding.
10. ComplyAdvantage
ComplyAdvantage is an AI-driven risk management and fraud detection platform. It provides you with AI-driven insights and real-time risk intelligence, which is great for staying ahead of any potential fraudulent activity.
- Publicly Exposed Persons (PEP): Reviews whether the individual is in a government role and ensures that their funds are not from illicit activities.
- Sanctions List Screening: Checks whether the individual is transacting with businesses tagged for terrorism, trafficking, or other crimes by the UN, EU, and others.
- Adverse Media Screening Tool: Checks media coverage regarding the individual to determine whether they have suspicious histories or reputations.
Marketing apps for accountants
Email marketing is an essential marketing strategy for accountants and accounting firms. It enables you to build trust with your clients and prospects, increase brand awareness, and drive sales in a cost-effective way.
With either MailChimp or ConvertKit, you can create newsletters or drip campaigns to engage with your customers. Both of them offer free versions that you can try.
11. MailChimp
MailChimp is a design-driven and easy-to-use marketing platform. You can create email sequences, landing pages, social ads, and segment and manage your audiences using a list model. It has multiple automation features and a template builder so that you don’t have to create from scratch.
One thing to note with MailChimp is that it uses a list model. This means that one person who could be in several lists results in duplicate counts. This might also make tracking their customer journey more challenging, like moving from a prospect to a client.
12. ConvertKit
ConvertKit is a professional suite that lets you create email sequences and segment your audience lists. It integrates a lot of automation so that you can save time setting up emails and sending them out to different time zones.
Unlike MailChimp, ConvertKit uses a subscriber model. This means that there is only one list that contains all subscribers. Tags or automations are used per subscriber to track their behavior and journey in the marketing funnel.
Social media management
You can’t market your accounting services without having any social media. Social media platforms help you reach and grow your audience at unprecedented levels. It’s also where you can share educational content to establish your expertise and build trust with them. All of these work together to boost sales.
Managing them can be tricky, especially when you have multiple—like Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and LinkedIn. These apps can help accountants manage various social media platforms by automating content scheduling.
13. MeetEdgar
MeetEdgar is a content scheduling platform that works on popular sites—Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Pinterest. MeetEdgar shines with its focus on recycling evergreen content. This means that once you’ve built up a content library, it helps you repost content at intervals automatically.
It removes the time-consuming and manual work of having to find content to repurpose and schedule. It’s overall less maintenance work, which makes it a great marketing app for busy accountants like you.
14. Later
Later is another content scheduling platform that works with Facebook, LinkedIn, X, Instagram, TikTok, and Pinterest. If you focus a lot of your marketing work on Instagram, Later offers a great way to plan out your content through a visual grid. This makes it easier to achieve visual cohesion on your feed.
Apps for document processing and collaboration
Documents and paper trails are imperative to accounting work. That’s why it’s important to have the right applications to help you manage and process your documents.
It’s easier to organize, store, and share your files on secure cloud platforms like Google Drive and Dropbox compared to on-premise storage. Both of them are free to use but come with paid upgrades.
15. Google Drive
Google Drive is a cloud storage space that lets you sync and share files. This can enhance collaboration with others when you need to update or review documents. If you already work on Google Space, Google Drive is likely the best option for you.
One potential drawback of Google Drive is that its integrations with Photos, Docs, Sheets, and others also take up space. If you have a lot of photos or videos, this may eat up the shared storage and leave less space for your files.
16. Dropbox
Dropbox is the other popular cloud storage option for files and documents. While it’s also collaborative, it integrates well with Microsoft Office. It has similar sharing and syncing capabilities to Google Drive. However, since it has fewer integrations, you’ll have more space on Dropbox for your files.
Time tracking apps for accountants
Accountants know that time is money. But it’s also easy to get swamped with work and lose track of time. Before you know it, you’re invoicing customers for more than they wanted to spend on. That’s why tracking your billable hours accurately matters.
These accounting apps will help you deliver client work on time and within budget. Both offer free starter plans.
17. Toggl
Toggl is a simple time-tracking tool. Here, you can track work, assign it to clients or projects, and generate reports for easy billing.
18. Harvest
Harvest tracks both time and expenses for various project sizes. Its features include reporting, analytics, invoicing, and payments. It can also integrate with other accounting software and project management tools.
Password management for accountants
With all the sensitive information that accountants work on, it’s important to keep your files and apps secure. Ideally, you shouldn’t be using one password for all your apps. Nor should you be writing them all down on notes scattered on your desk. That’s where password management apps can help—you just have to remember one password to access everything else.
19. NordPass
NordPass is a password manager developed by Nord Security. Its features include password vaults, password generation, dark-web breach monitoring, and secure sharing. It’s also popular for its navigable and intuitive interface, so it’s easy to use.
20. Bitwarden
BitWarden is an open-source password manager that offers the same features like vaults, password generation, and secure sharing. Because it’s open-source code, that means anyone can publicly check how its password storage and encryption work. If this kind of transparency is very important to you as an accountant, this may be the better choice.
Apps for mental health and well-being
One of the best accounting tools you can download is one for your mental health and well-being. Accountants suffer from stress and burnout due to an overwhelming amount of day-to-day work. These can negatively affect your health, performance, and happiness.
To help you combat stress, anxiety, and prevent burnout, check out HeadSpace, Calm, and Spotify.
21. HeadSpace
HeadSpace is a subscription-based app that helps accountants fight stress through guided meditations, stress management exercises, sleep wellness, and coaching. It’s great when you need quick breathers or daily meditation sessions.
22. Calm
Calm is another subscription-based app that focuses on sleep and meditation. They offer a large suite of longer-length content like sleep stories and soundscapes to help you relax, unwind, and get better quality sleep.
23. Spotify
Spotify is a subscription-based streaming platform where you can listen to music, podcasts, and audiobooks. Listening to music isn’t a distraction. WebFX reports from various studies that 90% of workers perform better when listening to music. Even better? 88% of people produce more accurate work with music playing.
Leveraging accounting software
Accountants are often stretched for time and overwhelmed by the sheer amount of work they do daily. This is where leveraging tech stacks with the right apps can help.
The right tech can help your team accomplish their tasks. But with the right team and the right tools, your firm could accomplish its biggest goals. TOA Global helps thousands of accounting firms scale with elite talent trained in leveraging mainstream accounting software and new technology.
Discover how partnering with TOA Global can help boost your team’s productivity without the burnout.
