Guide
Practice accounting software is not practice management
Updated
Searches for practice accounting software land on two different products sold to the same buyer, and the pricing pages rarely say which one you are on until you have already compared two numbers that were never comparable.
The ledger and the workflow
The first product is the ledger: the compliance engine a practice uses to produce client accounts and returns. It is priced per client file, per return, or as a practice licence, and its buyer question is coverage of the filings you actually do.
The second is the workflow system, which is what every vendor in the table on this site's front page sells. It holds the job list, the deadlines, the time, the work in progress and the recovery. It is priced per seat, because seats are what use it.
Why the distinction decides the bill
A ledger priced per client file gets more expensive as the client list grows. A workflow system priced per seat gets more expensive as the team grows. Those are different curves, and a practice adding clients without adding staff is on the cheaper side of one and the dearer side of the other.
Xero is the clearest case in the list because it sells both halves and prices them differently. Practice Manager is the workflow half, printed at a single practice figure for up to ten users, and it is included at no charge once a practice reaches Silver partner level.
Source: Xero Practice Manager, read 2026-09-12
Three questions that tell you which product you are pricing
- Does the price count seats or client files? Seats mean workflow, files mean ledger.
- Does the feature list name filings and returns, or jobs and deadlines? Filings are the ledger's vocabulary.
- Does the plan mention work in progress or recovery? Those are workflow words, and a ledger product will not use them.
What the published figures cover
Every figure on this site is a workflow price, read from the vendor's own page, in the currency that page prints. None of them buys the ledger, and none of them is a quote for a practice.
Where a vendor sells modules on top, the plan figure is a floor. Canopy prices tax and close automation separately from its Standard plan, so the seat price is the start of the bill rather than the end of it.
Source: Canopy pricing, read 2026-09-12