10 Best Basic Tools of Accounting for 2025

When considering the basic tools of accounting, you want a tool that can do, well, the basics. These include the ability to manage, track, and record your company's financial activities. Such activities might include financial transactions, payroll, taxes, cashflow, project budget allocation, expense management, and so on. 

Let's explore how accounting tools can benefit your team, 10 of the best accounting tools for business, and how to choose tools and equipment in accounting. 

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What Are Accounting Tools?

Accounting tools are used by finance teams to manage a business' finances. These tools can help accountants with tasks such as financial planning, cash management, inventory tracking, payroll, tax management, and expense management. 

When considering accounting tools for business decision making, you want a tool that will save you time and cut back on mundane tasks. Typing in data by hand makes accountants more prone to errors and wasted time, not to mention plain ol' boredom. 

With the right financial accounting tools, you can use this time and energy for more analytical tasks that can help you grow and scale your business and improve operations. 

What Are the Benefits of Accounting Tools?

When using basic tools of accounting, you want to consider an automated tool that offers these key benefits:

1. Save Time

You want a financial accounting tool that is going to save your finance team time. So much time is wasted manually inputting data into spreadsheets. With an automated tool, there is no need to assign anyone to these mundane tasks (not even the intern). Instead, your team can be spending their valuable time on more complex, analytical tasks or streamlining business processes. 

2. Gain Insights

Accounting tools can help you ensure you have accurate, timely, and high-quality data right at your fingertips. Choose a tool that provides automated data quality checks and exception reporting. Some accounting tools even allow you to collect and transform any data into interactive reports and analytics, helping you visualize your data. 

3. Increase Accuracy

With the right tool, you can achieve 90% fewer errors in your financial reporting. Imagine how much better your workflows and operations can be if you had fewer errors to correct or issues to mitigate.

4. Streamline Integrations

You want a basic accounting tool that can seamlessly integrate with your Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), workflow applications, database, and data warehouse systems. When all your systems work in tandem, you can gain more accurate insights in real time. 

What Are the Best Basic Tools for Accounting?

With so many basic accounting tools on the market, it's important to consider your business' needs and where you plan to be in the next several years. While some tools are fine for small businesses, they may not enable you to scale as time goes on. 

It's important to choose a tool designed for teams, big and small, with automated features that cut out mundane, time-intensive tasks, such as data entry.

You also want to consider each tool's collaboration capabilities, and whether you can share real-time data across your organization. Keeping all your key decision makers in the loop can help you streamline processes and ensure everyone is on the same page. 

Get to know the best tools for accounting and their functions:

1. SolveXia: Best for Overall Financial Automation

If you're looking for a tool with advanced financial automation capabilities, SolveXia is your solution. With SolveXia, you can remove manual tasks and automate financial processes such as: reconciliation, revenue and expense analysis, regulatory reporting, and rebate management, to name a few. 

You can easily combine, validate, and prepare data from your ERP and other systems and produce and share personalized analytics in minutes. The result of all this? Your finance staff feel empowered to help the business achieve its goals rather than focusing on tedious data-entry tasks. 

Plus, you can expect to complete processes 85x faster with 90% fewer errors. At the same time, you will say goodbye to key person dependencies and bottlenecks, improve compliance with audit trails, and be able to scale automation without any further IT involvement once you’re setup! 

SolveXia is incredibly user friendly, with a simple interface that enables drag-and-drop functionality, meaning there’s no need to know how to code. If you feel you need more support, SolveXia has a robust resource library, featuring blog posts, eBooks, videos and webinars, and a support site where you can get all your questions answered and any support you would need.

2. Wave: Best for Teams With a Limited Budget

Teams with a limited accounting budget often seek cost-effective solutions, and one popular option is Wave, a free accounting software package that offers a range of essential features. Wave enables you to create estimates, invoices, bills, and bookkeeping records for free. 

This makes it an option for small businesses, freelancers, or startups that need to manage their finances without incurring additional expenses. There is a paid version if you need more advanced accounting features, such as auto importing bank transactions and automating late payment reminders.

3. Microsoft Excel: Best for Microsoft Teams

For teams already using Microsoft Office, Microsoft Excel can be a flexible accounting tool. While it lacks the specialized features of dedicated accounting software, it offers control and customization, allowing users to manually enter data, track expenses, and create financial statements. 

While some may find Excel complex, those familiar with it can take advantage of its powerful formulas, pivot tables, and organizational tools to tailor solutions to their needs.

4. Google Sheets: Best for Google Teams

On the flip side, if your team uses Google tools, you might opt for Google Sheets for your manual data entry. This tool suits teams that only need basic spreadsheet functions without the complexity of dedicated accounting software. With Google Sheets, you can access your data from anywhere, as it’s cloud-based, and collaborate in real-time with teammates. 

Additionally, you have full control over who can access your sheet and what level of permissions they have, whether it's as a viewer, commenter, or editor, making it easy to manage collaboration and data security.

5. Zoho Books: Best for Sales Tax Automation

Zoho Books enables you to send invoices, manage expenses, generate 1099 reports, and perform other basic tax functions. Its other core features include inventory management integrated with CRM, accounting across devices, automatic reminders or alerts, and multi-currency capabilities. Zoho Books also has customizable reports, enabling users to build custom templates and fields. 

6. Kashoo: Best for Small Businesses

Kashoo is designed with small businesses in mind. It's a simple accounting tool that lets you send invoices, file tax returns, track expenses, and track transactions. Even if you're not ready to use the platform itself, Kashoo has free, designer-made invoice templates you can download. They also host free workshops where they discuss accounting 101, small business advice, and how to set up their accounting software. 

7. FreshBooks: Best for Freelancers or Solopreneurs 

Freelancers often turn to FreshBooks for its time tracking, automated invoices, expense tracking, and client portal features. While it lacks in advanced payroll, financial reporting, and inventory management capabilities, it's a popular solution for freelancers looking for a basic accounting tool.

8. Thriday: Best for Accounting and Banking Integrations

Thriday combines banking, tax, invoicing, and accounting into one platform, using AI to automate its financial admin features. This platform was designed for solo business owners in mind, offering affordable pricing, human support, automated expense management, real-time cash flow updates, and other basic accounting features. Thriday has several tiers of pricing based on your accounting needs, with the higher tiers including accountant support. 

9. MYOB: Best for Scaling Goals

Businesses that aspire to grow and scale tend to use MYOB. This Australia-based tech startup is an all-in-one business management platform. They have features for every sized company, enabling you to choose solutions based on where your business currently is and where you hope to be. You can use MYOB for invoicing, expense tracking, tax support, payroll, timesheets, payment processing, job tracking, financial reporting, and more. 

10. Xero: Best for Time Saving

Xero gets financial teams set up fast by offering onboarding specialists to get you started during your first 90 days. It offers time-saving features, like paperless record keeping, automated reconciliations and invoice reminders, trend analysis, and customizable reporting. You can try Xero for free for 30 days, then choose from several tiers based on your business' stage: early, growing, or established. 

How to Choose the Best Accounting Tool?

Follow these steps when choosing the best accounting tool for your team:

1. Make a Checklist: Before selecting your tool, create a list of must haves and wants for your team. For instance, if your team always feels pressed for time, choose a tool that can help you execute processes faster, with the best tools allowing you to do so 85x faster (like SolveXia).

2. Consider Your Business Goals: Find a financial accounting tool that enables you to scale your business and meet your most important goals. Consider a tool that will build resiliency into your business processes and reduce risk that comes with human error. 

3. Think About Your Team: Choose a tool that will be easy for your team to learn and integrate into your daily work. Consider what the interface of the tool will look like and whether you can easily visualize data and build customized reports or dashboards. 

4. List Your Pain Points: Too many errors, wasted time, poor data insights, boring tasks, and overly complex systems are a recipe for disaster. Keep a running list of pain points you're experiencing with your current systems, making sure the accounting tool you choose can resolve them. 

Closing Thoughts

Are you ready to take the plunge into a more streamlined workflow for your accounting team? The best accounting tools like SolveXia offers automation capabilities to save your team time, reduce errors, and gain real-time data insights. 

Get started today by requesting a demo and learn more about one of the top basic tools of accounting.