12 Best Productivity Tools for Accountants

Accountants are responsible for researching and analyzing financial data and presenting financial reports to management. In today’s fast-paced world, such a level of responsibility demands optimum productivity.

When boosting performance efficiency as an accountant, it’s essential to understand which tools are an excellent fit for your workflow and how they impact your performance. For this purpose, we have created a list of productivity tools for accountants in various categories.

1.   Time Tracking – actiTIME

Key features:

• Manual and automatic time tracking
• Easy invoicing
• Powerful reports
• Handy integrations

actiTIME is a versatile time tracking tool with a user-friendly UI design and such features as work scope management, report, and data analysis. actiTIME is ideal for any accountant as it encompasses all significant ingredients for productivity-boosting.

actiTIME provides comprehensive data for accounting and offers efficient tools for:

• Cost tracking and preparation of employee payroll
• Project profitability analysis
• Easy access to custom invoices for billing your clients
• Cost and billing data analysis, coupled with customizable reports and data presentation in formats like charts, HTML spreadsheets, and CSV files

actiTIME has a fully functional 30-day online trial for companies of any size and a free version for teams consisting of up to 3 members, which makes it an excellent choice for accounting teams. actiTIME is available as both a cloud solution and a self-hosted package.

2.   Distraction Blocking – Luxafor Flag

Key features:

• Color codes for a distraction-free work process
• Scheduling
• Notifications

Luxafor offers many practical solutions for improving employee productivity and task performance management. One of them is Luxafor Flag, which does the following useful things:

• Indicates if its user is busy or available with red or green colors
• Has an option to set up color notifications for specific calendar events and urgent emails
• Allows customizing notification colors and patterns

Companies taking employee productivity seriously – like Google, Facebook, EA, and others – equip their whole departments with Luxafor Flags to control workplace distractions better. Since the daily job of every accountant requires sharp focus when processing data, this tool can help you reduce the risk of errors and, consequently, the amount of time needed to complete work.

Luxafor Flag will cost you merely $31 per unit, which is a fairly small price for a ton of value it provides. You can learn more about how having a do-not-disturb light can skyrocket your office productivity here.

3.   Auditing – AuditFile

Key features:

• Financial statements
• Easy compliance
• Analytics
• Mobile access

AuditFile takes the pain out of the auditing process and helps certified public accountants (CPAs) maintain compliance in an effortless way. It includes audit programs for multiple industries, which makes it easier to follow professional standards and carry out reviews for diverse clients. Besides, it helps you stay on track with the audit process and make sure that every step is completed right.

AuditFile has built-in automation that lets you analyze data in real time and generate financial statements in merely a few clicks. In other words, this tool is worth trying out for every CPA who wants to perform at the peak of their efficiency and avoid errors in work.

4.   Project Management – Workzone

Key features:

• Timelines
• Project dashboards
• Task dependencies
• Reports

Workzone is a piece of software for organizing, tracking, and managing projects. With its help, you can:

• Plan new projects from scratch
• Develop different kinds of graphs and charts to review project roadmaps and work progress
• Create and allocate assignments to your team members
• Monitor the statuses of essential project tasks on the Kanban board
• Collaborate with key stakeholders
• Run reports and analyze your performance results

All in all, the tool’s functionality is tremendously rich. It provides much value for teams of any size and from diverse professional backgrounds, including accounting teams.

5.   Expense Management – Fyle

Key features:

• Budget tracking
• Real-time analytics
• Policy compliance
• Automatic alerts

Fyle is an AI-based expense management software built to make the tasks of expense reporting, tracking and management as seamless as possible and automate them to boost productivity in your team.

Using this piece of cloud expense management software, you can:

• Access employee expense reports and receipts under one platform
• Reconcile credit card transactions, expenses and receipts in a streamlined fashion
• Enjoy useful integrations with your favorite accounting apps
• Avoid manual data entry and errors
• Always stay audit-ready without a hitch

In addition to the above, Fyle also acts as a robust policy checking engine that monitors your cost reports in real time. It can readily empower your team to enforce organizational policies, eliminate the risk of fraud and encourage compliance.

Fyle offers three user plans: standard, business and enterprise. It bills only for active users, which means you will be charged merely for those employees who’ve created at least one expense report a month. 

6.   Practice Management – Canopy

Key features:

• Client management
• Document management
• Time tracking
• Billing

Canopy Practice Management is an all-inclusive solution for accounting professionals. It allows you to manage every aspect of your accounting practice in a single place. With this tool, you can:

• Keep client records in your Canopy account, share calendars with them, and receive notifications whenever clients respond to your requests
• Store and organize your versatile documentation on the file management dashboard
• Improve team workflows and automate processes
• Track time to collect billing data and generate accurate invoices automatically

In addition to the above, Canopy has an online payment functionality that helps accountants get paid faster and run payment data reports. In other words, it has the potential to replace any minor accounting app you may already utilize and provide you with a much greater value for the subscription fee paid. So, why not give Canopy a try?

7.   To-do List – TickTick

Key features:

• Task management
• Mobile access
• Voice input
• Built-in automation

TickTick is a to-do list application built and backed up on the cloud. It allows users to create to-do lists and manage them from a smartphone, a tablet, or a computer. This productivity tool comes with essential features that help you keep your multiple daily activities in check, prioritize tasks and never forget a thing (thanks to multiple automatic reminders).

TickTick is suitable for a great variety of operating systems and devices, including Android, iOS, Windows 10, Web browsers, and macOS. Plus, it can be used in the form of a browser extension or an add-on to your email system.

8.   Real-Time Communication – Pumble

Key features:

• Private and public chats
• Notifications
• Audio and video calls
• File sharing

The ultimate alternative to Slack, Pumble is designed to replace email as a core method of user interaction and file sharing. It allows users to establish communication channels for group conversations and private messages to exchange information, files, and other forms of data all in one place.

Pumble contains a plethora of valuable communication features, from unlimited message history and notifications to screen sharing and the do-not-disturb mode. It offers a free version for unlimited users and an unlimited period. However, if you want to make use of extended Pumble functionality, you have an option to subscribe to one of its paid plans.

9.   Email Management – Zoho Mail

Key features:

• Email hosting
• Calendar
• Mobile app
• Email backups

Zoho Mail is an email hosting service offering secure, encrypted and ad-free email hosting. This tool comes with a built-in platform that allows users to share information within the inbox. A hybrid of the standard email and social network, it has additional features, such as like, share and comment buttons. Key features of this productivity tool are

• Email archiving, data recovery and retention
• Email monitoring
• Queue, response and signature management
• Shared inboxes
• Spam blocking, as well as whitelisting and blacklisting

Zoho Mail is supported on Mac OS, Windows OS, iOS, Android OS, Cloud, SaaS and Web browsers. Pricing starts from $1 per month for a single account. Other plans start from $3 and $4.

10.   Document Management – Doc.It

Key features:

• PDF editor
• Document archive
• Cloud and mobile access
• Web portal

Doc.It is a file hosting, storage and synchronization service designed with accountants’ needs in mind. Besides providing a safe space for data storage, it fosters more effortless collaboration and information sharing through the cloud and bespoke web portals where you may upload financial statements, invoices, and other essential work-related documents.

In addition, Doc.It contains functionality for workflow management that allows for trouble-free workload distribution, due dates monitoring, and overall efficiency analysis. It can also be integrated with many third-party tools, including DocuSign, Microsoft Outlook, UltraTax, etc.

11.   Invoicing – Kashoo

Key features:

• Automated invoicing
• Payroll
• Advanced reports
• Income and expense tracking

As a piece of accounting software, Kashoo is designed to make the invoicing and billing process as simple as ever. With the aid of this tool, you can:

• Develop customized and professional-looking invoices
• Process and monitor payments
• Streamline the calculation of work expenses and income
• Create reports
• Calculate taxes

These and many other features make Kashoo an indispensable productivity tool for accountants worldwide.

12.   Payroll System – Square Payroll

Key features:

• Easy payroll
• Automated tax filing
• Benefits management
• Payments

As the name of the tool suggests, Square Payroll is an online platform designed to help you manage workers’ payrolls in the most efficient way possible. It streamlines the entire process by enabling automatic deductions and filling direct deposits, W-2s, and 1009s. Plus, it lets you sync payroll with versatile employee benefits and send payments to employees right from your account.

Square Payroll is a SaaS platform supported on the Web. It costs $5 per person paid a month + $35 monthly subscription fee.

Productivity Tools for Accountants Are Key to Higher Efficiency

Using the right accounting, time tracking, communication and other types of tools for productivity improvement will take you a long way in enhancing performance efficiency and bringing your accounting practice to higher levels.