When you launch your company, you might rely extensively on spreadsheets to track employee hours and wages, expenses, taxes, and cash flow. Continuing to budget and calculate through a spreadsheet isn’t sustainable as your business grows – on top of being unwieldy, it lacks many features and tools that could improve your budgeting process.

Wise business owners use specialized company accounting tools and software to make budgeting a breeze. If you’re looking to improve your business’s budgeting processes, here are three of the best tools for your company budgeting to consider utilizing.

What Should I Look For in Accounting Software?

When considering which accounting software you should purchase for your business, you’ll want one with all the essential tools: automatic income and expense tracking, accounting, cash flow management, invoice delivery, reporting dashboards, and future financial forecasting.

From there, you can take a closer look at each offering and see if it meets your individual needs for the number of users, support, and pricing. Additionally, you’ll want to see if your budgeting software integrates with any other financial tools, such as any payroll software, sales tools, or bookkeeping software you may already use or have access to.

Of these integrations, the most important one should be payroll software to pay your employees the correct amount each period. Should you make a mistake in your payroll runs, not only will you have to pay an unexpected expense to reconcile the taxes due, you may face additional penalty fees from the government. That’s why using a paycheck calculator should be a top priority for your budgeting software.

Top Three Company Budgeting Tools

Moving on, let’s look at five of the most reputable and multifaceted budgeting tools designed to help shed some light on your budget.

1. Sage Intacct

First on our list is Sage Intacct, the designated accounting software by Sage. Sage Intacct automatically calculates live accounts receivable and accounts payable, automates budgeting and forecasting per department, and displays cash flows from different sources in one easy-to-understand and customizable dashboard view.

Sage Intacct has been praised for its flexibility, utility, and ease of use. In particular, we place Sage at the top of our list because of its amazing scalability – you can customize your dashboards and accounts to provide views of cash flow by entity, meaning that as your business grows and opens new locations, Intacct can grow with you to easily account for each location.

Sage also provides a host of other business management tools for sales, human resources (i.e. payroll tools), manufacturing, and more. As these tools are all offered by the same vendor, they integrate natively with Intacct, meaning that data flows seamlessly and automatically between them. What a time-saver!

On the downside, though, Sage can be quite pricey: it’s $2,510 per year, plus a whopping $210 per user per month after the first user. Though we believe the price to be well worth it for medium-sized businesses who can afford it, the hefty price tag is admittedly a deal-breaker for small businesses that are just starting out.

2. QuickBooks

A woman using an accounting software on her monitor screen.

Next up is QuickBooks by Intuit, marketed for small- to medium-sized businesses. Some features of QuickBooks include automatic tracking of income and expenses, invoice payments, receipt capture, cash flow, automatic sales and sales tax calculations, and general reporting. Another perk of QuickBooks is that it’s hosted on the cloud, meaning you can manage your company’s budget on the go with the designated QuickBooks app.

Another big plus of QuickBooks is that its vendor, Intuit, also offers additional payroll software that you can purchase in packaged deals. As we mentioned earlier, integrating your payroll functions into your budgeting and accounting activities is simply the smart thing to do, so we consider this a golden opportunity.

Quickbooks’ pricing starts at $30 per month for its most basic features, and goes up to $90 per month for its most comprehensive plan that includes more users, inventory management, bill management, and sales channel cash flow management.

3. Xero

Our last budgeting tool is Xero, which offers cloud-based accounting software. Some features included with Xero are bill tracking and payment, expense claiming, invoicing, inventory management, online payment acceptance, and bank reconciliation.

Xero also offers a very generous 30-day free trial that includes all of its features; after the end of the trial, you can choose one of its three affordable plans to continue service. Plans start at $13 and go to $70 per month, making it a more affordable option for small businesses.

Going beyond offering simple accounting and budgeting tools, Xero operates as an all-in-one business solution for smaller businesses, offering sales tools such as contact management, payment and checkout solutions, as well as file storage. They don’t, however, offer in-house payroll software, and instead partner with a third-party company (Gusto) to offer these services.

So although Xero may be great for small businesses that need a lot of tools in one package, it is probably not the best solution for companies that will be scaling up fast because the tools are limited in this capacity. Still, if your business is planning on staying small, Xero could be a great choice for small business budgeting and financial services.

Conclusion

Budgeting and managing the financials can be a struggle for any business owner, whether it’s a small or large business. As your company grows, it would be wise to invest in an accounting tool to help automate cash flows and expenses such as payroll, ensuring that all of your money is exactly where it needs to be. With reliable budgeting software on hand, you can worry less about managing the money and get back to running your business.

Best Tools For Your Company Budgeting