SmallTeamStack

Software stack for a accounting or bookkeeping firm

Three illustrative stacks, priced from rates read off each vendor's own page. At five people they run from $64.99 to $392.44 a month — and the expensive one is not the best one.

Typically 2–10 people · figures computed from the pricing tracker at build time · newest check

What shapes this business's software

Client financial records, retention obligations measured in years, and desktop Excel that is not negotiable for at least one person.

The three stacks at a glance

Stack1351025
Lean $20.99$42.99$64.99$129.98$324.95
Practical $74.49$143.49$236.49$478.98$1,206.45
Feature-rich $106.44$249.44$392.44$759.93$1,837.45

Monthly, at the annual-billing rate, for the whole team.

Lean — $64.99/month at five people

The least you can pay and still run the business properly. Free tiers where they genuinely work.

Deliberately not included at this size:

  • Desktop Office for everyone. Buy it for the people who genuinely need installed Excel, not the whole firm.
  • A CRM — practice management usually matters more, and that is a different category.

Per person: $13/month · $779.88 a year for five people

Practical — $236.49/month at five people

What most teams this size actually end up on, once free tiers stop fitting.

Deliberately not included at this size:

  • Separate file storage — Microsoft 365 includes 1 TB of OneDrive per user even on Basic.

Per person: $47.30/month · $2,837.88 a year for five people

Feature-rich — $392.44/month at five people

More capability, and more cost. Not an upgrade — a different trade, and often the wrong one at this size.

Deliberately not included at this size:

  • Project management, which most firms run inside their practice-management software rather than alongside it.

Per person: $78.49/month · $4,709.28 a year for five people

The thing generic stack advice misses here

The important number here is not monthly cost — it is what happens to the records when you leave. Microsoft deletes data on cancellation with no read-only period, where QuickBooks keeps yours readable for a year. For a firm with retention obligations that is the line worth reading before the price.

What this page is not

A recommendation. We have not run most of these products in a lab, and two businesses of the same type and size can have genuinely different right answers — the variable that matters most is how your team actually works, which no table can see. These are priced illustrations, good for checking whether your bill is in a sane range and for seeing what a tier deliberately leaves out.

To price what you actually pay for rather than an illustration, the stack auditor takes your real list and flags overlap, seat-minimum waste and what happens when somebody leaves. If your bill is well above the feature-rich row, the cause is usually paying twice for a capability you already own rather than one expensive mistake.

Other business types

Tell me when these prices change

Every figure on this page is recomputed when a tracked rate moves. Subscribers hear what changed, with the date and the source.