Best Accounting Software for Freelancers in 2026: From Free to $30 a Month

The best accounting software for freelancers is usually the cheapest thing that tracks income, expenses and mileage cleanly enough to fill in a Schedule C. Wave does that for nothing, with a genuinely free plan carrying unlimited invoices and bookkeeping records. QuickBooks Solopreneur Lite at $20 a month adds unlimited mileage and receipt capture where the free QuickBooks tier meters both. FreshBooks Lite at $23 is the pick if you bill clients by project or hour and want invoicing to be the good part. Everything above about $30 a month is buying something different: a bank account with bookkeeping attached, a set of business tools that is not a ledger, or a human team.

The short version: Wave if you want free and simple, QuickBooks Solopreneur Lite at $20 for mileage-heavy work, FreshBooks Lite at $23 for client billing, Found or Lili if you want the bookkeeping to live in the bank account, and Collective at $199 to $349 a month only once an S-corporation election is on the table.

What makes freelance bookkeeping different

Five rules shape what a freelancer actually needs from software. Each is stated here with its source; none of it is advice about your own return, and the last section says who to ask.

Schedule C is the form everything feeds. The IRS describes it as “Schedule C (Form 1040), Profit or Loss from Business (Sole Proprietorship)” and says to “Use Schedule C (Form 1040) to report income or loss from a business you operated or a profession you practiced as a sole proprietor.” That is the practical test for any tool on this page: can it produce a categorized profit and loss statement that maps onto that form.

Self-employment tax is a separate bill from income tax. IRS Tax Topic 554 states the rate “consists of 12.4% for Social Security and 2.9% for Medicare taxes”, 15.3 percent combined, and that “You usually must pay self-employment tax if you had net earnings from self-employment of $400 or more.” It also states that “Generally, the amount subject to self-employment tax is 92.35% of your net earnings from self-employment”, and that half the self-employment tax is deductible in arriving at adjusted gross income. There is a ceiling on the Social Security portion, but the IRS page gives only the rule that the maximum “changes annually” rather than the current figure, so check the Social Security Administration for the year you are filing.

Estimated tax is paid four times a year on Form 1040-ES. The IRS says to “Use Form 1040-ES to figure and pay your estimated tax” on income not subject to withholding, “including earnings from self-employment, interest, dividends, rents, alimony, etc.” The IRS page about the form does not print the four due dates and points to the form itself and Publication 505 instead; they move when a date falls on a weekend or holiday, so take them from the current form rather than from any article, this one included.

2026 has two standard mileage rates, and quoting one of them is wrong. The IRS rate table gives 72.5 cents a mile for business driving from January 1 to June 30, 2026, and 76.0 cents a mile from July 1 to December 31, 2026, the second of which was announced in IR-2026-29. The 2025 rate was 70.0 cents for the whole year. A mid-year change is unusual, so re-check the IRS table before you file.

The arithmetic matters more than it looks. A freelancer who drove 6,000 business miles in 2026, split evenly across the halves of the year, computes 3,000 x $0.725 = $2,175 for the first half and 3,000 x $0.760 = $2,280 for the second, or $4,455. Applying the January rate to the whole year gives $4,350, understating the deduction by $105. Any tool that stores a single annual rate will get this wrong, so check what yours is using.

The Form 1099-K threshold is $20,000 and more than 200 transactions. The IRS page states that “Third party settlement organizations (TPSOs) (payment apps and online marketplaces) are required to report payments on Form 1099-K when the total amount of payments you receive for goods or services through the platform exceeds $20,000 in more than 200 transactions”, as of September 2026. The same page notes you may receive a 1099-K below those amounts, and that income is reportable whether or not a form arrives. If you have read that the threshold is $600, check the date on what you read: the IRS page carries no $600 figure today and describes no 2024 or 2025 transition amounts.

Freelance accounting software at a glance

US list prices as of September 2026. Promotional prices are noted in each section, not here.

Wave: still the free option that is actually free

Wave’s Starter plan is $0 and includes unlimited invoices, estimates, bills and bookkeeping records plus mobile invoicing. Wave makes its money on card processing: 2.9 percent plus $0.60 a transaction on Visa, Mastercard and Discover, and 3.4 percent plus $0.60 on American Express.

Pro is $19 a month or $190 a year, and that is where automatic bank imports, auto-categorization and merging, branding removal, automated late-payment reminders and live human support sit. Pro also drops the per-transaction fee to 2.9 percent plus nothing on the first 10 transactions each month. Receipt scanning is a separate add-on: $11 a month or $96 a year on Starter, $8 a month or $72 a year on Pro. So a freelancer who wants free books plus receipt capture pays $96 a year, and one who wants automated bank feeds too pays $190 plus $72, or $262 a year.

What Wave does not have matters here more than usual for freelancers: no mileage tracking, no time tracking, no project or job costing, no inventory, and no audit trail, which makes cleanup harder if an accountant takes the file over later. If you drive for work, Wave is the wrong tool on its own. Payroll is a separate subscription at $40 a month plus $6 per active employee and $6 per contractor paid, with tax service available in all 50 states. Our Wave versus FreshBooks comparison sets the two side by side.

QuickBooks Solopreneur: the metered free tier and the $20 one

Solopreneur is Intuit’s product for one-person businesses and is not the same thing as QuickBooks Online. The Free tier is $0 for one user and meters four things: 2 invoices a month, 2 receipt uploads a month, 5 mileage trips a month and 1 contractor. It also carries no accountant access; Intuit’s pricing page tells free users to upgrade to a paid plan to invite an accountant.

Lite is $20 a month and removes those meters, with unlimited invoices, receipts and mileage, Expert Assisted Tax powered by TurboTax, and the mobile app. Intuit lists a promotion of 50 percent off for three months, taking Lite to $10 for that period; $20 is the price after it. Over a year, Lite is $240.

Pick it if mileage is a real part of your deduction and you want the trip log on your phone, or if you expect to hand the year end to TurboTax. Skip the Free tier entirely if you send more than two invoices a month. And if you want an accountant working inside the file, step up to QuickBooks Online, whose paid plans include two free accountant seats; Intuit publishes no accountant seat count for Solopreneur. See our QuickBooks Online review for what the full product adds.

FreshBooks: built around invoicing clients

FreshBooks Lite is $23 a month, or $248.40 a year with the 10 percent annual discount, and covers invoicing, expense tracking, estimates and accepting payments for up to 5 billable clients. FreshBooks lists an introductory promotion of $1.00 a month for one year on Lite; the list price is what you renew at. Card processing is 2.9 percent plus $0.30, and American Express is 3.5 percent plus $0.30, both raised in the March 2026 price change. The free trial is 30 days with no credit card, backed by a 30-day money-back guarantee.

The limits that force the upgrade to Plus at $43 a month are specific: bank reconciliation, accountant access, receipt scanning, proposals and retainers all start there, and the billable-client cap rises from 5 to 50. Premium at $70 lifts clients to unlimited and adds project profitability. Every extra team member is $11 a month on any plan, which is the fee to watch if you bring in a subcontractor who needs a login.

Pick FreshBooks if the invoice is the center of your business and you want estimates, proposals and retainers in the same place. Skip it if you sell physical products: an item can hold a stock count, but there is no costing behind it.

Kick: a free double-entry ledger with a transaction cap

Kick is a full double-entry ledger rather than a categorization layer, and its free plan is the only one of its kind here: $0 for one entity and 250 transactions a year, roughly 20 a month, with automatic categorization, receipt matching, a profit and loss statement and a balance sheet, plus connections to Stripe, PayPal, Mercury, Plaid and Ramp.

Basic is $40 a month, billed annually at $480, and adds unlimited transactions, a universal importer for PDF and CSV bank statements, reconciliation, statement sync, Gusto, and read and write access for Claude, ChatGPT or Cursor over the Model Context Protocol. Plus is $100 a month, billed quarterly at $300, and carries the accrual ledger, multi-entity support, classes and AR and AP automation. Neither cadence is a discount: $480 a year and $300 a quarter are exactly $40 and $100 a month. A second entity is free for its first 250 transactions a year and then $50 a month. The trial is 14 days on Basic and Plus.

Two limits to know. Kick does not file taxes and says so plainly, recommending that owners partner with a local accountant. And migration and training are features of the custom-priced Advanced plan, so moving years of history in is not a self-serve job. Our Kick review has the full plan detail.

Found and Lili: bookkeeping inside the bank account

These two share a model: the business checking account is the product, and the bookkeeping is built into it. That is efficient if all your money moves through one account and awkward if it does not.

Found

Found is a financial technology company rather than a bank, with banking services provided by Lead Bank, Member FDIC. The base plan is $0. Found Plus is $35 a month or $315 a year, and Found Pro is $80 a month or $720 a year, both with a 30-day free trial.

The freelance-specific work is included on every plan: automatic expense categorization, receipt scanning, profit and loss and income and expense reports, real-time tax estimates, mileage and home-office tracking, Schedule C and 1120 and 1120-S forms, contractor W-9 collection and 1099-NEC e-filing, plus up to 20 sub-accounts for setting money aside. Plus adds importing transactions from other accounts, unlimited auto-categorization rules, custom tags and 1.50 percent APY on balances up to $20,000; Pro raises that to 2.50 percent uncapped with 1 percent cash back, free paper checks against $1 a check, and $10 wires against $15.

The limitation is structural. Without the transaction import on Plus, the books only see money that moves through the Found account, so a freelancer with a separate personal card in the mix will have gaps.

Lili

Lili offers business banking for the self-employed with banking services provided by Sunrise Banks, N.A., Member FDIC, and wires by Column N.A. Plans are Core at $0, Pro at $15, Smart at $35 and Premium at $55 a month, each paid tier carrying a 30-day free trial. Lili lists a promotion of $9, $21 and $33 a month for the first three months on Pro, Smart and Premium; the list prices are the ones above.

Core and Pro give basic expense organization, tax categories and receipt attachment. The accounting is on Smart at $35: predictive categorization, profit and loss and cash-flow reports on demand, unlimited invoicing and payment tracking, bill management with automatic scanning, syncing of external accounts, and automatic allocation of money to a tax fund. That last feature is the reason to look at Lili over a plain bank account, and it is the one that gets missed if you compare only the $15 tier.

Bonsai and Hurdlr: useful, but not your books

Bonsai

Bonsai handles the paperwork around freelance work rather than the accounting: proposals, contracts, invoicing, payments, a simple CRM, time tracking and projects. Pricing is per user per month, which is unusual in this category: Basic $15, Essentials $25, Premium $39 and Elite $59, or $9, $19, $29 and $49 billed annually, with a minimum of three users on Elite and a 7-day free trial.

The detail that decides it is where the accounting integration sits. Bonsai is explicitly not an accounting system and connects to QuickBooks and Xero, but that integration appears only from the Premium plan at $39 a month. An Essentials subscriber has contracts and invoices with no route into a ledger.

Hurdlr

Hurdlr tracks mileage, expenses with receipts, and tax estimates with payment reminders on its Premium tier, with a Pro tier above it that adds invoicing and core reports including an income statement and balance sheet. It is not a general ledger; it sits alongside one, or stands in for one where a Schedule C filer’s books are genuinely simple.

Hurdlr does not publish prices. Its pricing page describes the tiers and then routes to a free trial and account creation, so the only way to learn what it costs is to start one. Any dollar figure you find for Hurdlr on a round-up site is not coming from Hurdlr. The company claims that freelancers and small business owners find “over $5,600 in tax deductions” on average, which is its own marketing figure rather than an independent result.

Collective: a back office for S-corporation owners

Collective is not software you run; it is an all-in-one back office for solo business owners who elect S-corporation status, covering entity formation or review, automated monthly bookkeeping, invoicing, monthly financial reports, quarterly federal and state tax estimates and basic individual tax returns on the $199 a month LLC plan. The $349 a month S Corp plan adds the S-corporation election on Form 2553, the annual Form 1120-S, employer registration, reasonable-salary support, member and contractor payroll and a dedicated account manager. Both carry 15 percent off for paying yearly.

Judge it against a CPA rather than against software. At $349 a month, the S Corp plan is $4,188 a year. Collective publishes two different savings claims on the same site: “$8,000+/year” on its pricing page and “save an average of $10,000 a year on their business taxes” on its home page. Either way, those are the vendor’s numbers about its own customers, and whether an S-corporation election saves you anything depends on your profit and your reasonable salary, which is a question for a tax professional before you pay for a year. Our guide to what tax preparation costs gives the comparison figures.

The general-purpose option: when to move up to QuickBooks Online

Every product above eventually runs into the same wall: a freelancer who hires someone, takes on a partner, or needs an accountant working in the file month by month. QuickBooks Online Simple Start is $38 a month for one user and, unlike Solopreneur’s free tier, includes two free accountant seats. It brings proper double-entry books, bank reconciliation and the general business reports an outside preparer expects.

The step up is worth taking when one of three things happens: an accountant needs to be in the books rather than receiving a year-end export; you start carrying receivables or payables that make cash-basis reporting misleading; or you add a second person who needs their own login. Until then, $38 a month against Wave at $0 or Solopreneur Lite at $20 is money spent on capability you are not using.

How to choose

• You want the Schedule C total and nothing else: Wave Starter at $0, with the $96-a-year receipt add-on if you photograph receipts.
• You drive for work: QuickBooks Solopreneur Lite at $20 for unlimited trips, Found for mileage plus tax estimates in the bank account, or Hurdlr if mileage is the whole job. Check that whatever you use applies both 2026 rates.
• You bill clients by project or hour: FreshBooks Lite at $23, moving to Plus at $43 when you pass 5 billable clients or need an accountant in the file.
• You want money set aside for quarterly estimates automatically: Lili Smart at $35, which allocates to a tax fund, or Found, which produces real-time tax estimates on every plan.
• You want real double-entry books for nothing: Kick’s free plan, as long as you stay under 250 transactions a year.
• You keep getting 1099-Ks and are not sure what is reportable: any of these will hold the income, but the answer comes from a preparer, not the software. All income is reportable whether or not a form arrives.
• You are considering an S-corporation election: price Collective against a local CPA doing the same filings, and get the election advice first.

Our software guide covers the fuller ledgers, and the head-to-head comparisons go product by product.

When to bring in an accountant

Three points in a freelance year reward professional help. The first is the decision to elect S-corporation status, which changes your payroll, your filings and your self-employment tax exposure, and which no software should decide for you. The second is the first year you owe estimated tax: Form 1040-ES and Publication 505 carry the rules, but the safe-harbor calculation and the due dates are worth confirming with someone who files them for a living. The third is any year you receive a Form 1099-K you were not expecting, where the question is what part of the gross amount is business income. A CPA or an enrolled agent can take all three; our directory is the place to find a firm, and what tax preparation costs sets out the fees.

Frequently Asked Questions