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With the Covid-19 advent and its attendant restriction on our daily activities and movement around the cities and workplaces, Americans are in great numbers, spending heavily on buying new homes and remodelling their existing homes.
If you run a furnishing or interior design site or business, you’re already in for luck during this Covid-19 pandemic. And to ensure you’re keeping sight of your expenses and income and to have accurate and real-time insights into the overall financial health of your business, you need the best accounting software for your interior design business.
Accounting software is a must-have regardless of your business industry when you must keep proper and up-to-date records of your revenue and expenses. Accounting software helps interior designers look for ways to stay more efficient, effective, and automated with their business accounting.
An advanced accounting solution with automation features, for example, will save you time and stress with entering financial data manually. It will provide you with a centralized platform where you can securely store your important information and access it anytime or anywhere.
Upfront Conclusion
The best accounting software for interior designers right now is Patriot Accounting and FreshBooks.
The question is: What Accounting isn’t Your Passion or Strength?
Don’t pack! With the right accounting software, you can do your business accounting seamlessly and wouldn’t need to learn to account. Or the worst-case scenario, you can get accounting software with an easy and short learning curve. And best of all, we have rounded up the best accounting software for interior designers for you to select.
In this guide, we went through the markets and came up with a list of the best software you can trust. We based our selection of these accounting tools on several factors, like the features and functions designed for interior designers. Other things we considered include ease of use, cost-effectiveness, mobile options, automation, and more.
Essential Features To Consider For Your Accounting Software
While there are so many factors to look into when choosing accounting software for your interior design business, the following are the most fundamental features we always like to give priority to:
1. Ease of Use
We always put this feature first because if you’re anything like us, you want to avoid accounting software that will take you a year or more to get your team up and to run quickly. Or you want to save money by hiring an expert to train them to use it.
Ease of use entails many things, such as the ease of setting up or deploying the software, the user interface, and the ease of integrating with other apps. With easy-to-use accounting software, you can hit the ground running almost immediately and save both time and money.
2. Intuitive and Feature-Rich Software
Everyone hates spending extra bucks on getting add-on features. Accounting software that cannot thoroughly manage your finances is not worth your investment. Additionally, intuitive and all-in-one accounting software saves precious time wading through files and documents.
Accounting especially requires complete management of your finances, including invoicing, purchasing, transaction reconciliations, and generating financial reports, among others. Of course, the software may need a few add-on features; it has to be intuitive enough to manage your business’s accounting or financial side.
Overall, an all-encompassing accounting solution will integrate all the essential features like invoice generation, billing, time tracking, and reporting. With this, you can rest assured your business is not going off the rail.
3. Automated Functions
Accounting values accurate representation of data and frowns at errors and misrepresentation. But since there is a tendency for human beings to make errors when manually entering data, accounting software with automation is needed.
Automation helps you eliminate human errors and saves time by duplicating invoices and updating documents. Advanced accounting solutions with automated functions will help you create a client list and add invoices to your existing client list without you having to generate new invoices for your repeat clients.
This means that the era of repetitive and generic form-filling and invoice generation is over. And once you customize your documents (for example, your invoice) properly, the software will automatically generate an invoice for you when that same client is doing business with you.
4. Third-Party Integration
You probably have existing software you’re already passionate about. If you’re getting new software, consider this feature. While much-advanced accounting software in the market supports integration with third-party apps, many still need to. So, you have got to view this feature while selecting your accounting software.
5. Mobile App Options
When you’re busy creating beautiful furniture ideas for your clients, or you need to update an ongoing project or view the status of a project while out of the office, you need software with mobile app capability to get things done fast and conveniently.
With advanced accounting software, you don’t need to be in the office to do all of these, and your team can access the software on their mobile devices regardless of where they are. That is an important feature you want to ensure your accounting tool has in this era where everyone has gone mobile.
All in all, the benefits of having this type of software are enormous. Your work goes as planned because you’re not location-dependent to access your accounting tool.
Tips For Accounting For Interior Design Business
Jaime Bako explained the hack to accounting for interior designers’ businesses in her cheat sheet here. You can check it out for a better read. You need to keep track of how money flows in and out of your business to give a clear picture of your business’s financial health. Also, you should keep a tab on time spent on projects. Doing this will help you in billing your customers.
- Tracking Your Expenses: There are two types of expenses you’re likely to incur when running interior design projects for your clients. These could be either recoverable or irrecoverable expenses. Your recoverable expenses are those you incurred during the project, and you are entitled to a refund.
Examples are the cost of boarding a bus to a client site or the materials and supplies needed for your client’s job. If they persist, all these costs can be huge expenses that will affect your bottom line if added up.
So for an accurate picture of your bottom line, you need to keep track of all these expenses and factor them in as you evaluate your business’s financial health. - Tracking Your Time: Most advanced accounting software offers time tracking capability for interior designers’ accounting. And so you should take advantage of this invaluable feature by keeping track of every time spent on clients’ projects.
This helps you bill your clients effectively and fairly. On the other hand, if you’re leaving out this feature, you’ll not only be losing money but also underestimating time spent on projects. And timing is a critical factor in determining what to bill your clients. - Determining Your Bottom-line: Your revenue is your gross profit before deducting your expenses. Your business bottom line is profit or loss after netting your income against your costs. It’s essential to be watchful to see if your business is overperforming or underperforming.
And there is no way to know without monitoring your expenses, including purchase orders. Since your projects will drag on for a long time, you must monitor your purchase orders. The good thing is your PO can be very useful for apportioning costs to clients’ invoices. This is so as all materials and supplies are from what you ordered from your suppliers.
Best Accounting Software for Interior Designers
| Brand | Starting price | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Patriot Accounting | $20 – $30 per month | Flexible and scalable accounting |
| 2. FreshBooks | $17 – $55 per month | Simplified accounting |
| 3. IVY Software | $55 per month – $399 per year | Efficiency and profitability |
| 4. Studio Webware | $54 per month – $768 per year | Several exciting features |
1. Patriot Accounting – Best & Easy Accounting Software for Interior Designers
Patriot Accounting is the best accounting software for interior designers, with an easy-to-use interface that allows you to do payroll online in three simple steps. It provides free direct deposits and AP Intego integration for automated payments of workers’ compensation insurance premiums. It also offers cost-effective solutions, including one for companies that choose to file taxes on their own.
Patriot software features are very user-friendly and consist of a simple interface. The reports it generates are simple, and anyone can easily export them. It helps make your accounting more manageable by providing reconciliation, estimates, checking register, profit and loss statements, trial balance, and balance sheets.
Pricing:
Patriot has different accounting pricing plans, including:
- The Basic Accounting plan: $20 per month
- Premium Accounting plan: $30 per month
The basic accounting plan is the most popular plan. It also offers trials for 30 days and demos that are Video-based, self-guided, and personal.
Highlights and Hidden Gems:
- Great price point.
- Connects with banks.
- Cash-basis and Accrual Accounting.
- Track Your Expenses, Income, and Money.
- Pricing is based on actual expenses per month.
- Easily shared with accountants/bookkeepers.
- It has all the features of a double-entry accounting system.
Disadvantages and Limitations:
- Poor documentation.
- Weak customer support.
- Unable to customize reports.
- Accounting bugs are present.
- Additional fees (somewhat expensive)
- More integrations and detailed instructions should improve.
Also Read: Graphic Design Business Name Ideas
2. FreshBooks – Best for Cloud Based Interior Designers
One of the advantages of FreshBooks over other accounting software is its ease of use in that you don’t need to have any prior experience with accounting software to use it. And as simplified accounting software, this tool is a big time-saver when it comes to invoicing and billing, managing your expenses, or collaborating with your team members.
FreshBooks provides extra information by classifying tabs and improves profitability with Double-Entry Accounting tools. Its tabs include profit and loss, chart of accounts, balance sheet, sales tax summary, and balance sheet.
While you’re busy handling a photo shooting project, FreshBooks keep track of your receivables to ensure you’re getting faster. With this accounting tool, you’re sure to be on top of your expenses and time management so that you keep track of your money.
Pricing:
Freshbooks offers four different pricing plans with a free trial and a demo without any conditions and credit card. These includes:
- $17.00 per month for Lite.
- $30.00 per month for Plus.
- $55.00 per month for Premium.
- Custom pricing plans are also available for businesses with unlimited billable clients and specialized features.
Highlights and Hidden Gems:
- Robust time-tracker.
- Automated bill schedule capabilities.
- Automated late payment reminders.
- Simple-to-use accounting software.
- Seamless team collaboration and management.
- Easy to use: You can save hours learning about the software and searching tutorials. The dashboard is self-explanatory.
- Rich in features: It’s free accounting software with more features than any other. It has all the features you expect in an accounting package, and the company always adds more features.
- Specific record: Freshbooks Desktop can easily track your invoices and expenses. With Freshbooks, you can also prepare your tax returns on time.
Disadvantages and Limitations:
- Overall good but needs improvements.
- Expensive for beginners interior designers.
- The mobile app has some technical bugs present.
- Users’ limitations and restrictions of billing clients.
- Doesn’t have automatic enumeration for all your invoices and expenses.
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3. IVY Software – Best Business Management Software for Designers
Ivy Software is a business management app designed for designers to help improve their efficiency and profitability.
Designed by Houzz, Ivy Software provides exciting features to help you with tasks like sourcing for products, creating invoices and proposals, tracking projects, and tracking time and expenses, among others. Also, this tool offers seamless integration with QuickBooks Online, and it comes with a mobile app option.
In addition to these features, it assists you in project management, product sourcing and proposals, invoicing and billings, mood boarding, online payments, and reports. You can also get its regular magazine from its official website.
Pricing:
Ivy Software packages start at $55 per month. It offers tiered and customizable pricing options that reflect different business needs and budgets. You can get these plans on the Houzz Pro website.
- Starter: 30-day free trial, then $55 per month.
- Essential: 30-day free trial, then $99 per month.
- Ultimate $399 per month.
Highlights and Hidden Gems:
- Personalized reports.
- Ease of paying online.
- Effective project tracker.
- Implements new features all the time.
- Professionally seeing products.
- Smart product sourcing and cataloguing.
- Easy-to-use and secure online payment feature.
- Powerful invoice and proposal creation capability.
Disadvantages and Limitations:
- It requires help understanding initially.
- Illogical issues sometimes occur.
- Billing gets duplicated in Quickbooks.
- Complicated to link an account with a bank.
- Several major banking issues are present.
- Difficult to handle when having a product of 10+ pages.
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4. Studio Webware – Best Leading Software for Desgining Business
We chose Studio Webware as one of our top accounting software for interior designers because of its exciting features, including online project management, product sourcing, and accounting tool. It’s a powerful app for interior industry accounting because its integrated tools let you manage your finances effortlessly.
Studio Webware allows you to manage your interior design projects with full integration. Studio capture provides digitally sourced items from all your vendors. Client portal assists you in collaboration and acceptance of payments from your clients.
As cloud-based software, Studio Webware lets you collaborate on projects, share tasks among your team, and do many more in one unified platform.
Pricing:
Studio Webware offers you three types of subscriptions: monthly, annual, and time-billing. The pricing of these subscriptions is the following.
Monthly Subscriptions:
- Basic: $54 per user per month.
- Professional: $72 per user per month.
Annual Subscriptions:
- Basic: $576 per user per annually.
- Professional: $768 per user annually.
Time Billing:
- $38 per user per month.
- You can save $408 per user annually with an annual subscription offer.
You can save extra bucks if you choose to go with the annual subscription. For example, when billed annually, the Basic plan goes for $500. This is about a $28.00 difference from the monthly pricing. The same thing goes for the Professional plan when billed annually in that you save about $46.00.
Highlights and Hidden Gems:
- Easy-to-use digital portal.
- Powerful project management tools.
- Collection of products from all the sources’ websites.
- Manage and track your timeline and tasks.
- Quickly create products for your clients.
- Full studio capture, which lets you source products online.
- Creation of PDFs, proposals, and spec sheets.
- Instantly share documents with organizations.
- Unique client portal for collaborating on projects and accepting payments from your clients.
- Unlimited financial reporting and project capability.
- Fully integrated double-entry accounting system.
Disadvantages and Limitations:
- Pricing issue for beginners and learners.
- Quickly created sometimes gives poor results for products.
- The export of files and reports could be better with missing information.
- Technical knowledge is required.
- Customer support could be faster and more.
- The gathering of product information needs more factuality.
Also Read: Accounting Software for Architects
Wrapping Up On Best Accounting Software For Interior Designers
So there you have our top picks of the best accounting software for interior designers. You can make an informed choice of the right one for you. Remember to share your experience with us.