What actually matters in accounting software

Reconciliation quality beats everything else

The feature you will use every single day is the bank feed. Products diverge sharply in how confidently they auto-categorise, how they handle bank rules at scale, and how gracefully they recover from errors. This is the first thing to test in any trial, with your real bank statement.

Seat pricing is the silent differentiator

Unlimited users (Xero) versus tiered seat caps (QuickBooks, most others) sounds like a footnote. It is not: the moment a director, bookkeeper and two managers all need access, capped plans force you up a tier. Over three years this is often the largest cost difference in the category.

AI categorisation is real but uneven

Every vendor now markets AI-assisted bookkeeping. In practice, quality varies from genuinely useful pattern recognition to basic rules wearing an AI badge. Judge it on your own transactions during a trial, not on the keynote.

Switching costs anchor the market

Ledger migration is miserable, vendors know it, and it shapes pricing: deep year-one discounts followed by steady rises. Model the three-year price, and export your data periodically regardless of which platform you choose.