# Accounting firm software: what 21 vendors charge at your size, and where they say client data goes A directory of practice management, client payment and portal, hosting and AI tools sold to accounting firms. Each entry was read on the vendor's own site on 2026-10-18, with public pricing or a note that there is none. Built from a link-graph scan of three vendors' inbound links. *Figure: Four card boxes on a desk. Practice management, the biggest, sits in the middle with 10 cards; client payments and portals has 4, hosting and IT 3, and AI tools 5. One card in hosting and one in AI tools are green and joined by an arc: Rightworks, filed in both, so the 22 entries come from 21 vendors, each read on the vendor's own site on 2026-10-18.* A five-person accounting firm can pay $50 a month for practice management, or $417. The tools list much the same jobs. The cheap-looking price can turn out to be the dear one, because vendors charge in three different units: per user, per seat a year, or per client. Pixie is the dearest practice management tool here for a solo practitioner and the second cheapest for a firm of five. The payment tools hide their cost under the plan: CPACharge costs $10 a month, and five $500 card payments add $76.25 in processing on top. The second thing that's hard to find is where client data goes. None of the five AI tools sold to accounting firms says it can run on a firm's own hardware, and only one names a private environment. None of the three hosting providers names the country its servers are in. This directory covers 21 vendors in four groups. That makes 22 entries, because Rightworks is in two groups. Every price and claim was read on the vendor's own site on 2026-10-18, and each entry links to that site so you can check it. Where a vendor shows no price, the entry says so. No vendor paid to be listed, and nothing here is ranked. - [AI tools sold to accounting firms: 5 tools, and none says it can run on your own hardware](https://www.mackenziebowes.com/research/accounting-firm-software/ai-tools) (2026-10-18): Five AI tools sold to accounting firms (Rightworks Spark AI, Botkeeper, Finlens, Marble and Trullion), each read on the vendor's own site on 2026-10-18, with public prices and what each vendor says about where the AI and the data run. Markdown: https://www.mackenziebowes.com/research/accounting-firm-software/ai-tools.md - [Client payments and portals for accounting firms: 4 tools, and what card fees add to a $10 plan](https://www.mackenziebowes.com/research/accounting-firm-software/payments-and-portals) (2026-10-18): Four tools for the client side of an accounting firm (CPACharge, Clinked, Glasscubes and ClientWindow), each read on the vendor's own site on 2026-10-18, with public prices and fees, and what card processing adds to a monthly plan. Markdown: https://www.mackenziebowes.com/research/accounting-firm-software/payments-and-portals.md - [Hosting and managed IT for accounting firms: 3 providers, and what none of them says about where your data sits](https://www.mackenziebowes.com/research/accounting-firm-software/hosting-and-it) (2026-10-18): Three hosting and managed IT providers for accounting and tax firms (Verito, Rightworks and Ace Cloud Hosting), each read on the vendor's own site on 2026-10-18, with public pricing where shown and what each says about where the work runs. Markdown: https://www.mackenziebowes.com/research/accounting-firm-software/hosting-and-it.md - [Practice management software for accounting firms: what 10 tools cost a solo practitioner and a firm of five](https://www.mackenziebowes.com/research/accounting-firm-software/practice-management) (2026-10-18): Ten practice management tools for accounting firms (TaxDome, Karbon, Canopy, Uku, Financial Cents, Jetpack Workflow, Tidyflow, Pixie, Remindoo and Huskey), each read on the vendor's own site on 2026-10-18, with public prices and what each costs a solo practitioner and a five-person firm. Markdown: https://www.mackenziebowes.com/research/accounting-firm-software/practice-management.md If you make software for accounting firms and something here is wrong or missing, email mackenzie@mackenziebowes.com. ## How we found the gap this page fills *Figure: The Common Crawl domain graph for May-Jul 2026 pours once into three jars: domains linking to TaxDome (2.2k), Karbon (1k) and Canopy (174). Their contents go through a sieve that keeps the 110 domains linking to two or more of the three. Two of those are directory-type sites, both generic lists, and the cup for a directory for accounting firms is empty until a green card, this page, drops into it. The scan took one pass, about 26 minutes, and cost nothing.* We wanted to know who links to the tools accounting firms already use. So we took the Common Crawl domain graph for May-Jul 2026 [1], which is free. We streamed its edges once, looking for links into three practice management vendors: TaxDome, Karbon and Canopy. The scan took about 26 minutes and cost nothing. | Vendor | Domains linking in | |---|---| | TaxDome | 2.2k | | Karbon | 1k | | Canopy | 174 | 110 domains link to two or more of the three. They include trade press (cpapracticeadvisor), firm hosting (rightworks, verito) and other firm tools. Only 2 of the 110 are directories, and both are generic software lists. No directory for accounting firms links to all three. From the 110, we kept the firm tools themselves, such as Finlens, Uku, Botkeeper, CPACharge, ClientWindow, Clinked, Rightworks and Verito. We left out agencies, blogs, staffing and outsourcing firms, and generic lists. We read the remaining sites, and that cut four more: a page carrying injected casino spam, a coaching firm, a newsletter, and a website host that isn't accounting software. Search was no help. Bing Webmaster Tools counts searches across all of Bing, and "practice management software" gets about 36 exact searches a week. The longer queries a firm types when it is choosing get fewer than Bing's reporting floor of about 30 a week. Firms find these tools by referral, from a colleague or from their own agent. So every entry is written for that route: a plain entry that an agent can read, check against the vendor's site and pass on. **What this says about how we work.** We read a market's link graph before we build for it. With one free dataset and half an hour, we found which vendors the trade press and hosts already link to. We also found that no directory for accounting firms sat among them. This page fills a gap that the data showed us. We do the same kind of work for other businesses. Each entry has: - The vendor's name, linked to its own site. - One sentence on what it does, using the vendor's own description. - Who it fits, only when the vendor says. - Public pricing with the date checked, or "pricing not public". - Whether the vendor's own pages say it works with TaxDome, Karbon or Canopy. Where they don't, the entry says nothing about it. An entry says only what the vendor's own pages said on 2026-10-18. Prices are public list prices, without setup, add-ons or taxes, and they change. The list covers what the link scan turned up. It leaves out bookkeeping marketplaces, outsourcing firms and tax-prep engines. ### Take it Before you compare plans, send each vendor on your shortlist this message and get the answers in writing: > 1. What would we pay a month with [number] staff logging in and [number] active clients, including setup and add-ons? > 2. Where is our client data stored: which provider, and which country or region? > 3. If the product uses AI: which model does it use, which company runs it, and are our documents kept or used to train a model? > 4. Can it run in a private environment or on our own hardware? If you are working out which tools your accounting firm should run, or you build software for accounting firms and want to compare notes, I'd like to hear from you: [mackenzie@mackenziebowes.com](mailto:mackenzie@mackenziebowes.com) or [@_mackenziebowes](https://x.com/_mackenziebowes) on X. ## Sources 1. Common Crawl web graphs: host and domain-level hyperlink graphs published every quarter. We used the May-Jul 2026 domain graph. --- Published 2026-10-18. Web page: https://www.mackenziebowes.com/research/accounting-firm-software