We’ve repeatedly heard how accountants have the highest risk of having their jobs automated. Even though automation is often depicted as a threat, we can see it as an opportunity. An opportunity to win time by cutting manual labour. Never having to remember or look up the countless deadlines from hundreds of clients. And most importantly, free your tasklist of critical tasks that are routine and very mundane.

Top accounting firms use technology to help them get ahead of competitors. Regarding automation, you don’t need a custom solution or have to dive head-first into machine learning or artificial intelligence for accountants.

Accountants gain most from simple changes to their accounting work process

Standardise and automate your accounting firm’s processes‍

A standardized workflow with recurring tasks, checklists and deadlines ensures you don’t waste time manually creating and managing tasks. Automating workflow management makes sure you don’t waste time.

Integrate your accounting tech stack

‍Integrating all your apps and software is the easiest way to avoid spending time copying data or re-checking information. When looking for a software solution, consider how it fits in your existing toolbox, i.e. your emails, accounting software, billing solutions, CRM, etc.

Analyse data to make data-based business decisions

‍Automating work generates data, which you can use to make smarter decisions. Analytics help reveal your accounting firm’s bottlenecks, optimize processes, increase profit and offer better service. ‍

Enhance accounting team collaboration

‍Choosing the right tools can make remote work function for your team and customers. A complete CRM tool is the best way to share information with colleagues when unexpected changes occur

Make accountant-client communication easy

There are several ways to make accountant-client communication more effective. The best of those is a client portal, where you can share documents, ask questions and delegate tasks to clients. And no email is missed anymore.

Let’s find the best practice management software for accounting firms

An increasing number of work management software solutions on the market fulfil the needs of accounting firms and financial teams. 

Some are purely for practice management. In others, it comes as a part of a more significant range of features. Automation is here to make your life easier. Finding the right fit for your company depends on your accounting firm, clients, other software you use, and your budget and personal preferences.

Here are the best accounting practice management software options on the UK market, with particular attention to accounting work management, time tracking, billing, collaboration, reporting, CRM and user-friendliness.

1. Uku
2. Karbon
3. Senta
4. Xero Practice Manager
5. Pixie
6. Bright Manager
7. Capium
8. Practice Ignition

 

1. Uku

Uku is a smart assistant for accounting practices, making managing their back office operations simple and effective. Uku has been around for five years and has improved drastically. Tekpon has named Uku one of the best accounting workflow management software.

Jason Staats voted Uku the best accounting practice management software of 2025.

The software helps automate workflows across the practice and gives detailed insights and a big-picture overview of work progress, team performance, and profitability. The users also highlight their exceptionally helpful support team.

Book a 30-minute personal Uku demo or Create a free Uku account

Workflow management

The combined workflow accounting software Uku provides all the tools necessary for managing an accountant’s daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly recurring or one-time tasks.

• Workflow management – Automated workflows that give you a dashboard with today’s relevant tasks; set time forecasts and distribute workload evenly between days.
• Email management – Send one-time emails or automate them based on task completion, add start or end time, use email templates, and have an overview of the client communication timeline.
• Automated customer-based work plans – Create a personalized work plan for each client and the right tasks will be assigned to the right employee’s dashboard at the right time.
• Workflow and work plan templates — Create templates or use pre-made templates to save time creating client work plans from scratch.
• Powerful calendar – A detailed calendar view with a 1, 2, 3 or 4-week view differentiates Uku from its competitors. Plan and rearrange your present and future tasks, and use filters to sort out tasks that are your interest.

Time tracking and billing

Time tracking is an excellent way to raise productivity, find bottlenecks and increase profits. Uku’s time tracking has many features and provides several ways to manage your time entries. 

• Automated time tracking – Set time forecasts to tasks, and when you mark the task done, Uku will automatically mark it as time spent on the task.
• Time tracking – Measure time with a stopwatch, log it manually or add time entries to multiple tasks at once. 
• Time estimations – Seasoned bookkeepers can estimate how long a task will take. Estimate and manage the company workload so employees don’t overwork and burn out.
• Billable/not billable –  Distinguish time entries that you want to add to the client’s invoice and that need to be left out. 
• Automated billing — Create personalized billing contracts for clients and generate invoices automatically. Uku allows dynamic pricing that fits your needs. Base your invoices on time entries, add fixed fees, bill by item, or mix the pricing models together. Create, adjust, automate, approve and send invoices straight from Uku.

Team collaboration

• Assigning and substituting tasks — Temporarily or permanently assign one or multiple tasks to other team members. This makes replacing team members on holidays and sick leave smooth.
• Shared tasks – Assign tasks to multiple people or to groups.
• Following tasks – Get quick access to your team members’ tasks without having them on your own dashboard.
• Highly informative client profiles and notes – Keep all important client information in one place.
• Communicate with colleagues under shared tasks – Leave comments, mention team members and leave attachments.
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Business insights, reporting, and client agreement monitoring

• Detailed time expense report – View the time expense data by client, team member and task.
• Overdue tasks overview — Uku gives you the oversight eye of all of your employees’ work. You can view task status by client, team member, etc.
• Client agreements monitoring — This report allows you to compare the client’s contractual workload (hours, entries, documents, etc.) with the actual work done.
• Dynamic filters – Filter information by date, team member, client, topic, task status, and name.

User-friendliness

• A beautiful and well-structured system that is highly customizable.
• Mini Uku – browser extension to use the software in other browser windows.

Pricing:

Limited plan: Free
Standard plan: £29-49/month per user

Uku Reviews

Uku is like my second memory – with Uku’s help, I can’t and won’t forget anything. We use it daily and I can’t imagine ever working without Uku again – it is just the most helpful notebook you can ever use.

Uku has small problems sometimes, but Uku’s customer support deals with problems quickly.

‍Anni K., Accountant Team Leader

Uku is helping to solve our workflow issues. We would find some customers were not given the attention we wanted to give as our work load increased. It is hard to have visability accross the team as we have grown so quickly. Uku reporting and time tracking solves this.

Lucy D., Accounting Firm Manager

 

Uku helps track people’s activities. Plus, it’s a good reminder for repetitive tasks. It also helps the new person track what they need to do so that everything important stays in mind. Also, as a team leader, it provides a good overview of people’s working hours, which also enables better budgeting.

On the negative side, I would point out that I don’t have all the knowledge to use Uku more effectively. If I knew all the possibilities, I believe that my work would be even more effective.

Eliisa M., Accounting Team Lead

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Book a 30-minute personal Uku demo or 
Create a free Uku account

2. Karbon

Karbon has been a serious player in the market since 2014. It’s designed for accounting firms and built with collaboration at its core. With good yet somewhat limited possibilities, it’s a good choice for financial teams.

Work management 

• Fully integrated emails – to use Karbon, you need to integrate your Microsoft Office 365 or Gmail account and manage your emails from there. It allows you to assign them to colleagues, log them against projects, and more.
• Automated tasks and emails – set dependency rules to create new tasks or send emails.
• Big template library which you can customize according to your needs
• Kanban board that gives you an overview of tasks and their statuses
• Work tasks and subtasks checklist 

Time tracking & billing

• Simplistic time tracking abilities

Collaboration

• Fully integrated email – allows you to assign emails to team members.
• Automated reminders – set rules when you want to get reminders.
• Task communication – mentions, assigning and commenting tasks

Reporting

• Task status – work started, completed on time, overdue
• Average time to complete task – calculated from the time the first change was made to the task until it’s marked done.
• Leaderboard (open work, completed, overdue)
• Time and budget estimates

User-friendliness

• With basic workflow and automation possibilities, the overall experience is simple and fast with a clean and modern design.

Pricing:

Limited plan: £29-40/month per user
Standard plan: £44-55/month per user

Karbon Reviews

Karbon makes it possible for me to complete my responsibilities in an efficient fashion. I am able to collaborate in real-time with team members and look up communications I may need to review to complete my day-to-day tasks in this system.

Accessing a team member’s Triage when they are unexpectedly out can be challenging. This limitation can cause delays or bottlenecks in the workflow, as it is not always straightforward to retrieve the necessary information or tasks the absent team member was managing without accessing this. 

Abigail C., People Advisory Lead & HR Business Partner

 

The main help is by shared triage, as I work on many clients with multiple team members, via the shared triage we can tackle tasks here and not duplicate efforts.

Furthermore adding comments to emails works a treat. I’m not a massive fan on the timesheets functionality, as it seems to be very time consuming, and not work too well on how we as a business operate.

Jay M., Accounting Consultant

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3. Senta

Senta is a practice management software for accountants and bookkeepers which combines email and text automation, secure document exchange and a client portal. It’s rigid structure and weak navigation and reporting makes it somewhat challenging to use. As a part of the IRIS Software ecosystem, it’s the best solution for IRIS accounting software users.

Work management 

• Automated workflow – add recurring tasks to clients; based on the set rules, tasks will be assigned to team members; customizable tasks.
• Customizable dashboard – add or remove about 20 different widgets.
• Automatic task creation and completion based on pre-set filters and events occurring in Senta.

Time tracking & billing

• Add-on for time tracking – click on the specific job and enter a few details to log time.
• Basic time report about all recorded work across the firm for each client.
• No billing

Collaboration

• Client portal – document management, document signature requesting
• Task communication – notes, checklists, mentions
• Client information from emails – connect your email service (e.g. Outlook, Gmail) to Senta, pull in emails from relevant clients and organize them in the client record. This gives you one place to review everything related to the client.
• Auto-reminders to complete certain tasks (e.g. tax preparation and tax resolution)

Reporting

• Basic dashboard widgets – summary of tasks and their statuses by clients or work. You can further narrow the information with flexible filters.

User-friendliness

• The set up will likely take some time to master (you need training).
• A lot of information makes the interface overcrowded.
• Design from 2010’s.

Pricing: 16,50-29 £/month per user (depending on the number of users)

Senta Reviews

“Easy to upload client information and update data. Lacking any real features that will improve our efficiency as it requires constant updating.”

Brett M., Client Manager

“All in all, it’s a comprehensive solution with lots of automation and integrations and many small yet handy features that can potentially save man hours if used properly.

The notification area could be better. The current system is pretty barebone, I liked Glide’s notifications more. The homescreen could also be better in terms of design.“

Mohsin E., Accountant

4. Xero Practice Manager

Xero Practice Management  is a basic tool for accounting practice with limited functionality. If you’re a Xero accounting software power user that’s heavy into time-based billing, you may want to give this accounting practice management software a look. Other firms may want to look elsewhere.

Work management 

• Dashboard for task management – 2 time-based widgets, a calendar with upcoming jobs and tasks (e.g. tax resolution due dates), a list view of upcoming tasks and jobs
• Client work plans – jobs with its subtasks (e.g. a job like an accounting month-end close and its subtasks).
• Task status – move the job through different job states (by default: planned, in-progress, on-hold, complete) which affects how information is displayed.

Time tracking & billing

• Basic time tracking – log time manually or measure it precisely with the stopper.
• Billing (integrated with Xero, no other option)
• XPM’s quoting functionality which you can then turn into jobs and invoices.

Collaboration

• Notes – team members can add notes to tasks, jobs, and in the client records.
• Documents – can be uploaded into jobs and the client records.
• Notifications – being assigned to a new job, new job notes, new job tasks, tasks completed, new job documents.
• Collaboration manager – forward emails to tasks using a dedicated email address assigned to each task. Unfortunately, this is far behind something like Karbon’s triage feature.
• No client portal

Reporting

• Many reports and options to customize your own.
• Timesheets section which shows logged time for a given period.
• Options to compare your budgets to actual results within the job or within the report which might be interesting for tax practice management.

User-friendliness

• Quite complex set-up process – not that intuitive, but once everything is set up it gets easier.
• Nice looking interface
• Time-consuming to use (actions require many clicks)

Pricing: 123 £/month for up to 10 users (no charge for Xero silver level partners)

X‍ero Practice Manager Reviews

“I love how easy the software is to use, how much information they allow you to enter and how flexible it is for your firms needs. We really enjoy the way it allows you to group entities per family group and how easy it is to view the whole groups returns and activity statements in one section. I dislike how often it will create duplicate entities and pull information in from the clients Xero account. Also frequently has lodgement errors that make no sense and takes a long time to resolve the issue.”

Sequoia C., Client Services Coordinator

5. Pixie

Pixie is a simple and flexible practice management software for small accounting and bookkeeping companies. It has all the core integrations, and many features like email management, client management, workflow management, task management, and reporting. Users say the best thing about it is it’s simplicity. Yet the simplicity comes with a price, as it’s missing core features like time tracking and billing.

Work management 

• Task and deadline management – recurring tasks, workflow management, task statuses, automatic task creation based on set rules.
• Templates – choose the template from the template library or create your own.
• Email management – connect your email to Pixie and turn emails into tasks, delegate them, link to tasks, etc. Send automatic client email reminders.
• Automated client onboarding – automated welcome emails with document requests, assign tasks and checklists to your clients.
• AML checks with Xama.

Time tracking & billing

• No time tracking and billing solutions

Collaboration

• Client portal – request documents or document signing.
• Assigning and forwarding tasks and emails
• Notes – team members can add notes to tasks, jobs, and in the client records.
• Documents – can be uploaded into jobs and the client records.
• Notifications – being assigned to a new job, new job notes, new job tasks, task completed, email have been read.

Reporting

• Very basic reporting (overdue tasks)

User-friendliness

• Uncluttered and clean interface

Pricing: 53-282 £/month per company

Pixie Reviews

“It’s like a dynamic spreadsheet and very intuitive and simple with columns and lists and dates and filters and can be tailored for your firm and flexed so really do love this for two years plus.It’s not a dislike, but through its simplicity, there is a lack of complexity, and sometimes need workarounds in terms of how reports are produced, there is also some development possibilities around statistics and this would be splendid.”

Keith L., Partner

“Great price for the software, easy and intuitive to use very friendly, very quick to set. excellent support. Pixie has made very easy to keep us organized with our database of clients. Pixi as a management app is great, however, there is a couple of thing that can be improved. Like there is no possible to assign multiple people to a task template.”

Ricardo A. A., Graphic Designer

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6. BrightManager

Bright Manager is a strong player on the market with high functionality and many possibilities. It can be a challenge to set up but when that’s done, it’s a capable tool to help you streamline company processes. It has all the core functionalities an accountancy company could wish from a practice management software.

Here’s a handy comparison of Uku to Bright Manager for you to make a better decision.

Work management 

• Automated task management – create client’s work plan with recurring tasks to automate task management.
• Automated client onboarding – professional clearance, automatic proposals and letters of engagement.
• Work plan templates – create templates so you don’t have to create client work plans from scratch.

Time tracking & billing

• Time tracking – log time manually or measure it with the stopper.
• Invoicing – time based or fix fee invoices.

Collaboration

• Client portal to manage documents and ask for signatures (form filling, document management, branding, e-signatures, deadlines).
• Notifications – You’ll get a notification when a client uploads or signs a document, completes a form or updates their details. Other notifications include: deadline approaching, new tasks assigned to you, changes to your tasks – and many more.
• Automated client emails – create email templates for each service and emails will be sent out automatically at the right time, to the right clients.

Reporting

• Visual and informative reports – how time has been spent
• Client-based profit reports 

User-friendliness

• Modern interface with systematized design (spreadsheets, forms).
• Not very convenient to use – due to many features, you have to do many clicks.

Pricing: 31,2-39 £/month per user

7. Capium

Capium Practice Management is one module of Capium full suite solution. They offer client service tools from client tracking, scheduling and deadline calendars to CRM and invoicing. If you want to use it as your main workspace, you need to use other modules as well (e.g. bookkeeping, payroll, etc).

Work management 

• Task management calendar to track individual work or activity throughout the firm.
• Deadline management with automated reminders
• AML process
• E-signing

Time tracking & billing

• The timesheet module tracks time spent on specific tasks and clients.
• Billing – customised invoices can be emailed from the system, which also records received payments.

Collaboration

• Mobile app for clients lets them send expense receipts, correspondence and documents.
• Online document management hosts client files for sharing and authorisation.
• Built-in CRM retains standing data on clients and prospects and logs communications with them.

Reporting

• Overdue tasks report

User-friendliness

• Relatively easy to use
• Customizable – the solution comes in modular form, with a range of add-ons for corporation tax, accounts production, practice management, self-assessment, payroll and bookkeeping

Pricing: 115-345 £/month per company (up to 500 clients)

Capium Reviews

“Simple, clean interface, easy to navigate and easy to edit mistakes unlike other accountancy software we’ve used in the past! Seamless integration with our online banking. Very little – there’s an occasional bug when inputing data that just means you have to manually click on some menus rather than ‘tab’ to them but it’s a very minor issue.”

Ally G., Administator

8. Practice Ignition

Practice Ignition is first and foremost an invoicing software, automating proposals, contracts and payments. You can customize services, use various pricing and accept different payment methods. For full accounting practice management, you’ll most likely need some additional software.

Work management 

• Proposal and pipeline management – whether the proposal is simply for a customer to pay an invoice or a pitch and journey of a new client, the process is the same.
• No workflow management – some integrations available.

Time tracking & billing

• Recurring billing – integrated with Xero and Quickbooks.
• Client payments and payment status – bill clients automatically for your services. Good for value-based pricing.

Collaboration

• Client management – all client data in one place (contact info, client communication, contracts, proposals sent, invoices received, payments received, outstanding payments and much more).

Reporting

• Reporting about billing – proposals sent and accepted, payments (collected, rejected)

User-friendliness

• Easy to use, modern interface

Pricing: 56-299 £/month per company

Practice Ignition Reviews

“Once you get the services set up, it’s so easy to send proposals and they’re uniform. It took a lot of time for me to get these set up, but once I got them done it’s click and drag and the proposals are very professional. There are a couple of things / product fixes I have recommended.

One, have the ability to get rid of the Space Ranger demo client so that the test proposals you make don’t affect your pipeline.

Two, have versions of the proposals available to view when there are updates. When you revoke a proposal the history of what you originally sent is gone.”

Anne H., Founder & CEO

We suggest you also read the article on how accounting practice management software for US accountants compare.