best accounting software for therapists under $10 a month

Wave

Wave is the free accounting tool most often recommended to solo therapists, and the free Starter plan is genuinely usable: unlimited invoices, income and expense tracking, and a mobile app, at no cost. The catch since Wave restructured its plans is that automatic bank imports, receipt capture and auto-categorization now sit on the $19 a month Pro plan, so on the free plan you add transactions yourself. For a practice with a handful of client payments a month that is usually a fine trade, and it is the easiest of these to set up in an afternoon.

Zoho Books

Zoho Books has the most generous free plan of the cloud options: a solo practice earning under $50,000 a year gets real double-entry accounting, mileage tracking, receipt autoscans, payment reminders and more than fifty reports without paying anything. The limits that bite are one user plus your accountant, 1,000 invoices a year, and bank feeds being reserved for the paid Standard plan, so free-plan reconciliation means importing statements yourself. If your practice grows past the revenue threshold the step up to Standard is $20 a month, or $15 billed annually.

QuickBooks Online

QuickBooks now has a free tier, which is news to anyone who last looked at it as the $38-a-month option. The free plan tracks income and expenses, connects one bank account and runs a profit and loss report, but it caps you at two invoices a month, gives no accountant access, and leaves out the mobile app and third-party integrations. That makes it workable for a therapist whose client billing happens inside an EHR and who only needs the books and a year-end P&L, and frustrating for anyone invoicing clients directly. Its real advantage is that almost every accountant already knows it.

ZipBooks

ZipBooks is the free plan that does not make you give up bank connection: the Starter tier sends unlimited invoices, manages unlimited customers and vendors, connects one bank account and accepts card payments through Square or PayPal. Recurring invoices, automated reminders and multiple bank accounts are held back for the $15 a month Smarter plan. The product is older and less actively marketed than Wave or Zoho, and its reporting is basic, but for a solo therapist who wants free books with a live bank feed it is the shortest path.

GnuCash

GnuCash is free open-source accounting software you install on your own Mac, Windows or Linux machine, with no plan tiers, no revenue ceiling and no vendor that can change the terms on you. It does proper double-entry books, customer and vendor tracking, invoicing and bill payment, and a full set of reports including profit and loss. The trade is effort and looks: the interface is dated, there is no bank feed in the cloud sense (you import statement files), and nothing about it is designed for a therapy practice. It suits someone comfortable with a checkbook register who wants their financial data on their own disk.

Express Accounts

Express Accounts from NCH Software is a desktop bookkeeping package whose free version never expires for businesses with fewer than five employees, which covers most private practices. It handles quotes, invoices, recurring billing, accounts receivable and more than twenty reports including a profit and loss statement and balance sheet, and you can email reports straight to your accountant. The free edition leaves out features aimed at larger organisations, and like GnuCash it lives on one computer rather than in the cloud, so backups are your job.

Akaunting

Akaunting is the only paid option here that genuinely lands under ten dollars a month, and only if you pay for a year up front: the Standard Cloud plan is $8 a month billed yearly, or $12 month to month. It is explicitly sold for one-person businesses and includes one company, one user plus an accountant, and up to a thousand invoices. The software is open source with a hosted edition, which also means a self-hosted route if you ever want it, and an app-store model where extras cost more. Support and polish are a step below Wave or Zoho, so it is worth using the trial before committing to a year.

FreshBooks

FreshBooks is the friendliest of the paid options and the one reviewers most often single out for people who bill clients directly, but at $23 a month for the Lite plan it is more than double the budget in this question. Lite also caps you at five billable clients, which a therapist with a full caseload will pass quickly, and each extra team member is $11 a month. It runs in a browser and on iOS and Android, and the double-entry accounting underneath is real. Worth a look mainly if steep introductory discounts are on offer and you value the invoicing experience over the price.

Xero

Xero is a serious cloud accounting platform whose entry Early plan costs $25 a month once any introductory offer ends, so it sits well outside a ten-dollar budget. The Early plan is also deliberately narrow: twenty invoices and five bills a month, though bank reconciliation, sales tax and 1099 management are all included. What sets it apart for a growing practice is that it does not charge per user, so bringing in a bookkeeper or a second clinician costs nothing extra. Xero has also announced that subscription prices rise from October 2026.

Patriot Software Accounting

Patriot is a plain, inexpensive online accounting product built for very small US businesses, at $20 a month for the Accounting Basic plan, routinely halved for the first few months. Unlike most cheap plans it puts no cap on invoices or customers and includes automatic bank imports and account reconciliation at the entry tier. Estimates, recurring invoices and receipt management require the $30 Premium plan. Its natural appeal to a therapist is that payroll sits alongside it at a low price, which matters the moment you hire an associate clinician or an admin.

Heard

Heard is the only option here built specifically for therapists, and it is not software you run yourself so much as a bookkeeping and tax service with a dashboard attached: monthly bookkeeping is done for you, with quarterly tax estimates and annual filing on the higher tiers. It is included in this table as the honest ceiling of the category, because at $1,548 a year billed up front it is roughly fifteen times the budget in the question. The case for it is that it replaces both your bookkeeping software and your accountant, and the people doing the work already understand superbills, S corp elections and therapy practice deductions.