If you prepare returns or review books for small business clients, your real bottleneck isn't entering invoices - it's untangling whatever your client gave you. You need a clean trial balance, room to post year-end adjusting journal entries, a depreciation schedule that actually ties to the return, and a way to hand the file back without breaking anything. Cloud bookkeeping tools optimize for the business owner, not the preparer. The chart of accounts is locked down, JE access is buried, and depreciation is an afterthought. FreshLedger Pro is built the other direction: a real double-entry general ledger on Windows desktop, full MACRS depreciation with Section 179 and bonus, and a free Accountant Edition you install on your own machine to review the client's file. One $799 license per client engagement covers the bookkeeping side; your copy is free.
Four capabilities matter most for CPAs and tax preparers reviewing client work in FreshLedger Pro. First, free Accountant Edition. Your client buys FreshLedger Pro for $799. You install the Accountant Edition on your workstation at no charge. You open their backup file, post adjusting journal entries, run reports, then send the file back. You don't pay per client and you don't pay a monthly seat fee to look at their books in January and February. Second, a real double-entry ledger with unrestricted journal entry access. You can post adjusting entries directly - accrued payroll, prepaid insurance amortization, depreciation true-ups, owner distribution reclassifications, bad debt write-offs - without fighting a UI designed to prevent the business owner from breaking things. You get a working trial balance, an adjusted trial balance, and a post-closing trial balance. Reversing entries are supported for accruals that need to flip on the first of the next period. Third, full MACRS depreciation built in. FreshLedger Pro tracks assets by MACRS class - 5-year (vehicles, computers), 7-year (office furniture, most equipment), 15-year (qualified improvement property and land improvements), 27.5-year (residential rental), 39-year (nonresidential real). It applies the correct convention (half-year, mid-quarter when the 40% test trips, mid-month for real property), handles Section 179 elections with the income limitation, and computes bonus depreciation at the current phase-down rate. The schedule prints in a format you can tie directly to Form 4562. Fourth, clean export to the return. Trial balance exports to CSV. The depreciation schedule exports to CSV. Payroll totals reconcile to Form 941 quarterly filings and Form 940 annual FUTA, with year-end W-2 and 1099-NEC generation from the same data file. You're not retyping numbers from a PDF into your tax software - you're moving a structured file.
Workflow 1: Year-end review for an S-corp client. The client emails you a backup of their FreshLedger file in mid-January. You open it in the free Accountant Edition. You run an unadjusted trial balance, tie cash to the December bank statements (the client imported them via OFX during the year), then start posting adjustments. You accrue the December payroll that paid on January 3rd, book the depreciation for the new $32,000 truck (5-year MACRS, half-year convention, with a Section 179 election up to the business-income limit), reclassify $18,000 of owner draws out of an expense account into the shareholder distribution equity account, and book the health insurance add-back to the >2% shareholder's W-2 Box 1. You print the adjusted trial balance and roll it into the 1120-S. Workflow 2: Rental property depreciation for a Schedule E client. The client owns three single-family rentals. You set up each building as a 27.5-year residential MACRS asset using mid-month convention, with land carved out as non-depreciable. A new roof placed in service in June is set up as a separate 27.5-year asset starting that month. A $4,200 appliance package goes in as 5-year property. FreshLedger computes the current-year depreciation for each asset and prints a schedule that maps line-by-line to Form 4562 and Schedule E. Workflow 3: Quarterly payroll review for a small employer client. The client runs payroll in FreshLedger throughout the quarter using current-year tax tables (the $99 annual update keeps Federal withholding, Social Security wage base, and state tables current). At quarter end you open the file, run the Form 941 worksheet, tie wages and withholding to the payroll register, and confirm the Federal tax deposits made during the quarter. At year-end the same data feeds W-2s for employees and 1099-NECs for contractors paid $600 or more.
The technical pieces a preparer actually checks are all here. Depreciation follows IRS Pub 946: MACRS GDS as default, with the option to elect ADS for assets used 50% or less for business or where the client wants longer recovery. The half-year convention applies to personal property unless more than 40% of the year's additions land in Q4, triggering mid-quarter; real property uses mid-month. Section 179 is tracked with the annual dollar limit and the taxable-income limitation, with disallowed amounts carrying forward. Bonus depreciation applies at the current statutory percentage (phasing down from 100% under the TCJA schedule) and can be elected out by class. On the payroll side, the system computes employer and employee FICA against the current Social Security wage base, applies the Additional Medicare 0.9% over $200,000 of wages, and supports both the 2020+ Form W-4 (no allowances, with Step 2 multi-job and Step 4 adjustments) and pre-2020 W-4s for employees who never refiled. Federal unemployment is tracked for Form 940 with the 0.6% effective rate after state credit. Contractors are tracked separately for 1099-NEC (services) and 1099-MISC (rents, royalties, other). For S-corp clients, the chart of accounts supports separate equity accounts for capital stock, additional paid-in capital, retained earnings, and shareholder distributions - so AAA reconciliation at year-end is straightforward.
Your client pays $799 once for FreshLedger Pro. Your Accountant Edition is free. If they run payroll, the $99/year tax table update is optional but practically required for accurate withholding. Compare that to a cloud subscription where the client pays roughly $90-$200/month ($1,080-$2,400/year) for the tier that includes payroll, plus an accountant seat that may or may not be free. Over a three-year engagement, your client spends $799 + $297 in payroll updates - under $1,100 total - versus $3,000-$7,000 on a subscription. For a CPA managing 30 small-business clients, steering even half of them to a one-time-purchase desktop product is a meaningful client-side cost reduction you can point to in your engagement letter.
FreshLedger Pro is not right for every client you serve. If your client needs real-time multi-user access - a bookkeeper in one office and an AP clerk in another, both in the file at the same time - this is the wrong tool. The file is single-user at a time. If your client runs their business from a phone and expects to snap photos of receipts on the go, there's no native mobile app. If your client refuses to download bank activity manually, note that FreshLedger does not connect to live bank feeds; transactions come in via CSV, OFX, QFX, or QBO files downloaded from the bank's website. And if the client is on a Mac without a Windows VM, it won't run natively. For those clients, recommend a cloud tool. For everyone else, the math and the workflow favor desktop.
One-time-purchase accounting software with built-in payroll, full depreciation handling, and a free Accountant Edition for your CPA.
Buy FreshLedger Pro — $799One-time purchase. No subscription. Free Accountant Edition included.