Choosing a version

Private Accounting is built for the business where one person does the books — a solo bookkeeper, a sole proprietor, or a small team running one or several entities. It's traditional double-entry, offline, and installed on your own device. Here's where that fits well, and where it doesn't.

Good fit if

• You're the only person (or one of a small few) entering transactions — not a team that needs to work in the same file at once.
• You manage more than one small business entity — corporate, sole proprietorship, partnership, or non-profit — and want them kept separate.
• You're comfortable reconciling against your bank statement yourself, rather than treating an automatic bank feed as your books.
• Payroll is handled elsewhere (a provider, or manually), and you want to record it in your books and reconcile against it — not run payroll from inside your accounting software.

Look elsewhere if

• You need simultaneous multi-user access. Private Accounting doesn't support multiple people editing the same company file at the same time.
• You need role-based permissions. There's no per-user permission system — anyone with access to a company file has full access to it.
• You need bank-feed accounting. Transactions aren't automatically imported and reconciled as they arrive from your bank; you enter and reconcile them yourself.
• Your reporting periods run very high transaction volumes. A General Ledger report covering roughly 15,000–20,000 transactions in a single period may need to be broken into sections to produce. It's workable, but at that volume a larger multi-user system may be a better fit.
• You run payroll for more than a handful of employees. Private Accounting doesn't process payroll — it's built to record payroll you've already run elsewhere via journal entry, and to help confirm those entries reconcile against your payroll provider's numbers.