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Blog Summary:
Are you looking to gather information regarding the cost of building a custom accounting app? This blog helps you do the same. It discusses the development cost of custom accounting software. From stepwise development and regional cost differences to factors affecting the accounting app development cost, the post covers complete details.
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Are you looking to build an accounting app exclusive to your business? You have made a decisive step. The major advantage of developing any such app is it can align perfectly with your existing business system, offer flexibility, and scale as your business grows. So, what is the Cost To Build Custom Accounting App?
You might be thinking that developing a custom accounting app may be expensive. Well, it’s true, especially when compared to general accounting software.
We will discuss the cost associated with an accounting app in depth here. This will help you prepare your budget accordingly and proceed with your account app development.
A custom accounting application is necessary for a business with unique requirements and processes. This app offers several advantages, from increased security to tailored solutions. Let’s get a complete overview of all the benefits of developing a custom accounting app.
A custom accounting app serves its actual purpose of matching the specific requirements of any business. Whether it is industry-specific regulations, specific financial workflows, or unique reporting requirements, these apps can accommodate a variety of business needs.
A custom accounting application is very helpful to organizations that handle complex billing structures or unique tax requirements. This app can simplify their processes.
A custom accounting app can streamline various financial operations, helping businesses minimize manual tasks by limiting human errors. The major advantage of using such an app is that businesses can automate various repetitive tasks like expense tracking, invoice generation, bank reconciliation, and more.
It minimizes the risks of mistakes and also enhances overall accuracy. A custom accounting app also enables the integration of cutting-edge reporting features. It helps you generate balance sheets, financial statements, and cash flow reports with less effort. It saves time and thus empowers businesses.
Data security is something that matters a lot for businesses. Many custom accounting apps provide improved measures to safeguard sensitive data. Businesses find possibilities to implement specific security protocols with a custom accounting app.
They can also incorporate many security features into the app, such as role-based access control, multi-factor authentication, data encryption, and more. These features ensure that only an authorized person can access the app.
Another great advantage of custom accounting software is that it can be integrated smoothly with many existing systems. Custom accounting applications can work hassle-free even with tools that businesses already use, such as CRM, ERP, or any eCommerce platform.
Thus, it minimizes disruption during implementation and also allows for consistent data flow across multiple departments. By integrating a custom accounting app, businesses can create a complete unified system. This simplifies operations, from customer service to financial management to inventory tracking.
The financial process becomes more complicated as a business grows. A custom accounting application is highly scalable, ensuring it can grow with your business.
Whether you seek to expand the scope of your services, add more users, or implement various latest financial rules and regulations, a custom app can adjust to the changing requirements.
The cost of developing a custom accounting application varies due to several steps in the process and many other factors. Let’s gather detailed information regarding the cost of a custom accounting app.
This step generally costs between $10,000 and $15,000. Perfectly designed accounting software is necessary to ensure the app is user-friendly and thus attracts more engagement.
Development is a crucial phase that involves coding the crafted design. Its cost ranges from $15,000 to $150,000. The account software development cost also depends on various features like financial reporting, invoicing, integration, multi-user access, and more. You need to invest more to develop complex accounting apps with high-grade features.
Testing is essential to ensure your app functions are free from bugs and perform in the desired way. Thorough testing costs from $5,000 to $20,000 and includes various activities like security audits, bug fixing, performance evaluation, and more.
A custom account app deployment costs between $3,000 and $5,000. This includes the process of setting up servers or app stores, which generally includes additional costs.
Maintenance is essential to ensure your app performs outstandingly for a long time. To maintain it, you need to spend approximately 15% to 20% of the overall development cost annually.
Onshore software development may cost between $150 and $250 on an hourly basis, and this range applies to countries like the US and UK. On the other hand, if you opt for offshore development, it may cost between $100 and $250 per hour.
The offshore team often provides huge cost savings but also needs powerful communication and flawless project management to maintain better quality.
You can use various open-source and pre-built libraries and templates to minimize the overall development time. This also helps you minimize the overall accounting app development cost, as you don’t need to pay to use any open-source frameworks.
Agile methodology favors building an app in multiple phases that are useful for getting early feedback and implementing it during development. It lets you avoid any possibility of unnecessary expenses.
Outsourcing can definitely help you save costs only when you use the right strategy. It’s advisable to choose a hybrid model that keeps costs onshore and outsources routine work.
As mentioned, several factors have a heavy influence on the overall cost of custom accounting development. Here are some of those factors.
If you decide to build a basic app with some core and limited features, it may cost less than apps that are feature-rich and have advanced functionalities.
In other words, the more features and functionalities an app requires, the more development time it takes. Thus, it also increases the overall software development cost.
When developing an app, you can target iOS, Android, or both platforms. Each platform has different requirements in terms of tools, programming languages, etc.
If you opt for native app development, you need to be ready to spend more as separate app development is required on iOS and Android. Cross-platform app development is highly affordable compared to native app development.
With the cross-platform development approach, developers can use a single codebase and implement it on multiple platforms, saving time and money.
Besides, if you seek to leverage advanced technologies such as ML, AI, Blockchain, and others, these can further increase the cost of your accounting app development.
The expertise and size of any development team significantly impact custom accounting app development. If you have a larger team consisting of designers, developers, QA experts, and project managers, it can help you carry out the development process smoothly. But, it also costs more compared to a smaller development team.
The expertise of developers also increases the development cost, especially if they have proficiency in leveraging next-generation technologies. If you are looking to develop high-grade apps, you need to hire dedicated app developers. It also increases your project cost.
Third-party integration is necessary for adding more advanced and necessary features and functionalities. Meanwhile, this integration is often complex and requires more time to complete, which increases the overall cost of custom accounting development.
Sometimes, using third-party APIs or any service requires subscription fees, which increases the overall development cost.
Those apps that need to comply with several industry-specific rules and regulations are often expensive to develop. For instance, healthcare applications must comply with Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) regulations.
Conversely, finance apps need to comply with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) and adhere to the General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) for managing users’ data.
Complying with these standards requires additional development effort, which includes data encryption, security protocols, thorough testing, and more. All of these increase the cost of app development.
While developing a custom accounting app, you need to incorporate those features that are essential for accounting tasks. It ensures higher engagement and thus makes your app successful. Let’s explore some of these features you can integrate into your accounting app.
Invoicing is one of the core features of any accounting app and enables businesses to handle their billing process more efficiently. A powerful custom accounting application should allow users to create, send, and manage invoices without any hassle.
The app should include important functionalities like an automated invoicing process, recurring invoices, integration with emails, messages, etc.
An accounting app should allow businesses to track their expenses, which is necessary to improve financial health. With a custom accounting app, businesses can track, categorize, and streamline their day-to-day expenses.
These apps include features like receipt scanning with Optical Character Recognition (OCR), which tends to automate expense entry, save time, and thus minimize the scope of human error.
Businesses need accurate, on-time financial reports to make informed decisions. Your custom accounting app should be able to generate reports such as balance sheets, profit and loss statements, cash flow statements, and others.
Visual reports of these representations through graphs and charts make it convenient for non-financial stakeholders to understand data clearly. The reports need to be customizable and enable users to view only data.
Tax compliance is considered a complicated task that involves monitoring income, expenses, and applicable tax rates. The app should be able to calculate taxes based on user inputs and also various local tax regulations.
It should be able to produce tax-ready reports to make the filing process convenient. A perfectly designed tax management feature is essential to saving time and thus avoiding unnecessary penalties.
The major advantage of incorporating AI-based analytics is that it can predict cash flow, track spending trends, and provide suggestions for effective cost-saving measures. For instance, the custom accounting app should be able to predict times of low liquidity and thus suggest various measures to enhance cash reserves.
It helps businesses to become more proactive in their financial management, minimize risks, and thus enhance performance.
Accounting apps need a multi-currency support feature, especially if the business operates globally. Users should be able to handle transactions in multiple currencies with the app.
The app should apply the exchange rates automatically while maintaining a higher accuracy. It needs to include features like real-time exchange rate updates, set preferred currencies for different users, etc.
A custom accounting application needs to offer a dashboard that features important financial data in real-time. The dashboards should be highly customizable and let users select the metrics they want to take an overview of.
Be it cash flow, accounts receivable, or outstanding invoices, the dashboard should be able to provide an intuitive overview of the business’s financial health at a glance.
Mobile accessibility is a necessary feature for any accounting application. It should allow users to access important data and expenses from their mobile devices. The mobile version of the application should be able to optimize for small screens without compromising functionality.
Accounting tasks are something that is not meant to be handled by an individual, especially for large organizations. So, the app should have multi-user access to ensure a smooth workflow and collaboration.
The application should ensure multiple users work simultaneously, and changes should be reflected in real-time. Additionally, different user roles should be able to access the application according to their needs.
Security is of great importance in handling crucial financial data. A custom account app should have the ability to provide role-based permissions that can restrict access to sensitive data according to the role of users.
For instance, senior management may have full access to different financial records, whereas junior accountants only get permission to input their expenses or generate invoices. This ensures the authorized person only accesses sensitive information.
Developing a custom accounting application requires a systematic approach and is done in multiple steps. All these steps serve some specific purposes. Take a look at all those steps.
The first step in custom accounting app development is to perform thorough research to obtain details about businesses’ and target users’ actual needs. This includes gathering details from stakeholders, defining the apps’ actual purposes, identifying important features, analyzing competitors, etc.
The selection of the right tech stack is essential to developing high-performing, scalable, and secure accounting apps.
For front-end development, developers generally opt for the Angular or React framework, whereas Django or Node.js is perfect for backend development. MongoDB, MySQL, etc., are considered to be top choices for databases.
In this phase, UI/UX designers craft user-friendly interfaces while ensuring smooth navigation. Designers also create prototypes and wireframes to define the way users will interact with the application. It focuses on clarity and simplicity in design to improve user satisfaction.
The development phase starts after the approval of the design. The front-end developers are responsible for translating the UI design into a fully functional interface. On the other hand, back-end developers develop core functionalities, including accounting features, data storage, integration with 3rd party services, etc.
Thorough testing is essential to ensure the application functions properly. QA experts conduct testing under rigorous conditions and in different scenarios to ensure the app performs as expected.
These professionals perform a variety of testing, such as performance testing, security testing, and functional testing.
After the satisfactory test result, the app is finally deployed in the live environment. The development team submits the iOS app to the Apple App Store and the Android app to the Google Play Store.
As far as post-launch support is concerned, it involves monitoring bugs, providing necessary updates, and scaling the app as per the increase in user demands.
Partner with us to develop a feature-rich accounting app tailored to your business needs within your budget.
So, you may be searching for a reputed custom accounting app development partner now. Well, you can consult none other than Moon Technolabs! We specialize in delivering tailored accounting app development solutions to cater to the specific needs of your business.
As an accounting software development company, we have earned vast expertise in harnessing the potential advantages of next-generation technologies to create scalable, secure, and user-friendly accounting solutions. Our team consists of experienced designers, developers, QA experts, and other professionals.
We work closely with you to understand your business needs and create accounting apps with advanced features like automated invoicing, real-time financial tracking, etc.
We also ensure its smooth integration with third-party apps. Whether you need on-time delivery or ongoing support, we match your expectations in several ways.
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Jayanti Katariya is the CEO of Moon Technolabs, a fast-growing IT solutions provider, with 18+ years of experience in the industry. Passionate about developing creative apps from a young age, he pursued an engineering degree to further this interest. Under his leadership, Moon Technolabs has helped numerous brands establish their online presence and he has also launched an invoicing software that assists businesses to streamline their financial operations.
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