Last Updated on November 29, 2025 by Ewen Finser
Most “easy” accounting software is lying to you.
The login screen looks friendly. The demo video feels smooth. But once you get past the tour, you are three clicks deep in “Chart of Accounts” hell, trying to remember if this thing lives in Settings, Lists, or Some Random Gear Icon.
Today, I want to put a spotlight on the platform that I think really embraces the “user friendliness mentality”. And no, let me nip this in the bud…it’s not Quickbooks Desktop or QBO. It’s a new kid on the block, with an equally catchy name. Digits is the user-friendly platform that I think excels in making non-accounting folks into people who can build and understand their business’ financials.
Digits blazes a different path. It doesn’t just move the same old general ledger into the cloud. It rebuilt the engine with AI at the core, then wrapped it in a clean UI that feels more like a modern app than a filing cabinet.
This is why, if you run a small business and care about “easiest to use,” Digits needs to be at the top of your shortlist.
The Bottom Line Up Front
If you want the easiest accounting software for a small business, you want three things:
- Setup that does not cause an immense headache
- A system that does 90% of the grunt work for you
- Clear answers in plain English when you ask, “Where did the cash go?”
Digits hits that bar, because the core of the platform is an Autonomous General Ledger that auto-books over 93% of your transactions, then flags the weird ones for you or your accountant to review.
QuickBooks, Xero, and friends can get the job done. But they still feel like “software you have to learn.” Digits feels more like “software that learns you.”
What Easy Accounting Software Should Actually Be
“Easy” gets abused in marketing speak. So let’s define it from a CPA lens.
For a small business owner, an easy accounting platform should:
- Connect to your banks, cards, payroll, and payment tools without weird CSV rituals.
- Classify and reconcile transactions without you babysitting every line item.
- Show you live numbers that make sense on one screen: cash, revenue, expenses, and runway.
- Let you ask questions in normal language and get real answers, not a “report builder” pop-up.
- Play nice with your accountant or outsourced firm when it is time for tax or a raise round.
Digits was built to check all of those boxes for small businesses and startups, not for giant enterprises with an IT department and a six-month implementation cycle.
Why The Old Guard Still Feels Difficult To Use
QuickBooks Online, Xero, and other platforms are not bad tools by any stretch of the imagination. I live in them for clients every week. They are powerful, flexible, and battle-tested. But from an ease-of-use standpoint, they carry older design DNA:
- Menus built around accountant terms, not business owner questions
- “Rules” you have to configure to get any real automation
- Reports that need heavy customization to answer simple questions
You can make them sing, but it takes time and training. Most owners never get past the basics: bank feeds, invoices, a P&L that sort of works.
Digits shows up as the counterpoint. Media coverage and industry writeups put it head-to-head with QuickBooks and Xero, but the angle is clear: AI-native, automation first, and much less manual work.
That is the core of “easy” here. It is not about cute icons. It is about the percentage of your bookkeeping that happens without you.
Digits: AI-Native Accounting That Feels Like Cheating
Digits markets itself as the world’s first AI-native accounting platform, powered by an Autonomous (or Agentic) General Ledger. That is not a marketing flourish. Under the hood, they have:
- A self-learning ledger trained on hundreds of billions in transaction volume
- Vector models that recognize patterns across vendors and spend types
- Natural language processing that reads bank text, invoices, and PDFs
- A layer of “Accounting Agents” that monitor, classify, reconcile, and report without you ever needing to touch anything.
The results, in plain English, are:
- You connect your banks, cards, payroll, AR, and AP once.
- Digits auto-books most activity to your chart of accounts and you have a human review the oddball exceptions.
- Anything weird or ambiguous gets flagged for review in one place.
- Dashboards update in real time, so you are not guessing off last quarter’s exports.
That is the “cheating” feeling. You did not click through five windows. The books are just…done.
How Digits Makes SMB Accounting Feel Seamless
Let’s walk through the experience from a new owner’s perspective.
1. Setup That Looks Like A Modern App, Not A Government Form
Digits leans into guided setup:
- Connect banks and cards (they support thousands of US institutions).
- Connect payroll (Gusto, etc.) and payment tools like Stripe and Mercury if you use them.
- Confirm or tweak the recommended chart of accounts.
There are no giant “company settings” wizards full of jargon. The app walks you through the minimum decisions, then lets the AI do the heavy lifting on structure.
If you already have books in another system, Digits offers migration help, which matters if you are not the most tech-savvy person out there and want someone else to babysit the move.
2. One Inbox
Most accounting apps scatter tasks across menus:
- Bank feed here
- Bills there
- Invoices somewhere else
Digits pulls a lot of the day-to-day work into a single review surface. Transactions flow into the ledger, the AI classifies them, and then you or your accountant review exceptions in one place – the inbox.
You are not hunting across modules. You are working a queue.
3. AI That Does The Grunt Work
Digits’ Autonomous / Agentic General Ledger auto-books over 93% of inbound transactions in testing, with a public roadmap aiming closer to 95% automation of core bookkeeping workflows.
That automation covers:
- Categorization to your specific chart of accounts
- Vendor and customer recognition
- Matching invoices and bills
- Bank reconciliation to statement PDFs (this feature really blew me away, I can’t even begin to fathom how the Digits team was able to pull this off).
This is where most small-business “easy” promises fall apart. Clicking “Add” on 1,000 line items a month is not easy. Letting the machine do the first pass and only checking what it is unsure about is.
4. Dashboards That Answer “What’s Going On?”
Digits leans hard on visual, real-time dashboards:
- Cash position and trend
- Burn rate and runway
- Revenue and expense breakdowns
- Vendor and customer concentration
You still get the classic P&L, balance sheet, and cash flow statements. But you also get a live view of “where the money went” that you can scan in seconds, without exporting to Excel or building your own charts.
5. Ask Accounting Questions In Plain English
Digits AI is built to answer questions like:
- “How much did we spend on marketing this quarter?”
- “Who are my top five customers by revenue this year?”
- “What did I pay that new contractor so far?”
You do not have to know which report lives where. You just ask, and the system uses AI to generate charts and explanations you can drop into investor decks or board updates.
For a busy owner, this is huge. You stop guessing, and you get to stop pinging your accountant for every basic question.
A Day In The Life Using Digits
You run a three-person service business:
- You have revenue from Stripe, ACH, and the odd check.
- You’re running payroll through Gusto.
- You have a corporate card on Ramp, and rent, software, and travel on a business credit card
On Monday morning, you:
- Open Digits. Your weekend transactions have already synced and auto-posted. You glance at your cash dashboard. You see runway in months, not just a raw bank total.
- You open your review queue. Ten items need your eyes: a new vendor, an unexpected refund, and a contractor expense that might be billable.
- You click through, accept AI suggestions, tweak two or three, and move on. Before a client call at 10 AM, you ask Digits, “How much did we spend on that project so far?” and get a clean answer with visual context.
You never built rules. You never dug through “Banking” versus “Expenses” versus “Vendors.” The system pushed the few human decisions to you, not the other way around.
Is Digits Still Easy With More Complicated Use Cases?
No platform is magic. A few honest caveats, from a CPA who lives in the weeds:
- You still need a clean separation of personal and business spend. No software fixes a junk drawer bank account.
- You still need an accountant. Digits makes the books cleaner and faster, but tax, entity structure, and revenue recognition still need human judgment.
- You still need to look at the numbers. The dashboards help, but you have to log in, ask questions, and act.
Where Digits shines, in my opinion, is the ratio of effort to benefit. The time saved on closing the books and the reduced hassle versus traditional platforms is why I think Digits was the perfect candidate for today’s topic.
Pricing
You may be thinking that since this platform is the bees’ knees, it probably would be overkill for your small shop in terms of pricing. Well, you’d be pleasantly surprised. Digits’ pricing currently has a Starter plan at $35 per month and a Business plan at $100 per month, with transaction and feature limits that scale up from there. Most companies would probably be better suited to the $100 a month plan.
- Very small, side-hustle level: If your volume is tiny and you send three invoices a month, their $35 a month platform is plenty.
- Serious small business with real volume: If you run payroll, pay vendors every week, and have more than a handful of customers, Digits starts to make sense. The hours saved each month can exceed the subscription cost quickly.
- Growing startup with investors or a board: The combination of real-time dashboards, drill-down reports, and AI is built for you. This is the “we should stop living in Excel” stage, and you may consider Digits’ custom solutions (a bit pricier, but worth it).
Digits also runs an accountant partner program and offers firm-side tools, so if you’re a CPA or Accounting Manager who is thinking about using Digits to help run multiple clients, you absolutely should consider it, as it was built for this purpose.
Who Digits Is Perfect For
Digits is an especially good fit if:
- You hate bookkeeping, but you care about clean numbers.
- You are allergic to complex menu trees.
- Your business runs through modern tools (Stripe, Gusto, Mercury, Ramp, etc.).
- You want your accounting platform to feel like a modern SaaS app, not a legacy system wrapped in a new skin.
It is also attractive if you are:
- A founder juggling sales, ops, and finance
- A small team without a full-time controller
- A firm partner who wants to scale client work without scaling headcount
If you live to tinker with journal entries and custom reports, you can still do your thing. But you do not have to.
How To Try Digits Without Blowing Up Your Current Setup
If you are on QuickBooks, Xero, or something else today, here is a low-risk way to test Digits:
- Connect a read-only set of feeds first. Start with bank and card connections to let Digits build its own view of your recent history.
- Run it in parallel for a month. Keep your current system, but use Digits to see how it auto-books and what its dashboards show.
- Compare month-end. Look at your existing P&L versus Digits’ version. Pay close attention to classification quality and the time it took you to get there.
- Loop in your accountant. Ask them what they think of the review workflow, access controls, and reporting.
Because Digits leans on AI to handle the heavy lifting, you will get a clear sense in one close cycle whether it feels easier than what you are using now.
Final Take: Easiest Does Not Mean “Dumbed Down”
A lot of “simple” accounting software trims power to achieve ease. You get a clean interface, but you give up serious features the moment your business grows.
Digits manages a rare combo: real double-entry accounting under the hood, automation that strips out the busywork, dashboards and AI Q&A that surface answers in plain language, and a design that feels like software built this decade for humans, not just for accountants.
If your goal is to find the easiest accounting software for a small business, you can stay in the safe zone with the usual suspects. Or you can lean into a platform that is trying to make the books take care of themselves.
As a CPA who has watched too many owners drown in “easy” tools that are anything but, I am comfortable saying this:
Digits is not just easier to look at. It is easier to live with. And that is what actually makes the difference.