Ad / affiliate disclosure: Fizoral is funded by affiliate commission. When we are a member of a vendor’s affiliate programme, links to that vendor are affiliate links and we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Where we are not in a vendor’s programme, our links are ordinary links and we earn nothing. Commission never changes our recommendations, and we tell you below exactly where each product beats the ones we earn from. Read the full disclosure.
Fizoral is an independent comparison site for UK accounting software. We are not owned by a software company, no vendor pays us for placement or a kinder review, and every price we publish is worked out over twenty-four months — long after the introductory discount has expired.
Search for accounting software in the UK and you will be told that Xero costs £3.20 a month and QuickBooks costs £1. Neither number is a price. They are six-month new-customer hooks, and they expire — usually on your seventh bill.
What follows is predictable. A sole trader budgets from the promotional rate, forgets about it, and finds out in month seven that the bill has quintupled. By then the data is in the system, the bank feed is connected, the accountant has been given a login, and moving is a weekend’s work. The discount did its job.
We think the honest unit of comparison is total spend over twenty-four months. Two years is long enough that the introductory period stops distorting the number — on Xero Ignite, the six discounted months account for about 6% of a two-year bill — and short enough that a small business can actually plan around it. So that is the number we lead with on every page, and we show the arithmetic in full so you can check it rather than take our word for it.
That is the entire premise of Fizoral. It is not a clever one. It is just the number nobody else prints.
We cover UK accounting and bookkeeping software, priced in pounds sterling, for businesses filing to HMRC. That is a deliberately narrow beat.
Reader 01
Self-employed people who need to keep records, invoice, and file a Self Assessment return — and who are working out whether Making Tax Digital for Income Tax applies to them yet. The most price-sensitive group we write for, and the one most damaged by budgeting from a promotional rate.
Reader 02
Individuals with property income, who have distinct needs: per-property tracking, mortgage interest treatment, and the MTD for Income Tax thresholds that catch property income alongside trading income. Frequently sold a product built for a different job.
Reader 03
Owner-managed companies, typically one to ten people, usually VAT registered, often running payroll. Here the seat count, VAT filing and payroll add-on costs matter far more than the headline monthly figure — and the plan tiers are designed to make that hard to see.
Fizoral is not owned by, part of, or invested in by any software company. We are not a Xero property, not an Intuit property, not a Sage property, and not owned by an accountancy practice or a bank with a horse in this race. No vendor has an equity stake, a board seat or a veto.
No vendor pays us for placement, and no vendor can buy a better review. There is no rate card. There is no sponsored slot at the top of a table. No vendor sees a page before it is published, no vendor gets a right of reply before publication, and no vendor has ever had a conclusion changed on request. If a vendor asked, the answer would be no, and we would say on the page that they had asked.
We are funded by affiliate commission. When we are a member of a vendor’s affiliate programme, our links to that vendor are affiliate links and we may earn a commission if you subscribe — at no extra cost to you. Where we are not in a vendor’s programme, our links are ordinary links and we earn nothing at all. That is a real conflict of interest and we are not going to pretend otherwise, so we do two things about it: we disclose it at the top of every page, and we make a habit of naming the products that beat the ones we earn from.
The test we hold ourselves to
If a cheaper or better-fitting product exists for the reader in front of us, we say so by name, in the first screen of the page — even when we earn nothing from it, and even when it costs us the sale.
Concretely, and today: QuickBooks is cheaper than Xero over 24 months on entry plans. FreeAgent is free forever if you bank with NatWest, RBS, Ulster Bank or Mettle. Sage has a genuinely free tier for sole traders. All three of those facts cost us money, and all three are printed above the fold on the relevant pages.
Read the full affiliate disclosure for exactly how the money works, including which links carry rel="sponsored nofollow" and why.
Fizoral is brand-authored. Our reviews are researched and written by our editorial team and published under the masthead, not under an individual’s name. We want to be straightforward about why.
The convention in this category is to attach a founder photograph and a paragraph of biography to a page — eleven years running a limited company, paid for both products personally, switched twice and regretted it. It reads well. It is also unverifiable by you, and it is very often invented. We are not going to manufacture a person to carry credibility that the work should be carrying.
So we put the credibility somewhere you can actually inspect it: the method. Every figure on this site is traceable to a vendor’s own published UK pricing page. Every total is shown as arithmetic you can redo on a phone. Every assumption — ex VAT, monthly billing, promotional months included, trial months excluded — is stated on the page rather than buried. Every page carries the date its pricing was last verified.
You should not have to trust us. You should be able to check us, in about ninety seconds, with the vendor’s own website open in the next tab. That is a higher bar than a biography, and it is the one we would rather be held to.
The short version. The long version, including our sourcing rules and what we refuse to do, is on How We Research.
We write comparisons a UK business actually types into a search box — “Xero vs QuickBooks”, not “top 17 accounting tools”. If we cannot state the question in one sentence, there is no page.
Every plan is priced from the vendor’s own UK pricing page on a stated date. Ex VAT unless we say otherwise. Promotional rate and full list rate both recorded, along with the month the promotion ends.
Promotional months at the promotional rate, then full list price to month twenty-four. The arithmetic is printed on the page. We model the realistic scenarios separately — VAT registered or not, one user or four, payroll or no payroll — because the winner changes between them.
Every page has to answer “who should not buy this?” and name the alternative. If the honest answer is that a competitor wins, that goes in the opening paragraphs, not the footnotes.
Prices are re-confirmed against the vendor pages immediately before publication, the page is date-stamped, and it goes into a monthly re-verification cycle. Promotions in this category change roughly monthly.
Tell us. We would rather be corrected by a reader than quietly wrong for a month.
Vendors change prices without notice, promotions roll over, and plan names get reshuffled. When we are wrong we correct the page, and we date-stamp the correction so you can see what changed and when. We do not silently edit a number and pretend it was always that way.
Email info@fizoral.com or use the contact form. We aim to reply within three working days, and pricing corrections usually go live faster than that.