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.
This page is our editorial method, written down so you can audit it. Where every number comes from, why we model twenty-four months rather than one, how often we re-check, what we say when a rival beats the product we earn from, and the things we refuse to do to get a click.
Fizoral is brand-authored. There is no named reviewer, no founder photograph and no invented eleven-years-in-practice biography. Our reviews are researched and written by our editorial team, published under the masthead, and held to the rules on this page.
We made that choice deliberately. In this category a personal byline is usually decorative — a persona attached to a page to make it feel human, unverifiable by the reader, and frequently fictional. It asks you to trust a stranger’s stated history. We would rather give you something you can independently check.
So the method is the credential. Everything below is a commitment we are accountable to, and every one of them is designed to be falsifiable: you can open a vendor’s pricing page in the next tab and catch us out inside two minutes. That is the point. A method you can audit is worth more than a face you cannot.
One source of truth, and it is not us.
Every price on this site is read directly from the vendor’s own published UK pricing page, by a person, on a date we record and print on the page. Xero’s UK pricing page for Xero prices. Intuit’s UK pricing page for QuickBooks. Sage’s UK pricing page for Sage. FreeAgent’s UK pricing page for FreeAgent.
We record four things for every plan we quote: the promotional monthly rate, the full list monthly rate, the number of months the promotion runs, and whether the plan can file a VAT return. That last one sounds like a footnote and is routinely the most expensive detail on the page — entry plans that cannot file VAT are compared against rivals that can, as though they were equivalent products.
When we cannot source a price cleanly, we say so. Some vendors only reveal a rate inside a signup flow, tie it to a bank relationship, or quote on application. In those cases the page states plainly what we could and could not verify, rather than filling the gap with an estimate that looks like a fact.
Assumptions are only honest if they are printed. These are ours.
Two of those deserve a word. Excluding free trials is a conservative choice that works against the product with the longest trial — usually Xero, which is the vendor we would earn most from. We keep it because a trial is not a price and including it would flatter whoever happens to be running the longest one that month. Excluding annual prepayment reflects how most sole traders actually buy; where a vendor’s annual deal is genuinely material we cost it out on the page rather than folding it silently into the headline.
This is the rule the whole site is built on, so here is the case for it in full.
A UK accounting software price advertised today is almost never a price. It is an introductory discount — typically 70% to 90% off for six months, for new customers only, non-renewing — and it reverts to full list price on your seventh bill.
Compare on that headline and you are comparing marketing budgets, not products. The vendor running the deepest discount this month wins every comparison, and the reader is handed a number they will pay for half a year and then never again.
We therefore model total spend over twenty-four months: promotional months at the promotional rate, then full list price through to month twenty-four. Two years is the shortest window in which the promotion stops dominating the arithmetic while still being a horizon a small business can plan against. It also roughly matches how long people actually stay — switching accounting software mid-year is painful enough that most don’t.
The arithmetic, worked in the open
Xero Ignite, at the promotion running on 31 July 2026: six months at £3.20 = £19.20. Then eighteen months at £16 = £288. Two-year total: £307.20 ex VAT.
Which means the discounted period accounts for about 6% of what you will actually pay across two years. Ninety-four per cent of the bill is the number nobody puts in a headline.
Every 24-month total on this site is printed alongside the multiplication that produced it. If our arithmetic is wrong you can see that it is wrong, which is the only sort of transparency that is worth anything. Where a vendor’s promotion differs from the six-month pattern, we model its actual terms and say so.
“Which is cheapest?” has no single answer, and pretending otherwise is how readers end up on the wrong plan.
The winner of a comparison changes depending on who is asking. So we model the realistic cases separately and publish each one, rather than picking the flattering scenario and calling it the verdict.
When the scenarios disagree, we say which reader each answer is for rather than averaging them into a mush. A recommendation that fits everybody fits nobody.
Promotions in this category change roughly monthly. A comparison site that checks once a year is fiction.
Every price on a new or materially updated page is re-confirmed against the vendor’s live UK pricing page immediately before it goes out. No page is published on figures gathered weeks earlier during drafting.
Every published comparison is re-checked at least once a month against the vendors’ current UK pricing. Promotional rates, list prices, promotion end dates and plan capabilities are all re-read — not just the headline.
If a vendor changes pricing, renames a tier, adds or removes VAT filing from a plan, or launches or withdraws a promotion, we update the affected pages as soon as we see it rather than waiting for the monthly cycle.
Each comparison states the date its pricing was last verified, in plain sight, near the top. If that date is stale, treat the numbers with suspicion — and please tell us.
We do not back-date verification stamps, and we do not refresh a date without actually re-reading the source. A date stamp that isn’t earned is worse than no date stamp.
We say so, by name, in the first screen of the page. Here is the current evidence.
We are funded by affiliate commission, and we do not earn equally from every vendor. That is a real conflict of interest. The only meaningful test of whether a site has handled it is whether it will publish a fact that costs it money. So:
Costs us money · published
Over 24 months on entry plans, QuickBooks Sole Trader comes to £186 against £307.20 for Xero Ignite — £121.20 in QuickBooks’ favour. That sits in the second paragraph of our Xero vs QuickBooks page, not in a footnote. (The gap narrows to £9.60 once VAT registration forces QuickBooks up to Simple Start, and we show that too.)
Costs us money · published
If you bank with NatWest, RBS, Ulster Bank or Mettle, FreeAgent is free for as long as you hold the account. Against a £399 two-year FreeAgent bill — or £307.20 for Xero — that is the whole comparison, and for those readers we tell them to stop reading and go and get it.
Costs us money · published
Sage Sole Trader Free costs £0, permanently, not as a trial. For a sole trader below the VAT threshold who needs basic records and invoicing, £0 beats every paid plan on this site and we print that on the Xero vs Sage page above the fold.
None of those three facts is good for our revenue. All three are true today, all three are on the relevant comparison pages in the opening screen, and all three would be the first things to disappear if commission were driving the editorial. That is the test, and it is the only one worth applying to a site like ours.
Read the full affiliate disclosure for how the commercial relationships work, including which vendors we are and are not in a programme with.
Standing rules. Not aspirations — if we break one of these, we have broken the site.
rel="sponsored nofollow" and sits under a disclosure that appears before the link does.We will get something wrong. What matters is what happens next.
Prices move without notice, promotions are withdrawn mid-month, and vendors rename plans and quietly change what each tier can do. Some of that will get past our monthly check. When it does, we want to hear about it from you.
Send us the page, the figure you think is wrong, and ideally a link to the vendor page that shows the correct number. That last part turns a two-day check into a two-minute one.
Email info@fizoral.com, or use the contact form and pick “Report a pricing error”.
Directly from each vendor’s own UK pricing page, read by a person on a date we record and print. We do not take figures from other comparison sites, vendor press releases, affiliate network creative, or language models. Where a price is only visible inside a signup flow or given on application, we say so on the page instead of estimating.
Ex VAT, unless a page states otherwise. Most UK accounting vendors advertise ex VAT but not all do — where one advertises inclusive of VAT we normalise to ex VAT so the comparison is like-for-like, show both figures, and flag on the page that we have normalised.
Because introductory discounts expire, typically on your seventh bill, so a promotional monthly rate is not a price you will pay for long. Over 24 months on Xero Ignite the discounted period is about 6% of the total bill. Two years is long enough for the promotion to stop distorting the number and short enough to plan against.
No, and we say which is which. Where we have used a product we describe what we did and what happened. Where we are reasoning from a vendor’s own documentation and pricing, we say that instead. What we never do is dress up documentation as first-hand experience.
No, and we publish the evidence rather than just the assurance. QuickBooks is cheaper than Xero over 24 months; FreeAgent is free with NatWest, RBS, Ulster Bank and Mettle; Sage has a free tier for sole traders. All three cost us revenue and all three are printed in the opening screen of the relevant comparison.
Because we would rather be checkable than likeable. A byline in this category is usually a persona you cannot verify and quite often an invented one. We publish our method instead, so you can test any claim we make against the vendor’s own site in about ninety seconds. The site has a real operator and a real contact route — see the contact page.
Use the contact form or email our corrections address. Give us the page, the figure and ideally a link to the vendor page showing the right number. We reply within three working days and fix confirmed pricing errors within two, with a dated note on the page.