SpidNums vs Asana: an honest comparison for Canadian firms

What Asana does well

This section comes first deliberately. Asana is a serious product with real customers, and a comparison that pretends otherwise is not worth reading.

• Project and portfolio views — list, board, timeline, calendar — that keep cross-functional work legible at any team size.
• A fast, polished interface most new hires already know, which cuts training time to almost nothing.
• Forms and rules automation that route intake work without anyone writing code.
• A deep integration ecosystem, so it connects to whatever else the organisation already runs.

Where the fit differs

These are differences in model rather than claims about missing features. Where a capability is not listed for Asana, that means we did not verify it — not that it is absent.

• Record model: Asana organises work as projects and tasks for any kind of team. SpidNums organises it around the client record — legal name, fiscal year-end, contacts with designations, assigned services — so every task inherits its client context.
• Deadline logic: SpidNums generates deadlines from Canadian rules — the T2 six-month clock and earlier balance-due date, GST/HST by each client's reporting cadence, year-end reminders a month early. Asana is a general-purpose platform where firms typically build those dates themselves as recurring tasks.
• Pricing model: Asana is priced per seat. SpidNums is a flat USD $1,200 per firm per year, so a busy-season hire changes your software cost by nothing.
• Client-facing layer: SpidNums ships e-signed engagement letters and a branded client portal. Asana is built for internal teams; firms typically handle the client-facing pieces in separate tools.

Pricing

Asana does not publish pricing we could verify, so this page does not state a number for it — ask the vendor for a current quote. SpidNums is a flat USD $1,200 per firm per year with every feature included, including white-label branding.

What SpidNums is, plainly

SpidNums is practice management for Canadian accounting firms: the client list, the services each client buys, the deadlines those services generate, the person who owns each one, and the engagement letter that defined the scope. It is not a general ledger, it does not prepare or transmit returns, and it does not calculate payroll — those stay in the tools your firm already files with.

The list below is the complete set of claims this site makes about the product. If a capability is not on it, we do not claim it.

• Multi-tenant white-label branding per firm — name, logo, colours, emails and letterhead
• Colour-coded SLA deadline dashboard ranked by proximity
• Aggregated reminders across tasks, service cadences and fiscal year-ends
• E-signed engagement letters with a public, no-login client portal
• Per-tenant Google Workspace integration
• Client portal
• Staff roles with confidential-client gating
• Canadian-hosted data (Supabase ca-central-1)
• Flat USD $1,200 per firm per year, all inclusive
• CSV/XLSX client import and export

Questions worth asking both vendors

Comparison grids converge because feature names converge. These six questions separate products that look identical on paper, and they are worth asking of Asana and of SpidNums alike.

• How is a deadline generated — from a rule tied to the client's fiscal year-end and reporting period, or from a recurring task somebody configured by hand?
• When a client's filing cadence changes, is that one field or a rewrite of every future date?
• Whose brand does the client see on emails, on the portal and on a signed engagement letter — and on which plan does that become true?
• Where is client data hosted, and is tenant isolation enforced in the database or only in the application? Get the answer in writing.
• What is the total annual cost at three seats and at ten? Ask for the total, not the per-user figure.
• What comes across on migration, and what does not? Clients usually move; documents, notes and completed work usually do not.

Who should choose Asana

A firm that is happy running work as generic projects and tasks — and whose filing cadences are simple enough to maintain by hand — should stay on Asana. It is a better tool than SpidNums for the non-client work a firm also has: marketing, hiring, internal projects. If the team already lives in it, that familiarity is worth real money.

If that describes your firm, take the other product seriously. If it does not, the practice management overview covers what SpidNums does in full.

Switching

SpidNums imports clients from CSV or XLSX. Client data in Asana usually sits across project fields and a spreadsheet somewhere; consolidate it into one sheet, map it to the import template, and bring it in. There is no direct connector — task histories, comments and attachments stay in Asana, so keep read access during the transition.

SpidNums imports and exports clients as CSV or XLSX. There is no direct migration connector, so historical documents, notes and completed work do not come across automatically — plan the cutover around a period boundary rather than mid-season.