SpidNums vs QuickBooks Online Accountant: what the free tools cover

What QuickBooks Online Accountant does well

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

• It is free for accounting professionals, which is a genuinely hard price to compete with.
• Native to QuickBooks Online, the ledger a large share of Canadian small businesses already use.
• The work dashboard and client requests cover real practice needs at zero cost.
• Firm benefits including QuickBooks Online Advanced and Payroll for the practice's own books.

Where the fit differs

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

• Coverage: QuickBooks Online Accountant manages QuickBooks work. A firm also runs T2s, GST/HST cadences, engagement letters and clients who are not on QuickBooks at all — that is the layer SpidNums adds.
• Branding: clients see Intuit's brand. SpidNums presents the firm's own name, logo, colours, emails and letterhead.
• Deadline logic: SpidNums generates dates from CRA rules and each client's fiscal year-end and assigned reporting period.
• Engagement letters: SpidNums builds priced letters from a services catalogue with no-login client e-signature.

Pricing

QuickBooks Online Accountant is free for accounting professionals in Canada as of July 2026, including firm-use benefits.

SpidNums is a flat USD $1,200 per firm per year with every feature included, so the comparison turns on headcount: per-seat pricing is usually cheaper for one person and usually more expensive from the third or fourth seat. Source: Intuit — QuickBooks Online Accountant practice management (Canada), checked 2026-07-22.

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 QuickBooks Online Accountant 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 QuickBooks Online Accountant

A bookkeeping practice whose clients are all on QuickBooks Online, with fewer than about fifty of them and no tax work, should use the free tools. Paying for practice management to replace something free only makes sense once the free thing stops covering the work.

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

Nothing needs to switch. Most firms keep QuickBooks Online Accountant for QuickBooks work and add SpidNums as the firm-wide layer covering every client and every deadline. Client lists import by CSV or XLSX.

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.