indiAccounting 2.0: Your Whole Office, One License — and an Accountant's Copy That Doesn't Hand Over Your Passwords

Two things kept coming up from the people using indiAccounting. The first: my bookkeeper and I both need to be in the books. The second: my accountant wants a copy, and I don’t love emailing my entire company file to anybody.

2.0 answers both. Here’s what’s new.

Your whole office, on one license

One computer in the office hosts the company file. Everyone else connects to it directly over your own network. There’s no server product to install, nothing hosted, and no cloud in the middle — the file never leaves the machine that owns it.

One purchase covers every desk. $399 on top of your accounting license, once. Not per seat, not per month, not per year. If you add a sixth person next spring, you don’t owe us anything.

We want to be blunt about why, because the alternative is what most of this industry does. Charging a business again for every desk in the same room was never a technical requirement. It’s a billing decision. QuickBooks Online Plus includes five users and went to $140 a month in August; add payroll for five employees and you’re near $2,700 a year, forever. indiAccounting with payroll and unlimited office computers is $947, once. It pays for itself in about four months and then it just stops costing money.

If you’re on QuickBooks Desktop, this is probably already on your mind: Desktop 2023 lost payroll and security updates in May, and 2024 — the last version there will be — is supported through September 2027. A lot of people who deliberately chose desktop software are being walked into a subscription they didn’t ask for.

It works like an actual office

Multi-user isn’t just “several people can open the file.” Five areas — Sales, Purchasing, Banking, Payroll, and Books — and each person gets no access, read, or write in each one.

Payroll is the case that matters. The person entering invoices at the front desk has no business seeing what anyone earns, and now they don’t. Reports follow the same rule: the payroll summary needs the payroll permission, A/R aging needs sales. A report can’t become a side door into data someone isn’t allowed to see.

The day-to-day details are the ones that decide whether people actually like using it:

• Open an invoice someone else is editing and you’re told by name — “Eugene Marsh is editing this record” — before you start typing, not after. You go ask Eugene.
• Every screen updates within a few seconds of somebody’s save.
• Closing the books for period-end doesn’t lock anyone out. Everyone keeps reading; changes wait, with a sentence saying who closed them and why.
• Every edit is stamped with who made it.

Pairing a new computer takes a six-digit code read across the room. Every connection is encrypted and pinned to the host machine, so a computer that isn’t your host can’t pretend to be. And if a laptop walks off, you revoke that machine — nobody changes a password.

An accountant’s copy that isn’t your whole life

Here’s the thing nobody says out loud about sending your company file to your CPA: that file has your saved email password in it. Your bank feed credentials. Your Stripe key. Your employees’ Social Security numbers and direct-deposit details. Your accountant needs none of that, and probably doesn’t want the liability of holding it.

So the accountant’s copy strips it. Before the file is sealed, out comes the license key, the app password, saved email and bank and payment credentials, the user accounts and sign-in history from a hosted office, and every SSN and bank detail on your employee records. Then the file is compacted, so the removed data is actually gone rather than sitting there unreferenced. We test that against the raw bytes of the file, not just the rows.

What’s left is the books, exactly — every invoice, bill, payment, and journal entry, reconciling to the cent, because it’s a genuine snapshot rather than an export.

The whole thing is encrypted with AES-256 under a passphrase. The app offers you one in four readable groups with the look-alike letters taken out, so you can read it over the phone without spelling anything twice. Send the file however you like; send the passphrase separately.

Your accountant opens it in their own copy of indiAccounting, under their own license — they need nothing from you but the file and the passphrase. It shows up as its own company, badged, with a strip across the top naming whose books they’re in. Every attempt to change something gets the same plain sentence: “This is an accountant’s copy of Maple Street LLC. It can be reviewed but not changed.”

Two deliberate omissions. There’s no merge-back — adjustments come to you as a list and you enter them, the way you would from a printed page. And there’s no network involved: your machine doesn’t need to be on, no port opens, nothing passes through a server of ours.

Getting it

2.0 is a free update if you already own indiAccounting — it’s in the Microsoft Store and on our download page, and the app will tell you it’s there.

Multi-user is a $399 one-time add-on, purchasable from inside the app under Settings → License. The accountant’s copy is included; it isn’t an upsell.

And if you’re new: $249 for accounting with unlimited companies, payroll from $299, 30-day free trial with everything turned on. Buy it once. It keeps working.