Each row in the table above stands for a decision that eventually shows up in a budget line or on a Monday morning. Here is what they mean.
Starting pricePublished pricing versus a quote
IRIS pricing is custom, typically in the hundreds of pounds a month and upwards. Accupe publishes its numbers: £20 a month on Solo, £55 on Growth for up to five people, £185 on Elite for unlimited seats, roughly 17 percent less paid annually, with AED equivalents for UAE firms.
The difference that matters is not the figure, it is what a quote does to your negotiating position and your budgeting. A quoted price has to be re-established at every renewal, which costs partner time nobody bills for, and it turns internal cost allocation between departments into an argument rather than an arithmetic. A published price means the number you plan on next year is the number on the website, and you can model adding four people without booking a call.
Practice managementOne platform, or several products wearing the same badge
A suite is a commercial arrangement as much as a technical one, and suites commonly span multiple products with their own logins and their own bills.
Accupe is deliberately the other shape: one application, one login, one subscription. Jobs, tasks, timesheets, the Smart Board, the deadline calendar, documents, e-signatures, the client portal, Compliance Radar, reports and invoicing are all the same product reading the same records. The practical consequence is that a client's identity check, the engagement letter signed off the back of it, the recurring job it created and the deadline that job carries all sit on one record, so nobody exports anything to answer a question about one client.
Companies House integrationBoth yes, so here is what Accupe does with it
This is a row where the tick is the same on both sides, so the useful thing is to describe the depth rather than manufacture a difference.
Accupe runs a central, server-side Companies House API key, so there is no per-firm connection to configure or renew. Searching adds a company with its registered office, incorporation date, SIC codes, status and officer list, and creates the Accounts and Confirmation Statement tasks on their real due dates without being asked. Deadlines are colour coded: red and marked overdue once passed, amber with a day count inside 30 days. A daily check writes register changes into an activity feed, and a director or PSC change raises a Refresh CDD task. Officers pulled from the register also populate the director dropdown on the KYC tab, so verification evidence gets filed against a real named officer rather than free text somebody typed.
AI document analysisWhat an AI feature has to prove in a regulated practice
The bar for AI in an accounting firm is not fluency, it is traceability. An answer you cannot source is an answer you have to redo, which makes it worse than no answer.
Accupe AI Chat, on Growth and Elite, reads PDF, .docx, .xlsx, CSV, plain text and images, runs OCR automatically over the first three pages of a scanned PDF, and offers a Docs Only mode restricting answers to your uploaded documents with a citation on every factual sentence. Two automated checks run before the answer reaches you: it is blocked if more than 40 percent of its factual sentences carry no citation, and blocked again if the key names and figures it cites cannot be found in your documents. Fast, Planning and Ultra modes trade speed for depth, with Ultra on Elite running a multi-pass analysis under Analysis Plan, Deep Research, Verification and Conclusion headings. Limits worth knowing: OCR is English only, PowerPoint and legacy .doc and .xls files are not read at all, and one message can draw on at most ten documents.
E-signatures includedA signature you can still evidence three years later
The question to ask about any e-signature feature is what you can produce when somebody disputes a signature long after the fact.
Accupe hashes the original and the signed PDF with SHA-256 at the moment of signing and stores both on the record. The Certificate of Completion is timestamped through a third-party RFC 3161 time-stamp authority, FreeTSA, and the certificate itself discloses whether the time came from that authority or from Accupe's own clock as a fallback. Every request keeps a per-recipient audit trail of invited, viewed, signed or declined, with timestamps and IP addresses, and there is a publicly reachable integrity record in JSON that anyone can check against the document hash. This is a standard or advanced electronic signature under UK eIDAS, appropriate for engagement letters and everyday agreements, and it is not a qualified electronic signature.
14-day free trial, no cardTime to value, measured properly
Implementation length is a cost even when the licence is not. Every week between signature and useful output is partner and manager time that never appears on an invoice.
Accupe is self-serve: sign up, complete a seven-step onboarding wizard that most firms finish in under two minutes, and add your first client by searching Companies House at step five. The trial is 14 days with no card. The sensible way to use it is not to explore the menus but to run one real engagement end to end: import a handful of clients, build the workflow template for your most repeated job, send one engagement letter for signature, and issue portal access to a client who will tell you the truth about it.
Time trackingBoth yes, so ask what the time is actually for
Almost every practice product records time. The differentiator is what it produces afterwards, and whether a partner ever looks at it.
Accupe runs a shared timer session, so you can start a timer from the jobs list and stop it from another screen, plus a weekly grid for logging and submitting timesheets. What that feeds is the Profitability report, which computes margin per engagement as the fee minus logged hours multiplied by internal staff cost. That is deliberately the partner question, which is whether an engagement is worth doing, rather than a gross fee ranking that flatters your worst client. It is restricted to admins and managers by default.
