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Accupe vs Karbon

Karbon is a strong, email-driven practice management platform widely adopted in North America and the UK. Its workflow templates and Triage inbox are excellent, but per-user pricing scales painfully, and identity verification, e-signatures, and Companies House remain bolt-ons. Accupe consolidates those into one platform at a per-firm price.

Feature comparison.

A direct, like-for-like look at what each platform ships out of the box.

FeatureAccupeKarbon
Practice management Yes Yes
Identity verification built-in Yes No
E-signatures included Yes No
Client portal Yes Yes
AI document analysis Yes Limited
Companies House integration Yes No
MTD VAT job tracking Yes Limited
UAE compliance Yes No
Per-firm pricing (not per-user) Yes No
Starting price£20/mo (whole firm)~£59/user/mo
Custom domain white-label Yes Limited
Smart Boards (kanban governance) Yes Limited
Time tracking Yes Yes
Xero + Zoho Books integration Yes Yes
14-day free trial, no card Yes No

Why firms switch to Accupe.

Four reasons we hear most often from firms moving off Karbon.

Per-firm pricing

A 5-person team on Karbon costs ~£295/month. The same firm on Accupe Growth is £55/month, flat.

Built-in compliance

Karbon has no native identity capture. Accupe includes identity and document verification records with re-check reminders.

Native e-signatures

Accupe ships e-signatures with SHA-256 hashing, OTP, and Certificate of Completion at no extra cost.

Companies House API

Accupe pulls live company data and tracks UK filing deadlines automatically. Karbon does not.

Who each option actually suits.

Both of these are credible platforms, and they are aimed at different problems. Karbon organises the conversation around the work. Accupe organises the evidence around the client. Here is how to tell which one your firm actually needs.

Karbon is the better fit when

  • Email is genuinely where your work lives and always will be, because your clients will not move and your team would rather work an inbox than a board.
  • You want deep, reusable workflow templates and a shared triage queue more than you want compliance records, and the compliance side already has a home you trust.
  • Your firm is large enough that a per-seat licence is a rounding error next to salary, and a predictable per-head cost is easier to defend to a board than a tiered plan.
  • You operate in North America or across several regions, and UK register data and UAE compliance are not part of the requirement at all.

Accupe is the better fit when

  • Adding the sixth, tenth or fifteenth person should not change the software bill. Elite is £185 a month for unlimited seats.
  • You want client conversation to sit against the client record and stay there when the person who owned it leaves, rather than living in a mailbox.
  • You need Companies House data and UK filing deadlines pulled automatically, or you run UAE entities with TRNs and free zone licences.
  • You want to try it properly first: 14 days, real clients, no card.

If your firm runs a genuinely high-volume, low-touch bookkeeping model where the only thing that matters is throughput per staff hour, neither platform is where your leverage sits. Look at your ledger automation and your client data collection first, because practice management can only coordinate work that already exists.

What those rows mean in practice.

The table gives you the verdict. This is the reasoning, row by row, and why each one shows up in how a practice behaves rather than in how it demos.

Per-firm pricing (not per-user)What a per-seat licence does to hiring decisions

Karbon is priced per user, from around £59 a month, so a five-person team sits near £295 a month. Accupe Growth is £55 a month for the whole firm at up to five people, and Elite is £185 with no seat limit at all.

The interesting effect is not the total, it is what per-seat pricing does to decisions that should have nothing to do with software. Firms with per-seat licences hesitate before giving a login to an offshore bookkeeper, a January temp, an apprentice or the office manager who books everything in. The workaround is always the same: shared credentials, or work recorded under somebody else's name. Both destroy the one thing practice management exists to give you, a reliable record of who did what and when. If your licence model makes generosity expensive, you will not be generous, and your data will be worse for it.

Client portalEmail triage versus a client record

Karbon's Triage inbox is genuinely good: it pulls client email into the work, which is exactly right if email is where your firm lives. Accupe takes the other route and centralises client conversation in the portal instead.

Neither is objectively correct, but they fail differently. An email-centred system fails when a person leaves and a two-year thread goes with them, or when a client sends the year-end pack to one partner's personal address. A portal-centred system fails when a client refuses to log in. Accupe's answer to that second failure is to make signing in almost frictionless (a Client Code such as CLI-465 and a four to ten digit PIN, with no email and no password) and to provide the Secure Deposit Box at your portal address followed by /documentupload for people who will not log in at all: they type a client code, drop files up to 25MB each, and that is the whole interaction. Accupe also has a Triage screen for turning inbound email into jobs, so this is a difference of centre of gravity rather than an absolute.

Identity verification built-inOnboarding a client versus verifying one

Karbon has no native identity capture, so a firm doing customer due diligence alongside it is running the check in another product and recording the outcome by hand.

Accupe includes KYC Smart Capture. You send a link by email or show a QR code, the client scans an ID document and takes a live selfie on their own phone with nothing to install, EXIF and GPS metadata are stripped before the image is stored, and the submission is scored on document metadata, passport MRZ checksum and image quality. Face matching is disabled server-side rather than approximated, which caps the trust score at 70 and means a person always makes the final call from the review queue. Approving one writes the client's compliance status to green everywhere else in the app.

To be explicit, because it is the next question every partner asks: Accupe does not screen against sanctions, PEP or watchlist data and does not do adverse media. Run that with a specialist provider, then file the output against the named director on the client's KYC tab with a re-check date, and Accupe will chase it for you.

Companies House integrationWhy a UK firm keeps coming back to this row

Karbon does not integrate with Companies House. For a firm outside the UK that is irrelevant. For a UK general practice it is most of the administrative load.

Accupe pulls the register directly. Add a company as a client and it arrives with its registered office, incorporation date, SIC codes and officer list, plus two tasks created on the spot: Accounts on the Accounts Next Due date at High priority, and Confirmation Statement on its own date at Medium. Sync All CH refreshes the whole client base in one action, and a daily check writes any change (an officer appointed or resigned, an address change, a SIC code change) into a Companies House activity feed on your dashboard. Changes affecting a director or a person with significant control raise a Refresh CDD task automatically, which is the ongoing monitoring an inspection actually asks to see.

Smart Boards (kanban governance)Who is allowed to see the whole board

A kanban view is easy to build and hard to get right, because the governance question is not whether you can drag a card, it is who is allowed to see the column.

On the Accupe Smart Board, managers and admins see every job in the firm; staff see only the jobs assigned to them, on every tab. Cards sort overdue first and then by soonest due date, and any job untouched for 14 days or more carries an amber flag, which is the most useful signal on the board because stalled work rarely announces itself. Moving a card fires whatever automation rules you have wired to a job status change, so a move into In Review can raise a task or send an email without anyone remembering to. The board is fully keyboard driven too: focus a card, press space to pick it up, arrow keys to move it, enter to drop.

UAE complianceOne workspace, two jurisdictions

Karbon does not cover UAE compliance. If you have no Gulf exposure, skip this row entirely; it is not a reason to move.

If you do, the practical difference is smaller than it sounds and shows up daily. Accupe holds a region on the firm record, and that region drives the currency on job fees and invoices (GBP or AED), the licence category, emirate, TRN and free zone authority fields on a client record, the compliance templates, the region tag on workflow templates, and the deadline calendar's working week and public holiday list. It also decides the regulator on a suspicious activity pack: goAML and an STR in the UAE, the NCA and a SAR in the UK. Two caveats stated plainly: Accupe assembles the evidence pack but your MLRO files it themselves through their own credentials, and the UAE public holiday list is currently loaded for 2026 with the Hijri-based dates marked approximate.

14-day free trial, no cardHow much you learn before you commit

A trial you can start yourself, on your own clients, is worth more than a demo, because what you are actually buying is how the product behaves on your messiest engagement rather than on a tidy sample.

Accupe gives 14 days with no card required, and the trial carries Solo-equivalent features, so you can load real clients, create real jobs and send a real signature request. Use it as a rehearsal rather than a tour: import 20 clients, build the one workflow template that covers your most repeated job, send one engagement letter for signature end to end, and issue portal access to two friendly clients who will tell you the truth. If those four things feel right, the rest will.

Pricing, side by side.

We charge per firm, not per user. That is where most of the savings come from.

Accupe

Per-firm pricing

One flat price, add as many team members as you need.

Solo
Sole practitioners
£20/mo
Growth
Up to 5 team members
£55/mo
Elite
Unlimited team, white-label and SSO
£185/mo

14-day free trial. No credit card required.

Karbon

Typical pricing

Most competitors bill per user, costs grow with your team.

Starting price
~£59/user/mo
5-user team cost (approx)
Scales linearly with users
Add-ons typically required
E-signatures, verification tools and AI integrations are usually separate subscriptions.

What switching actually involves.

A move between two competent platforms is mostly a data exercise and a habit exercise. The data part is short. The habit part is the one firms underestimate.

What comes across

  1. Clients and contacts

    CSV import, or a contact pull from Xero or Zoho Books if your ledger holds the cleaner list, which it usually does. Matching runs on exact email, then exact business name, then a looser partial name match, and partial matches are written to your compliance audit log for review rather than applied silently.

  2. Tasks and open work

    CSV import for the open items, then rebuild the repeating structures as workflow templates. A template holds an ordered task list with a day offset and a priority per task, tagged by region and industry, and applying it creates one job and all of its tasks in a single step with a calculated due date on each.

  3. UK statutory data

    Re-fetch rather than migrate. Attach each limited company through Add from CH and the deadlines, officers and SIC codes arrive from the register itself, which is more reliable than an export of an export.

  4. Invoices

    Either the .xlsx import template, or a Pull invoices run from a connected Xero or Zoho Books organisation. Statuses are normalised into Accupe's five values on the way in rather than kept verbatim, so check the mapping on a sample before you commit the batch.

What does not come across cleanly

  1. Email history

    This is the honest sticking point when you move off an email-centred platform. Threads that live in a shared triage queue do not transplant into a portal, because they are not the same object. Plan to leave the archive where it is for its retention period, start new client conversation in the Accupe portal from a fixed date, and tell clients that date. A half-migrated inbox is worse than either whole.

  2. Portal credentials

    Nothing carries over. Each client needs a Client Code and a PIN issued from their record, and sends are rate limited to 30 an hour per user, so a 300-client practice is a couple of scheduled sessions rather than a single click.

  3. Automation rules

    Rules do not port between vendors. Rebuild them, and take the opportunity to drop the ones nobody can explain. Accupe's triggers cover job status changes, an approaching deadline, KYC document expiry, a new client and a document upload, with actions that create a task, send an email or a notification, post to Slack, or start a workflow job.

  4. Team habits

    The genuine cost is not data, it is the fortnight where half the team still opens the old tool by reflex. Name one person per team to answer the question of where things go now, and remove access to the old system on a date you announce in advance rather than letting it linger for months.

When to do it

Time the cutover to your busiest obligation rather than to the calendar year. A UK practice carrying a lot of self assessment work should not touch this between mid-December and early February, because 31 January will win. A firm weighted to quarterly VAT should cut over on the first day of a new quarter, so the first recurring jobs Accupe creates cover a whole period. A firm with a lot of 31 March year-ends is better off moving before that date than in the nine months after it. Most firms have one genuinely quiet fortnight, usually in late spring or immediately after their heaviest filing peak, and that is the window to protect.

How to run a parallel period

Run one complete cycle in both, and be strict about which is authoritative: do the work in Accupe and mirror the status back, never the reverse. At the end of the cycle, reconcile three lists and nothing else. Open jobs should match in count and owner. Deadlines in the next 90 days should match in date, after allowing for Accupe's working-day shifting, which deliberately moves a Saturday deadline to the following Monday. Clients with an incomplete compliance record should match, and if Accupe finds more of them than the old system did, that is usually the system doing its job rather than an import error, so read the itemised issue list before assuming a fault.

Questions to ask any practice management vendor.

Ask these of every vendor you shortlist, ours included. They are written to be awkward to answer with a slide.

  1. Price this at our headcount in three years, including seasonal and offshore staff.

    Do the arithmetic in the meeting rather than after it. A per-seat model and a flat model cross over at a specific number of people, and you should know what that number is for your firm before you sign anything.

  2. A client emails a document to one person. Where does it end up, and can a colleague find it in two years?

    This single question separates products that coordinate work from products that merely store it. Ask them to show you the retrieval, not the capture.

  3. When someone leaves the firm, what happens to their client conversations, their tasks and their audit trail?

    Leaver handover is where most systems quietly lose information. The answer you want involves reassignment and retained history, not a mailbox export and a shrug.

  4. Which features are on the entry tier and which need the top tier?

    Get the tier boundary in writing for the specific features you are buying the product for. It is common for the compelling part of a demo to sit on the most expensive plan.

  5. Can a partner see every job in the firm while a junior sees only their own, without us building anything?

    Role-scoped views are the difference between a board partners trust and a board that becomes a second, uncontrolled to-do list nobody maintains.

  6. What compliance evidence can live in this system, and what has to live somewhere else?

    You want an explicit list, because the gap between the two is the tool you will still be paying for afterwards. Be equally direct with us: Accupe holds identity verification and AML evidence with re-check dates, and does not perform sanctions or PEP screening.

  7. Can we trial it on real client data, without a card, and for how long?

    A vendor confident in the product lets you try to break it yourself. If a trial requires a card or a sales call before you can type anything in, ask why that is.

Frequently asked questions.

How does Accupe pricing compare to Karbon?
Karbon is priced per user starting around £59/month. Accupe is priced per firm from £20/month (Solo) to £185/month (Elite), making it dramatically cheaper for teams of 2 or more.
Does Accupe match Karbon's email triage?
Accupe centralises client communication in the encrypted Client Portal rather than email. For firms that want to move away from email overload, this is a feature, not a gap.
Can I migrate from Karbon to Accupe?
Yes. Accupe imports your clients, contacts, and tasks via CSV. Most firms migrate within a week.
Does Accupe support automation like Karbon?
Yes. Accupe supports recurring jobs, automation rules, and AI-suggested next actions on every task.
Does moving to Accupe mean giving up email?
No, and no product could enforce that. Accupe has a Triage screen for turning inbound email into jobs, so email is still an entry point. The difference is where a conversation ends up: Accupe puts client messaging in the portal, attached to the client record, so it survives a leaver and does not depend on somebody forwarding a thread. Most firms that move this way keep email for the outside world and use the portal for anything they would ever need to produce again, which in practice means documents, approvals and anything with a deadline attached.
Does Accupe run sanctions or PEP screening?
No. Sanctions, PEP and watchlist screening are not part of Accupe, and neither is adverse media. Identity verification is: KYC Smart Capture takes an ID scan and a live selfie from the client's own phone and puts every submission in front of a human reviewer. For screening itself, use a specialist provider, then file the evidence in Accupe against the named director with a re-check date. Accupe tracks that date, badges the document as Valid to that date or Re-check overdue, and reflects the gap on Compliance Radar.
What do we actually lose by moving off a per-user platform?
Two honest things. First, per-seat products tend to invest heavily in the individual experience, so expect a period where personal views and shortcuts feel less tuned to you. Second, an email-centred workflow gives the team a single place to look in the morning, and a portal-centred one asks them to look at a board instead, which is a habit change rather than a feature. The trade is that seat cost stops driving staffing decisions and client evidence stops living in mailboxes. Firms that value the second more than the first are the ones this suits.

See the difference for yourself.

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What firms say about Accupe

5 out of 5 from Push Digits Chartered Accountants

Really simple to use and effective. We love the customisation options available, and we particularly value that the developer listens to our feature recommendations. We look forward to future updates.

Sarfraz ChandioManaging Director, Push Digits Chartered Accountants
Accupe · SaaS database