Twinfield

What it does

Twinfield is a cloud accounting and bookkeeping platform. It holds your financial records online, so you and the people who help you with your numbers work from the same books. It covers record-keeping, financial reporting and the compliance side of accounting. The vendor publishes web services documentation and a developer portal, so other software can connect to it.

The product page sits on Wolters Kluwer's Dutch site, which tells me it is built with a Dutch-speaking market in mind. Check the current feature list with the vendor before you decide.

Why you would need it

You feel the need when bookkeeping stops being a once-a-quarter chore. Invoices live in email, bank lines in a spreadsheet, and your accountant asks for the same exports every month. Questions such as what you earned last month, or how much VAT you owe, take a day to answer.

An online ledger makes the books current. Whoever needs to see the numbers, you, your finance lead or your accountant, looks at the same data at the same time. That is the main point of a cloud package.

Where it fits

Twinfield sits at the centre of the finance stack. Sales invoices, expenses and bank data flow in. Reports, tax filings and management numbers flow out. A payment tool such as Stripe or a bank feeds it, and a dashboard tool reads from it.

It replaces desktop bookkeeping and spreadsheets. If you are comparing it with Exact Online or Moneybird, you are choosing between accounting packages, not adding a new layer.

What stands out

• It is a cloud product, so access does not depend on one computer or one person.
• It targets small and mid-sized businesses as well as finance professionals, which suits a business that shares its books with an outside accountant.
• A documented web services API and a developer portal allow other tools to read and write to it.
• It is part of Wolters Kluwer, so the vendor behind it is an established company.

My take

For accounting software, I care about three things: does my accountant work in it, can I get data in and out, and can I trust the numbers at month end. Twinfield has an API, which handles the second. The first and third you have to check for yourself.

Do not pick accounting software for its feature list. Pick it for the people around it. If your accountant already runs Twinfield, that is usually a stronger reason than any comparison table.

Verdict

Pick Twinfield if your accountant or finance team already works in it, or you want a cloud ledger with an API from an established vendor. Skip it if you want a tool you can try and judge on public pricing this week, since you will need to ask for plans and prices.