Skip the installer. Skip the registration form. One click puts you inside a live accounting system with a sample business already set up and waiting — roughly five seconds from here to your first report.
Runs on Mac, Windows, iPad, Android and Chromebook. Nothing lands on your device.
Shopping for accounting software tends to involve a gauntlet: surrender an email, sit through a scheduled call, then install something you still have not laid eyes on. For a purchase you have not made yet, that is backwards.
Our answer was to publish the product itself. What loads is the genuine application carrying a worked-up sample business — a filled chart of accounts, real customer and supplier records, posted history, and reporting that recalculates as you go. No slideshow, no guided walkthrough on rails. The actual thing.
A fresh tab opens with the demo inside it
The sample business loads on its own — no credentials to invent
Enter transactions, rework invoices, pull statements. None of it is yours
Move to the 30-day trial whenever it suits you
Nothing has been hollowed out for the demo. Once you are in, you can work through:
Raise an invoice against a sample client, drop in line items and tax treatment, then preview exactly how it reaches them.
Profit & Loss, Balance Sheet, Trial Balance and aged debtor or creditor listings, each computed from the demo ledger on request.
Key a journal and watch the account balances respond. The debit-and-credit checks are identical to the live product's.
Step into reconciliation on the sample bank feed to see how items are matched off and cleared.
Hop between sample businesses to understand how separate sets of books coexist inside one licence.
Account structure, permission levels, tax configuration and invoice styling are all reachable and editable.
Treat the demo as a showroom, not a filing cabinet. It sits on shared rehearsal data that gets wiped on a schedule, so whatever you type in is short-lived and genuine business details do not belong in it. The moment you want to keep real books, move to the installed 30-day trial — separate database, your hardware, your records, nobody else in the room.
This is the trade-off buyers expect to make, and it is worth correcting. Picking installed software usually implies one machine, one chair, one location. Kantivo is not built that way.
The program publishes its own interface across your network — the identical mechanism this demo is riding on. With it installed on your primary computer, every other screen in your life connects through an ordinary browser. No companion app to download, no charge per extra device, no second subscription stacked on top.
Any phone, tablet or laptop sharing your WiFi reaches it by local address, with nothing to configure.
Layer on the free Tailscale client and your installation answers from a job site, an airport or your bookkeeper's desk over an encrypted private link.
Save it to your device's home screen and it launches in a clean standalone window, indistinguishable from a downloaded app.
Each of those routes terminates at your own computer. Your accounts are never parked on a supplier's hardware.
Put plainly: the reach people sign up to cloud packages for, minus the arrangement where a vendor holds your books and sets the price of getting at them. More on remote and mobile access → | Hosted vs self-hosted, weighed honestly →
| Kantivo Live Demo | Standard Cloud Trial | |
|---|---|---|
| Details demanded before entry | ✓ None | ✗ Email at minimum |
| Card on file to begin | ✓ Not asked for | ✗ Frequently required |
| State of the file on arrival | ✓ Populated and ready | ✗ Empty, setup wizard first |
| Conversation with sales required | ✓ No | ✗ Standard on upper plans |
| Custody of your books afterwards | ✓ Held on your machine | ✗ Held on theirs |
| Shape of the bill | ✓ One yearly licence | ✗ Per user, per month, climbing |
Nothing at all. It is a web page. Shut the tab whenever you like and no trace remains on your device.
No username, no email, no password. The link drops you directly into a sample business, and we have no idea who you are unless you reach out to us yourself.
They share one codebase, so the screens, ledgers and reports carry over unchanged. Where the demo differs: it runs on rehearsal data, it clears itself on a schedule, and a small number of functions that would fire real email or move real money are switched off.
Better not to. The dataset is shared and periodically reset, so your entries will vanish and should not be considered confidential. For genuine numbers, take the 30-day trial — it installs locally with a private database of your own.
It will. Any current browser on any platform can run the demo, ChromeOS, iPadOS and Android included.
No. Kantivo is licensed annually as a single figure. Nothing is billed per user per month, and getting to your books from a tablet or phone carries no extra cost.
With the installed edition, the host machine has to be awake for other devices to reach it, as with any server. Most businesses simply leave it running through the working day. The online demo carries no such condition and is up regardless.
No form to fill, nobody phoning you — just the software, running.