Office Professional Plus 2024 for Accountants and Finance Teams

The short answer

Two perpetual licences are worth a UK finance team’s attention, and they answer different questions.

For most UK practices the answer is Professional Plus: it is the cheaper of the two, and it is the only one with Access. Home & Business is the answer if your practice works on Macs, or if you need the standard retail build of Office rather than the volume edition — a distinction that matters more than it sounds, and one we come to below. If three people edit the same month-end workbook at the same time, neither is right for you, and we say so plainly further down.

Why the version of Excel on your desks became a compliance question

Accountancy has always run on Excel. What changed this year is what Excel is now attached to.

What changed in April

Making Tax Digital for Income Tax became mandatory on 6 April 2026 for anyone whose qualifying income from self-employment and property was over £50,000 in the 2024 to 2025 tax year. On 7 August, more than 864,000 sole traders and landlords were due to file their first quarterly update. Two further waves follow: the £30,000 threshold from 6 April 2027, and £20,000 from 6 April 2028. Partnerships are expected after that.

For a practice, that is not one deadline. It is a client base that gets larger every April, each client needing records kept digitally and submitted four times a year instead of once.

HMRC accepts spreadsheets

That is the fact that makes a perpetual Office licence a legitimate answer to a compliance problem rather than a way of dodging one. Your working papers can stay where they are. What has to be right is the software underneath them.

Which makes an unsupported Excel a problem

Office 2016 and Office 2019 both stopped receiving security updates on 14 October 2025. The apps still open, the licences are still yours, and nothing was switched off — we have set out what end of support actually means in detail. But there is a difference between running unpatched software to write letters and running it to prepare a client’s quarterly submission to HMRC. The threat that matters to a practice is not exotic: it is an ordinary attachment from an ordinary client, carrying an exploit for a flaw Microsoft fixed everywhere else months ago.

If your practice holds Cyber Essentials, is completing a client security questionnaire, or has a professional indemnity insurer who asks about unsupported software, the question stops being about risk appetite and starts being about answers you have already given in writing.

What a finance team actually gets

Excel, two releases further on than most practices

A practice moving from Office 2016 or 2019 collects two releases of Excel at once, because it skipped 2021 entirely. Named features are less useful than the jobs they do, so here is what changes on a Monday morning.

XLOOKUP, added in 2021, replaces the nested VLOOKUP and INDEX/MATCH constructions that make an inherited nominal ledger mapping so painful to audit. Dynamic arrays — FILTER, SORT, UNIQUE and SEQUENCE — produce a cost-centre summary that updates itself, without a pivot table to refresh and without the range creeping out of date. LET lets you name the intermediate steps in a long calculation, which is the difference between a formula a colleague can review and one they have to rebuild.

Office 2024 adds fourteen new text and array functions. In practice these are bank statement functions: TEXTSPLIT and TEXTBEFORE break a CSV export that arrived as one crowded column into something you can reconcile against, and VSTACK stacks twelve monthly sheets into a single year without a copy-and-paste chain that nobody will be able to check in March. Charts now update themselves when the dynamic array behind them changes.

The improvement most likely to be felt daily is the least glamorous: Microsoft lists faster workbooks, with better speed and stability when several are open at once. Reconciliation work means five workbooks open at once, and Excel 2016 shows its age at exactly that moment.

Access, for the records a spreadsheet has outgrown

Access is the reason most practices end up on Professional Plus. It is where a client register with a decade of history lives, where a fixed asset register keeps its relationships intact, and where time and billing records survive being edited by four people over five years without turning into a spreadsheet with 90,000 rows and three conflicting copies on the server.

It is Windows only, and it is not sold on its own — we have covered why Access has no standalone licence, and separately whether it has a future, which is the question every practice asks before building anything on it. Buying Professional Plus is the cheapest route to a licensed copy.

Outlook, and the rest

Both editions include the full desktop Outlook rather than a web client, which matters to a practice that keeps local archives for retention purposes and needs them searchable years later. Word, PowerPoint and OneNote are present in both. Neither edition includes Publisher — Microsoft removed it from the 2024 line-up ahead of its retirement in October 2026.

Professional Plus or Home & Business?

The two are not simply a bigger and smaller version of the same thing. Professional Plus 2024 is the volume-licensed build, which Microsoft also calls Office LTSC 2024. Home & Business 2024 is the retail build. They contain the same Excel, but they are packaged, installed and maintained differently, and for a finance team the differences land in specific places.

If your practice is entirely on Windows, Professional Plus is the straightforward choice and there is no case for paying more for less. If you have partners on Macs, Home & Business is the only 2024 licence that covers them. For the edition comparison outside a finance context, see our full breakdown of Home & Business against Professional Plus.

What Professional Plus deliberately leaves out

This is the part most resellers do not write, and it is the part a finance team should read twice. Because Professional Plus is the LTSC build, Microsoft has removed things from it. Three are worth knowing before you buy, and one is not the problem it looks like.

Publish to Power BI is gone from Excel

Microsoft states plainly that “the Publish to Power BI feature is removed from Excel” in Office LTSC 2024. That is the one-click route from a workbook into a Power BI workspace.

It is a changed route rather than a closed one. Microsoft’s own guidance is to work through the Power BI service instead: workbooks can be imported from OneDrive or SharePoint document libraries, existing local workbooks can still be downloaded from Power BI workspaces, and Excel data models can still be published as Power BI semantic models with scheduled refresh. If a monthly management pack currently leaves Excel through that button, someone needs to change how it gets there. If nobody in the practice uses Power BI, this costs you nothing.

ActiveX controls are switched off by default

Neither perpetual edition does real-time co-authoring

Microsoft is explicit that the one-time-purchase versions of Office contain only a subset of what Microsoft 365 Apps offers, and the missing part is the collaboration layer. If your month-end model is genuinely edited by three people simultaneously in a shared workbook, buy Microsoft 365 instead. That is a real difference in how the software works, not a marketing distinction, and no amount of saving makes a perpetual licence the right answer to it.

And the one that is a feature

Professional Plus receives no new features for five years. For most software that is a complaint. For a practice whose quarterly submission process is documented, staff-trained and repeated four times a year across a client base, a build that does not move underneath you mid-quarter is the point. The security updates keep coming until 9 October 2029; the ribbon does not rearrange itself in January.

What it costs across a practice

Microsoft’s own one-time price for Office Home & Business 2024 in the UK is £249.99 for a single PC or Mac, and that edition has no Access. That figure is worth holding in mind while reading the rest of this section.

The subscription comparison is the one most practices are actually weighing. Microsoft 365 Business Standard is £10.80 per user per month on an annual commitment, excluding VAT — £129.60 per person per year, recurring, for as long as the practice exists. For a three-person practice, that is the difference between a purchase and a standing cost.

The honest counterweight: the subscription is not simply a more expensive version of the same thing. It buys hosted Exchange mailboxes, a terabyte of OneDrive per user, Teams, the collaboration features described above, and apps that keep updating. A practice that needs hosted email is not saving money by buying a perpetual licence — it is buying a different product and will have to solve email separately. We have set out the full case for buying outright, and it is not a case that fits everybody.

If a sole practitioner needs nothing beyond the spreadsheet itself, Excel 2024 can be bought on its own — though the gap to the full suite is usually small enough that it is worth checking both prices before deciding.

Rolling it out across the practice

One licence covers one machine, so a five-desk practice buys five keys rather than one key used five times. Worth knowing before you reach the basket rather than after.

Professional Plus installs differently from the retail editions. It comes down through the Office Deployment Tool rather than setup.office.com, which is why the activation steps differ from the ones a colleague may remember from a home purchase — we have written the full ODT walkthrough for exactly this. It is not difficult, but it is not the same, and doing the first machine carefully is quicker than doing five badly.

Remove the old version before installing rather than running both side by side. Mixed Office versions on one machine can produce file association arguments and Outlook profile problems, and a working practice is not the place to discover which.

One version not to buy

October 2026 is a crowded month for Microsoft deadlines generally. If your practice also has Windows 10 machines or a Project or Visio estate, our round-up of every October 2026 retirement is the shorter way to check.

Frequently asked questions

Where this leaves a practice

If your desks are running Office 2016 or 2019 and your clients are now filing quarterly, the software underneath that work has been unsupported for nearly a year. Professional Plus 2024 fixes that for a one-time cost per desk, includes the Access licence most practices need anyway, and stays still until October 2029 — which, for a process you have to repeat four times a year for every client, is worth more than a feature list.