Accounting Software (Part 2)

MichaelCee

Part 1 - https://lowendspirit.com/discussion/2698/accounting-software/ (Didn't want to gravedig)

What accounting software do you use? Particularly if you're in the UK.

I have been using Ember.co for a while, it's incredibly simple and everything added up on a monthly basis until recently something happened to my account and a bunch of data is no longer available. I am awaiting a response from them before I know what's going on but it's quite a stress and I am looking to move to other alternatives, especially if they're more established.

I am now making the rounds trying out free trials and freemium software to move over to.

I have tried the Xero free trial, it's really great because I can automatically import basically everything but definitely expensive (anything about £0 is expensive to me, for perspective).

I am now trying Zoho Books which is going well and I've managed to import about 80% of my income and 65% of my expenses. Things are adding up and making sense, and I'm able to import my documents and store a copy with them too.

My use case is: Hosting industry income (PayPal, Stripe & Bank) and eBay Income (eBay Managed Payments > Bank) and all expenses coming from the bank directly or through PayPal.

Any other suggestions?

chris

If data loss is a concern, I'd avoid zoho! They've had a few incidents!

Can't help with actual advice outside of paid options though lol

MichaelCee

@chris said:
If data loss is a concern, I'd avoid zoho! They've had a few incidents!

Can't help with actual advice outside of paid options though lol

I'm open to paid options, but I'll likely only buy it if really hits the spot and is leagues above what I can get for free.

With Zoho, I notice I can download a backup of all docs and transactions twice per month. There's a few more steps involved with Ember, and the document system isn't integrated so I'm looking to move!

chris

Quickbooks! It's just spot on

Very pricey with your budget though Mike!

Ympker

I used to use Accountable (paid; https://www.accountable.de/en/ ). Since a few years I am with https://papierkram.de and very happy. Unfortunately, it probably only works for germans, but it has all a freelancer could need.
You can link your business bank account/paypal and assign open invoices to certain transaction. If transaction includes some sort of reference code including the invoice number it usually even can automatically link them. Same goes for assigning expenses. Really straight forward. When creating invoices, I can create certain projects and bill them differently. Within each projects I can add tasks which again can be billed differently. For tax report, with one click, it tells me what to write in each line of the tax report. If I need an accountant's opinion I usually use smth like yourexpert.de where they are available via live chat/phone and they charge like 2€/min, so I can keep costs down. If needed, I can invite them via a link so they can access my accounting saas to answer my questions e.g. . Very happy Price is 8€/mo

webcraft

Did you consider InvoiceNinja? Was using it a couple years ago (self hosted) and it did everything required. If you plan to manage multiple brands with multiple employees, maybe consider SAP, they're having a startup tier.

MichaelCee

Will take a look at InvoiceNinja. The project and time tracking is interesting to me with that.

I’ve spoke to my current provider, found a couple of issues like personal transactions seeping in to the business section and not being movable and some transactions are coming up as positive amounts, some negative when they should all be positive so the summary figures are wrong. My Dec 22 figures were showing £9 below the income I exported from the same system, then £7 below once I discounted the personal transaction. When I added all the numbers in the system, they came out £2 higher than the value in the system. Weird stuff.

They said they’d pass the info on to dev so hopefully that stuff starts getting fixed regardless of if it changes my mind.

Currently really enjoying Xero, and might subscribe to it as long as all the features I’m using right now in trial are in the cheapest plan.

Ympker

@MichaelCee said:
Will take a look at InvoiceNinja. The project and time tracking is interesting to me with that.

I’ve spoke to my current provider, found a couple of issues like personal transactions seeping in to the business section and not being movable and some transactions are coming up as positive amounts, some negative when they should all be positive so the summary figures are wrong. My Dec 22 figures were showing £9 below the income I exported from the same system, then £7 below once I discounted the personal transaction. When I added all the numbers in the system, they came out £2 higher than the value in the system. Weird stuff.

They said they’d pass the info on to dev so hopefully that stuff starts getting fixed regardless of if it changes my mind.

Currently really enjoying Xero, and might subscribe to it as long as all the features I’m using right now in trial are in the cheapest plan.

You won't regret going for a paid tax/acounting solution. Free tools always had a drawback for me, or free plans (of paid software) were too limited :S

Anyway, regarding tax you can use https://www.justanswer.co.uk/ to simply ask some questions. Not free, but pretty straight forward (similar to german yourexpert.de) .

MichaelCee

@Ympker said:

@MichaelCee said:
Will take a look at InvoiceNinja. The project and time tracking is interesting to me with that.

I’ve spoke to my current provider, found a couple of issues like personal transactions seeping in to the business section and not being movable and some transactions are coming up as positive amounts, some negative when they should all be positive so the summary figures are wrong. My Dec 22 figures were showing £9 below the income I exported from the same system, then £7 below once I discounted the personal transaction. When I added all the numbers in the system, they came out £2 higher than the value in the system. Weird stuff.

They said they’d pass the info on to dev so hopefully that stuff starts getting fixed regardless of if it changes my mind.

Currently really enjoying Xero, and might subscribe to it as long as all the features I’m using right now in trial are in the cheapest plan.

You won't regret going for a paid tax/acounting solution. Free tools always had a drawback for me, or free plans (of paid software) were too limited :S

Anyway, regarding tax you can use https://www.justanswer.co.uk/ to simply ask some questions. Not free, but pretty straight forward (similar to german yourexpert.de) .

3 days for 5EUR? Going to need to write a huge doc of questions 😁 Thank you!

flips

Maybe https://www.bokio.co.uk/ ?

(In Norway the last usable free version I knew of, Centiga, disappeared. I'm now using Tripletex. It works really well, not very expensive.)

Ympker

@MichaelCee said:

@Ympker said:

@MichaelCee said:
Will take a look at InvoiceNinja. The project and time tracking is interesting to me with that.

I’ve spoke to my current provider, found a couple of issues like personal transactions seeping in to the business section and not being movable and some transactions are coming up as positive amounts, some negative when they should all be positive so the summary figures are wrong. My Dec 22 figures were showing £9 below the income I exported from the same system, then £7 below once I discounted the personal transaction. When I added all the numbers in the system, they came out £2 higher than the value in the system. Weird stuff.

They said they’d pass the info on to dev so hopefully that stuff starts getting fixed regardless of if it changes my mind.

Currently really enjoying Xero, and might subscribe to it as long as all the features I’m using right now in trial are in the cheapest plan.

You won't regret going for a paid tax/acounting solution. Free tools always had a drawback for me, or free plans (of paid software) were too limited :S

Anyway, regarding tax you can use https://www.justanswer.co.uk/ to simply ask some questions. Not free, but pretty straight forward (similar to german yourexpert.de) .

3 days for 5EUR? Going to need to write a huge doc of questions 😁 Thank you!

I used the german equivalent years ago ( justanswer.de) before switching to yourexpert.de and it was quite fine. There just was some fine print on cancelling the 3-5 day trial in time, so make sure to not miss any deadline haha. I prefer german's yourexpert.de as it really seems to focus on Germany (Justanswer doesn't that much) and yourexpert bills me by the minute, which might sound a rip-off at first, but for 2 years I have paid 90€/year for a hotline flatrate for legal advice (unlimited calls/mo) and I noted down the minutes in a spreadsheet. Granted, I didn't have any bigger issues but I never really talked longer than say 20-30 minutes with a lawyer per year. Yourexpert charges start around 2€/min where 30x2 (60€) would still be far below the 90€/y I paid. Also, yourexpert supports livechat (also about 2€/min) so I usually opt for that to have the legal advice in written form (you receive a transcript from the chat).
Just posted about JustAnswer because I thought, maybe you can prepare and sort some questions for cheap

gbshouse

We use Kashflow internally for our UK branch. It has all the required functionality plus pretty decent API

MichaelCee

Spent a few hours adding up all of the transactions I processed in my original software for 2021-22 and submitted to HMRC, I am quite relieved that all of the numbers matched my spreadsheet and tax submission, although they are not displaying correctly in the overview.

So at least this issue didn't affect my tax return.

Wolveix

Like you @MichaelCee, I've been dealing with my taxes to submit to HMRC for the last week or two. I finally hired an accountant since it was relatively cheap, and it saves me a lot of stress and hassle. I'll be doing my 2022 - 2023 taxes in April this year, rather than waiting until January 😆

Regarding accounting software, I've tried a few over the last 8 years. I was initially using and.co before they introduced paid options and then rolled into Fiverr.

Then I switched to FreeAgent as I got it for free through my business account with NatWest at the time — FreeAgent is really good. I found it a little too restrictive for how my bookkeeping ends up; you can't modify old invoices etc. I understand why, but it was frustrating when I was a minor freelancer at the time.

I've been using InvoiceNinja for the past 4 years or so. I really like it, but the jump to v5 now has me looking into other options. I have various currencies for inbound and outbound payments, whuch InvoiceNinja is fine with. But specifically in v5, when generating your end of tax year profit/loss report, you cannot obtain the converted amounts. I ended up having to generate an inbound payments report with the conversion rate included (since it can be included on that report), and then exporting my full expenses from the backend and doing a few calculations in Excel to get the real converted amounts. It's baffling to me that such an important feature was omitted from the upgrade to v5.

As such, I am now seeking an alternate solution once again. I suspect I'll end up staying with InvoiceNinja as other than this, they're great.

MichaelCee

@Wolveix said: Then I switched to FreeAgent as I got it for free through my business account with NatWest at the time — FreeAgent is really good. I found it a little too restrictive for how my bookkeeping ends up; you can't modify old invoices etc. I understand why, but it was frustrating when I was a minor freelancer at the time.

I also used FreeAgent for a while when I had a Mettle account but they haven't accepted me this time around

If it was less than a tenner a month I'd buy it but you're talking £350 a year before VAT. With Xero I'm looking at less than £200.

@Wolveix said: I've been using InvoiceNinja for the past 4 years or so. I really like it, but the jump to v5 now has me looking into other options. I have various currencies for inbound and outbound payments, whuch InvoiceNinja is fine with. But specifically in v5, when generating your end of tax year profit/loss report, you cannot obtain the converted amounts. I ended up having to generate an inbound payments report with the conversion rate included (since it can be included on that report), and then exporting my full expenses from the backend and doing a few calculations in Excel to get the real converted amounts. It's baffling to me that such an important feature was omitted from the upgrade to v5.

That sounds like quite a bit of stress and working things out. My only multi-currency payments are payments to MXroute and Hetzner done through PayPal, but I would like to expand and start holding those currencies and accepting them from customers too.

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I have a few hundred £ of income/expenses to add still but I am mostly fully reconciled on Xero with 28 trial days left. It's kinda unfortunate that I went through purging accounts as I now can't add automatic feeds for those accounts and have to manually deal with statements, but everything looks like it will run smooth for the next tax year. There are extensive reports available which is good.

MichaelCee

@MichaelCee said: I have a few hundred £ of income/expenses to add still but I am mostly fully reconciled on Xero with 28 trial days left. It's kinda unfortunate that I went through purging accounts as I now can't add automatic feeds for those accounts and have to manually deal with statements, but everything looks like it will run smooth for the next tax year. There are extensive reports available which is good.

I am 100% fully caught up for the current tax year, with 24 days of trial left. If nothing goes wrong in those 24 days, I'll likely stick with Xero. Thanks everyone for the contributions.