Comments on: FreeAgent Central aims at… free agents who hate book-keeping

By: Clear Books Accounting Software

Clear Books Accounting Software — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 09:23:05 +0000

Along with FreeAgent Central and KashFlow (mentioned in a comment above), is our online accounting software offering: http://www.clearbooks.co.uk.

Take a look and tell us what you think

By: Richard Evans

Richard Evans — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 22:54:45 +0000

We’re a small web design agency and we use http://www.bionicbooks.com. I haven’t tried many of the others but I’d highly recommend Bionic Books; it’s a proper accounting app but easy to use; does your books and everything, just from entering invoice info.

Rich

By: Sarah Hunter

Sarah Hunter — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 20:34:11 +0000

Manoj,

Take a look at the Kashflow product mentioned above. It will probably be ideal for your clients (unless they need intensive stock control). And it’s a lot cheaper than £75 a month!

If you are likely to have 5+ clients on it, then their Partner Programme is worth a peek too.

Best.

By: Manoj Ranaweera

Manoj Ranaweera — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 14:16:25 +0000

Having played with Freshbooks, BT Bizzbox (a Northern business) and FreeAgent Central before, I wonder whether there is a SaaS application that is a no brainer for a startup. I am currently involved with three early stage startups. If I am to use FreeAgentCentral it will cost me a cool £75 per month. Everytime I look at this space, I come to one conclusion – keep using messy spreadsheets.

By: Thoughtplay

Thoughtplay — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 17:54:21 +0000

Having tried FreeAgentCentral for a while… it works nicely enough, but it doesn’t really seem all that necessary – you still have to do a tax return yourself (or pay for an accountant if you prefer an expert eye), and all this does is help you keep records. For a price. It’s a lot cheaper to use a notebook, and not that much harder to use simple spreadsheet. I just can’t see the need.

By: StuMac

StuMac — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 11:31:08 +0000

Looks to be pretty useful site – I know a few people who struggle in this area, like Joel states in the comments however got to wonder if your money is better spent employing a professional expert to do this for you.

I also understand your comparison with attempting to include features from mint.com, but as that site is not open to UK users why would you put it in your post for TechCrunch UK? Don’t get me wrong I think mint.com looks awesome and I would love to be able to use it over here in the UK, but for now making comparisons with it for those of us that can’t use it is not ideal!

By: Joel

Joel — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 10:47:44 +0000

Doing your own accounts = False economy

The HMRC make it a piece of cake to sort your taxes out, but you end up paying through the nose for it.

Did my own accounts for a bit, but got someone else in to do it when I found it was taking up too much of my time. First thing he did was wipe £45k of our tax bill.

By: Chris Monaghan

Chris Monaghan — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 20:26:59 +0000

Also worth mentioning is http://www.time59.com which is designed for sole traders. A US program but has settings for UK.

By: Dennis Howlett

Dennis Howlett — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 13:54:19 +0000

Thanks for the props Mike. Your last point is well made. We know there is genuine value well beyond the ‘accounting’ data for customers, their advisors and, potentially, third parties. So yes, it is something we have firmly on the long distance roadmap.

Several issues: First, we need to accumulate a sufficient body of data to ensure we produce valuable information. Second, we’re managing sensitive business data and so need to give assurances that any aggregation work we undertake doesn’t compromise the security model. Third, we may need to build a business analytics engine to handle variances so that the information is statistically useful. Fourth: we need to be market and business specific as well as generic. Finally, we’re looking at ways of shortcutting to integrate into third party systems. Mint would be a natural fit so as I’m sure others are watching us, we’re watching them to figure the best way to serve customers.

One nit on the tax front – the work we’re doing to calculate personal and corporate taxes usually requires separate software or the services of a professional accountant. In the UK version, we’ve done the tax grunt work so removed several steps in the overall understanding of business finance. I won’t assert it is 100% and we do recommend users check with their advisors because there may be factors impacting the results that arise out of advice given by professionals.

I guess the piece you’re referring to is the government gateway which is still under development and to which we plan on integrating for the ‘go’ date in 2010. It’s all part of our efforts to remove friction but hide the complexity of a 600 year old system of business record keeping from which none of us can readily escape!

By: David

David — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 13:49:14 +0000

Also worth mentioning is http://www.kashflow.co.uk/ which is a UK specific web based accounting system.

By: Keith

Keith — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 12:28:50 +0000

“as freelancers are want to do”

It’s ‘wont’, not ‘want’.