Pandle Cloud accounting system

Anyone with any experience of Pandle Cloud system?

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Hi All,

So I've started flirting with a range of free cloud accounting systems out there. I landed on Pandle - for which I had very high hopes.

I haven't got very far - I cant seem to import bank feeds or even sort out the opening balances.

The marketing looks very swish but I just don't get it. Apparently its really easy to use - maybe I'm missing something.

Anyone else had experience with this? Anyone else managed to get bank feeds working?

As I said - high hopes but its falling short. It would be great to see a new entrant and if it was working well then I would be championing it but I just can't see how this even comes close to the likes of Xero (which admittedly is paid...)

Replies (5)

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Keep Calm, I'm and Accountant!
By i-accounts
30th Sep 2016 19:54

Take a look at the pricing page, the bank feeds are only offered in the pro version for which a paid subscription is needed but detailed as 'coming soon'. It would seem that manual imports are possible. I have not yet used or tried this package as it seems to be still in the early development and would not want to invest time and energy in it just yet, I have used wave with some success for smaller clients and found it to be pretty good, a bit on the slow side but this is more than made up for as the developers actually listen to the requests of their users and are always improving things.

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online accountant
By paulcolman
06th Oct 2016 11:12

I had a quick look recently and wasn't too impressed. Not as good as Wave at the moment, plus you'll get bombarded with emails from the accountants that provide it.

As mentioned you have to pay for bank feeds. I struggled to upload a CSV file because of the date formatting despite selecting the correct bank. I think you'll save more time using a slightly slower Wave, and much more time using QBO or Xero.

Free software isn't going to come close to Xero. Even most of the paid for software is quite far behind. You get what you pay for!

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By Charlie Carne
06th Oct 2016 11:14

Why are you interested in free cloud accounting systems? If you offer professional advice to your clients, you charge for that service and there should be plenty of scope to include £5-£10 pm for the software cost. The only clients for whom £60 - £120 pa is too high a cost to absorb will be those for whom the transaction volume is small and you can thus deal with in something like Excel, as they won't need the more complex tracking that is provided by a fully-featured bookkeeping product.

Nothing is truly free. Google and Facebook get their money via advertising. I looked at Pandle.co.uk and it says:

"Why is Pandle free?
So small businesses owners can become great bookkeepers without the additional expense normally associated with cloud accounting software."

That's not an answer. If that were the case, Sony should give me a free TV "so I can enjoy great TV shows without the additional expense normally associated with buying a television"!

I looked further down the page on Pandle.co.uk and found the true answer:
"Outsource your bookkeeping. Would you prefer not to have to worry about your bookkeeping? Then why not use our bookkeeping service"

Pandle appears to be a bookkeeping provider that offers their own software. So you will be advising your clients to outsource their bookkeeping to a rival firm. How does that build your practice? Even if you don't offer bookkeeping services yourself, why would you recommend a rival that, in all likelihood, will in time soon offer statutory accounts and tax return preparation?

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Replying to charliecarne:
online accountant
By paulcolman
06th Oct 2016 11:19

That rival firm offers all of their services from the start, not just bookkeeping, via all the Pandle emails you get.

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Replying to charliecarne:
Tornado
By Tornado
06th Oct 2016 14:16

I assessed the situation with Pandle as you have, and it is clear that they are using free software as a bait to catch more paid for services. All I can say is that this is a common marketing practice and Pandle are fairly upfront about it.

I am no expert on the 'free' MTD phone apps that HMRC are promoting at the moment, (I have had a mobile phone since 1989 but my current smartphone is PAYGO at about £50 per annum and used for anything other than phone calls only when free wi-fi is in range), but from what I have seen and what others have said, these too are generally very basic programs and play heavily on paid for additional features.

I can relate this to the situation when Self Assessment was introduced when Banks started offering Tax Return completion services at a cheap rate on the assumption that customers would attend a meeting with all the necessary information and it would be easy peasy for the bank staff to enter all of this information into a computer program and create a completed Tax Return straight away. What they did not bargain for was that customers often did not have all the relevant information, and often forgot to include some in the first place.

History records that Banks dropped this service pretty quickly when they realised that completing a Tax Return is often significantly more complex than they expected, and a fixed rate charge was commercial suicide.

(Only today, a client has asked me to amend their draft 2016 Tax Return as they have just found some more income to put on to it).

I can see a bitter sweet experience ahead for MTD software developers as they not only battle with the complexities of basic MTD software but try to keep up with the inevitable numerous changes that the Government require as policies and legislation changes.

Good luck to them.

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