For years I have looked at various "practice management" packages that I can use within our small practice. We mainly deal with Limited Companies so I want something "simple"to warn us if a client (or even worse we) has missed: Companies House (CH) deadlines, VAT filings (Payroll RTI is managed by Moneysoft) and CT payment and filing deadlines. Nothing quite fits the bill, so today I played round in excel and knocked up something fairly simple for VAT and as I had the year end dates I progressed it to monitor filing dates.
Whilst doing this I couldn't help but think that given CH's recent technology improvements, their Ipad app is very useful, I wondered if there was anything I could use, so I had a look. The long and the short of it is that I came up with the following for excel:
=HYPERLINK((CONCATENATE("http://data.companieshouse.gov.uk/doc/company/0",G7,".html")), "Companies House Data")
Where G7 (in my sheet, can be any cell) contains the company registration number, for example 592349, note that excel drops the leading zero hence the "0" in the formula above. It returns the Companies House data for that particular company that I can instantly check against our records, a simple "vlookup" report that I have designed to match the CH output.
Now I know it's not perfect but I'm proud of my minor success.
So the question to some of you clever people out there... Is it possible to improve this is some way (note the different formats available on the top right of the report) to produce something fairly simple to help manage a client portfolio?
I look forward to your suggestions!
Chris
Replies (8)
Please login or register to join the discussion.
Maybe....
Could be, who knows. Just bumping your query out of unanswered to get some new ones up!
Text
If the cell for the company registration number is formatted to text then it will show the leading zero.
Have you considered
Glide
We have spent many hours trying to build just a spreadsheet so if you have not considered Glide have a look at https://www.whatsglide.com/
No prices on the Glide web site
I was really interested in Glide until I saw there are no prices on the web site. Then I lost interest.
Prices
I pay less than £30 pm if this helps Contact
Ben Norwell Director , Glide Practice Solutions Ltd
Tel: +44 (0)845 643 7380 | Mobile: +44 (0)7738 766623
[email protected]| http://www.whatsglide.com
gbooks does most of what you want
I use gbooks and it displays the Companies House filing deadlines for Accounts and Annual Returns. You can sort your company list so the most urgent cases appear at the top, and the background colours change to alert you when a set of accounts or annual return is due within the next month.
It has a similar system for CT600s, with the same alert system.
I believe there's also a way to send out reminder emails about VAT Returns but I don't use this myself.
Hi Chris,
Nice idea! We have implemented a similar display of CH data for clients in our PM solution PracticeFlow.
Regarding ideas for using the data, what we have so far is:
Using the data to set up clients in the database so that in the first instance all you need is the number.Warning you when data from CH doesn't match the data in your client list (e.g. when an update has been made to CH but you have perhaps not been informed).Automatic reminders for upcoming filing deadlines, notification of missed deadlines.Automatic creation of deadlines in PracticeFlow.
We're certainly open to other suggestions.
If anyone would like to try the system out there is a form on the main page—for the majority of use cases the price is currently £15 per user per month.