I have agreed to take on the Treasurer's role for a very small local charity with one paid employee. We will effectively be starting from scratch accountswise and am wondering what package/system to use. I am intending to maintain the books and prepare the final accounts ready for the examiner. Whilst I would perhaps prefer desk based, rather than cloud, but am happy to consider either and cos it is a charity, cost should be minimal - any recommendations/comments please?
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Nil cost payroll software
With only one paid employee there are several nil cost software products available, see:
http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/softwaredevelopers/paye/rti-software-forms.htm
What about 12pay for payroll and VT for bookkeeping
The advantage with 12pay, apart from it being free in this situation, is that Tom McClelland, their head man, is frequently on Aweb to give advice. His software appears to be much more flexible than that of some of his competitors.
VT cashbook is free to use, and easy to transfer to spreadsheets and back again if you want.
Quick Books?
If you need fund analysis then for an organisation of this size nothing beats QB. However you will have to either subscribe to their payroll or use one of the online payroll packages, some of which are free at this level.
QuickBooks for me!
I use QuickBooks for two charities where I keep the books (and have set it up in several more where they keep the books themselves). The main charity I work with has a turnover of half a million via a dozen different funders, plus a Social Enterprise, and QuickBooks has been a major factor in winning funding and helping the Managers to keep spending on track.
Advantages - easy to use, very configurable, transaction rather than spreadsheet based, reliable and hard to muck up. The No 1 advantage for charities however is the classification system which allows multiple funders to be tracked via reserves, income and expenditure and also allows P&L by Funding/Expenditure stream to be drawn down with one click.
Disadvantage - cost only, especially if you decide to run payroll RTI through the system (which needs current version purchase or monthly subscription). However if you can use alternative payroll software and post in the resulting transactions, then a single licence outright purchase (typically £150) can happily work for many years.
12 Pay is excellent
I've used 12 Pay and recommend it. It's probably worth paying the £60 per year to get the proper version.
I wouldn't recommend QuickBooks. I've have had poor results with it.
excel or open office
I have a similar small charity client with 2 employees. I find that the free open office (from Oracle) is more than suficient for basic entry through to accounts production, but you do need to have medium level spreadsheet skills. I also use the free HMRC RTI software.
12 Pay looks very good, but won't produce accounts.