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Online accounting review: Imbercal

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1st Oct 2008
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software reviewNewcomer Imbercal has come up with a promising online accounting offering aimed at small business users. Reviewer Nigel Harris takes a look.

Imbercal currently offers a 60 day free trial to both versions of the service:

  • Eezebooks – which provides comprehensive bookkeeping for those with little experience – cost after 60 days £10 pm or £100 pa.
  • ProBooks - for the experienced user or client who wishes to produce not only comprehensive books but also a Profit & Loss Account and Balance Sheet. – cost £20 pm/210 pa.

Accountants and bookkeepers can create users at both levels, so for example inexperienced clients or their staff can operate the basic invoicing and cashbook functions, leaving the accountant to deal with reporting and journals. There is no facility to tailor user access in any more detail other than selecting one of these two levels.

Like many online accounting providers, Imbercal is looking for accountants and bookkeepers to promote its services. The company explains: "Imbercal Accountant clients principally use the packages to either resell to their own clients or to expand their own business by offering a bookkeeping and management account facility. Imbercal recognises the problems of client bookkeeping and has been specifically designed to make entries easier so no more pages of Sage gobbledygook to unravel which makes the job more difficult not easier and creates fee pressure."

Subscribers can currently earn commission of 50% of the annual subs (for as long as the customer remains with them) when they introduce new customers to Imbercal, so you only have to introduce two new customers to get your own subscription absolutely free. After that it could be a useful source of revenue.

In use

Intuitive navigation from the options along the top menu bar, with further options underneath, depending on the section you are in.

The Home Dashboard provides a summary of the key information for your business and handy links to important features of the system, including quick start links to key areas of the system – invoicing or bank account for example, aged debtor and creditor analyses, bank balances - colour-coded green or red (overdrawn) and a neat quick VAT liability calculator which generates the current liability at the press of a button.
You can opt for an Advanced version of the home page with is less graphical but squeezes in more links to and summaries of all the main sections. Because of the extra information crammed on it seemed less effective to me.

Banking does what you would expect, receipts and payments, transfers between accounts and bank reconciliations. There are no fancy import routines for electronic bank statements, but the reconciliation routine is simple to follow and shows good controls.

Customer account management and sales - here you manage your customer accounts (the supplier section works similarly). Adding customers, posting invoices and monitoring unpaid invoices is very simple. Invoices can be produced individually or in batches and are printed via a PDF generator. They look presentable but I couldn’t see how to customise them. Having set the credit terms when generating the invoice I was disappointed that these are not printed on the invoice. There is no facility to email invoices to customers direct from Imbercal, although you could simply attach the PDF to a manual email.

VAT Return - Imbercal handles invoice and cash accounting and the flat rate VAT scheme. It displays the final figures in the same layout as the paper return for you to simply copy across.

VAT reports are produced in summary and detail. I was particularly excited to see that the VAT Return screen has a tick box to include earlier period unreconciled transactions, which should avoid losing transactions posted into a prior period after a return has been run. It all looks promising, but every attempt to actually generate a VAT report with my test data was met with “Sorry there has been an unexpected error. Our technical team has been informed”. Let’s hope they fix this before anyone needs to produce a real return!

Reporting in EezeBooks offers a cut-down set of options for day-to-day users:

  • Money owed to you from customers
  • Money owed to suppliers
  • Sales day books
  • Purchase day books
  • Customer statements
  • Supplier statements

With ProBooks you get a range of additional feature more suited to accountants and bookkeepers, such as a nominal ledger report and trial balance, nominal journals, audit trail and accounts. The profit & loss summary includes a simple bar chart of monthly profits, a nice looking report and a shame that it’s the only one to offer and graphical display of the data, especially as there’s no easy way to export the data to Excel to produce your own charts.

Throughout Imbercal there are question mark icons which give you plain English help, but there were rather too many “coming soon” messages for my liking. The help library is not so vast that the service needed to be launched with this vital tool for users missing.

Conclusion

Imbercal looks promising, although it does give the impression of being a work in progress in places. It also looks a bit short of features compared with other products aimed at the same market, and costing a similar amount each month. The subscription levels are set at a competitive level, comparable with others in this marketplace, and those concerned about ongoing costs will be pleased to know that the company has guaranteed there will be no price increases for two years. The Eezebooks version offers a very reasonable entry-level online accounting solution for small businesses needing to do some basic bookkeeping, perhaps in conjunction with an Imbercal accountant.

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