I'm currently looking at candidates for systems for VAT registered traders who currently either keep their books on spreadsheets or paper.
I seem to have narrowed it down to Clearbooks and Quickbooks Online. Has anyone got any thoughts on the relative merits (or difficulties) of these two rivals ?
Or are there other options at which I should be looking ?
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You're right I'm stretching the point a bit and we do have clients on various cloud packages and of course for some clients there are tangible benefits.
However for a large proportion they have no desire (or ability) to do anything themselves, that's what they pay us for and there is definitely still a place for products like sage 50. Costed per client it comes way below the cloud offerings. Bank feeds and the like are available and product is MTD compliant
I'm also a bit worried about the cheap version of QB's advertising 'simply copy and paste into you HMRC tax return'
Of course it is total b*llocks but I expect it appeals to some taxpayers and HMRC who seem increasingly keen to cut out the 'middleman' - us.
In my view the "click and paste" advertising done by most of the Cloud software folks amounts to a breach of the UK advertising standards code.
3 different clients have fallen totally for this - 2 on Xero and 1 on QBO - and all have ended up paying a minimum of £300 extra in accountancy fees - 30% or so.
Why? Very simple. When you have a bank balance in Xero of 42,931 and the bank statement shows 4,210 there are not really many short cuts. When "repairs and maintenance " is £80k for a recruitment consultancy with £300k sales you know that what you are seeing is the tip of a rather nasty iceberg.
Cloud software is a car crash waiting to happen, that's if it is not already happening. I for one am not rushing to join this rather silly bandwagon.
QBO has certainly led consumers to believe that cloud accounting is very simple. However if you wanted that kind of work then there will be plenty of sorting out to do in the years to come!
I wouldn't recommend Xero unless the client was educated in the bookings since it is a nightmare when it goes wrong. I have even had clients make big messes on FreeAgent.
I moved a client from FreeAgent to QuickFile today as she just wasn't using it to its full potential and didn't even refresh the bank feed. I should have just put her on VT and charged for the bookkeeping instead of FreeAgent getting the fee.
I also have clients who use the above packages very successfully.
I wish that were so! I wish HMRC had done some proper communications of what MTD entails to business owners and self-assessment taxpayers.
They have studiously failed to even do basic communicating to these groups, in my view this is just sheer cynicism on their part in order to keep this under their radar screens until it is too late.
Dear AWeb, there have been loads of questions similar to this where a practitioner asks a question and gets buried in arguments between various products. Could you do a survey where you actually test the various MTD-hopefuls and report back how they perform, similar to Which/Consumer Association tests? It's a big ask but in less than 12 months we will all have had to decided and at the moment there's too much information to go through. We need something concise.
I agree with Akkountant about the reports in Xero. The VAT100 breakdown is unusable without downloading it to Excel first, and even then you have to unmerge lots of cells and change or put up with random italics.
The bank statement has a running balance but, like Akkountant says, it is so hard to see in the browser, you have to download it to Excel anyway.
All Xero Excel downloads have merged cells, which is extremely irritating when you want to work on a spreadsheet.
Xero does have funny priorities. They say they are too busy to work on running balances and supplier statements but they spend time on things like Xero Ask, which, as far as I can see, is useless in the format in which they have done it.
Having said all that, I still prefer Xero to CB and QB.
HMRC has just finished broadcasting a MTD webinar. today. A live poll was held asking agents how much do businesses know about MTD. 74% answered that businesses know little about MTD and are relying on accountants. This proves that HMRC are not getting the MTD message across to taxpayers. HMRC say they publish info on GOV.UK but taxpayers aren't going to know it is there unless they know about MTD in the first place and most taxpayers have got better things to do than trawl through GOV.UK.
Hugely impressed that after 2 weeks and 60 posts there has been no mention of Brexit or Hitler.