Draft MTD response: Costs and savings
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Replies (6)
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Not sure where you have got your figures from, I have not seen any software that costs £50 a month (Sage accounting £10, Freeagent £14).
It is of course difficult to know for sure until we know what will be involved but as an accountant with my own practice I do not anticipate increasing fees. The savings I will gain in efficiency will pay for the extra software cost.
If your fees go from £600 to £1200 you need another accountant!!
The problem with assuming that software is the magic solution is that there will also be an assumption that all of the users are IT literate. Unfortunately this is far from being the case. Even where the users are IT literate, they are not necessarily familiar with accounting terminology.
Our experience with moving clients onto accounting software is that many of them still rely on their accountant to give advice and support and to tidy-up where they have made simple mistakes.
It seems to me that all or most of the savings and benefits will be for HMRC and it will be the clients and agents who pick up the bill.
Well done Rebecca. I agree with all that you have said and am happy to be associated with it. As a busy practising accountant, I do not have time to waste answering so-called condocs from HMRC. In the past they have ignored me anyway.
As someone has already said, HMRC should first concentrate on making their own records accurately digital in real time.
@NH
freeagent for Ltd £29 + vat a month after 6 months, £24 for partnership, and ££19 for sole trader.
then at least 1 hour a month my time to review, more if corrections needed,
I expected moving clients onto Openbooks would reduce my year end time but that wasn't the case
@ Marion If you are with barclays you can get Freeagent for £14, if you enter a partnership agreement with them you can also get it for around that.
We went with Sage who are cheaper, start licenses for £1 or less.
Either way, £50 is way over the top which was my point.
We do bookkeepng for 95% of clients anyway, and cloud software saves us time over the old excel route
Thank you for these 6 posts, Rebecca, I will now made a response to HMRC, it was a bit daunting before reading your posts.