None of this mentions the problems with the software packages themselves and how clients immediately phone or email us as the first port of call when their browser won't load FreeAgent, or the bank feeds stop working overnight in Kashflow, or bank feeds are missing or duplicating transactions, or they can't allocate a payment to more than 100 supplier invoices - I could write a book on the problems and limitations with the main software packages, none of which have turned out to be "free" by the way !
Let alone clients who don't have a computer, or can't switch one on, or who don't do online banking because of "security issues", or have no internet, or just who haven't got a clue about any of it and care even less.
MTD-for-everybody-else would be accounting armageddon - its been time consuming enough for the 5% of clients who had to do MTD for VAT and they are actually used to the concept of keeping accounting records, receipts and the like, and of doing something quarterly even if they don't really know what it is.
May God help us all.
I recall Michael Steed, esteemed lecturer on the circuit and brilliant all round chap, a few years ago, saying he had just been teaching tax, at the Treasury, to a bunch of fresh-out-of-University graduates, for them to then advise the Government on tax !! Says it all.
Does anyone know of software which is going to cope with submitting a VAT return via MTD with a retail scheme in place ?
Presumably you will need the ability to adjust the VAT return figures prior to submission
All being done on a spreadsheet at the moment.
Kashflow support were vague - the person who might know the answer is on holiday. Lucky them.
I have a client, a boarding kennels, on the FRS, and we were planning to use FreeAgent to capture the sales as they appear on the bank feeds which, as they are mostly credit card sales (or cash/cheque deposits into the bank), would be an agglomeration of several sales. Are they actually going to want the individual sales to each customer recorded ?
Surely the answer with fraudulently redirected refunds is to take us out of the equation altogether - let the client register their bank details directly with HMRC and we just tick if a refund is required or not. Or stick to cheques ! Much like reissuing a UTR, it would only ever be sent to the clients registered address (or registered bank).
Don't be sad - you're just being replaced with a free app on a mobile phone which takes photos of receipts and miraculously turns them into a set of accounts and a tax return.
What is going to happen in firms with large numbers of staff, or multiple sites ? Would there be one communal mobile phone ? What if 2 or 3 staff members logged it in at roughly the same time - you wouldn't know whose code was whose, would you ?
Perhaps they need to come up with a dongle thing like the banks do, or something like Google Authenticator or a similar app each staff member could use on their own mobiles.
How much fraud can really take place and what could fraudsters achieve anyway ?
When, exactly, did some moron think that taking crappy out-of-focus photos of receipts would become a substitute for book-keeping ?
But wait, I've just had a better idea !
Instead of waving a faded, crumpled, thermal-printed receipt for some diesel, a packet of Marlboro Gold, a Costa coffee and a bottle of Chardonnay around in the cab of your white van while wafting around a smartphone in the other hand (cigarette would obviously be in mouth at this point but give us another million years and evolution might whip up a third hand) in the vain hope that in the second you press the shutter button, both items are roughly lined up, imagine if only you could look after that receipt safely for just a few hours, take it back to the office/home/spare bedroom/shed, and there put it on some sort of special machine or device which avoids the wafting palaver, and then somehow, oh I can't think of a word for it, maybe "scans" it ? Possibly ? And then it could even, (imagine this !), "save" an "image" of this to your computer ? And then, maybe in a couple of decades or so, when technology has caught up, you might even be able to "email" this image to someone who actually knows what to do with it ? And maybe in another couple of decades after that, there would be people you could employ who might actually be able to look at this receipt and just enter the actual numbers that matter into some sort of device which could add up and even summarise all those numbers into some sort of useful format. Now that's what I would call progress !
I have just spent about 30 minutes painstakingly ticking off 256 invoices on Kashflow for a single cheque batch payment (this is one months invoices for my supplier). You have to load 10 transactions, scroll down, load another 10 (and that's just to get back to April-16), I then had to tick them all off, pressing "load more" or whatever to get the next screen up, it took ages and my hand aches but I finally got the 256 invoices to agree to the amount of the cheque, pressed "Save" and was told the maximum amount of invoices I can include on a batch payment was 100 !!! So for every one of my suppliers cheques, I have to post three different payments to the bank to match off a month's invoices ? Let alone the hours and hours it would take of scrolling down, ticking boxes. This has just rendered Kashflow completely useless for this client. What a waste of my time and their money. These are the sorts of things we need to know before we waste days trying to implement a package which is not for the client. I have spent days just importing a whole years invoices for this client and getting the TB to balance and now it's all just wasted. I am gutted frankly.
Is there not a forum where we can all discuss the pros and cons of all the accounting software ?
I've been looking at Zoho, Quickbooks, Kashflow, Xero, Clearbooks and FreeAgent - trying where possible to actually use them for some real -life accounts, but they all seem to have some horrible shortcomings, most commonly in that lack of flexibility in the nominal code structure. For example, I loved the simplicity of FreeAgent, and the neat postcode and company details lookups of ClearBooks (which saves no end of typing), but you can't amend any balance sheet codes in FreeAgent (so to cope with a temporary loan of monies to a client, we had to create a bank account) and the code structure in Clearbooks is somewhat amendable but so many are undeletable you couldn't possibly have your own code structure.
Quickbooks outputs a TB with the code number and the code name as one text item (why would you do such a thing ?), Xero is quite inflexible when it comes to posting cash received which doesn't pertain to a particular invoice, on Zoho, when I tried to put some real accounts on it where the first deposit into the bank account was £101 being £1 share capital and £100 directors loan account - I gave up at that point - it was just too hard !
So it would be useful if everyone's findings (good or bad) can be posted on here to save everyone else from reinventing the (square) wheel !
My answers
None of this mentions the problems with the software packages themselves and how clients immediately phone or email us as the first port of call when their browser won't load FreeAgent, or the bank feeds stop working overnight in Kashflow, or bank feeds are missing or duplicating transactions, or they can't allocate a payment to more than 100 supplier invoices - I could write a book on the problems and limitations with the main software packages, none of which have turned out to be "free" by the way !
Let alone clients who don't have a computer, or can't switch one on, or who don't do online banking because of "security issues", or have no internet, or just who haven't got a clue about any of it and care even less.
MTD-for-everybody-else would be accounting armageddon - its been time consuming enough for the 5% of clients who had to do MTD for VAT and they are actually used to the concept of keeping accounting records, receipts and the like, and of doing something quarterly even if they don't really know what it is.
May God help us all.
I recall Michael Steed, esteemed lecturer on the circuit and brilliant all round chap, a few years ago, saying he had just been teaching tax, at the Treasury, to a bunch of fresh-out-of-University graduates, for them to then advise the Government on tax !! Says it all.
Does anyone know of software which is going to cope with submitting a VAT return via MTD with a retail scheme in place ?
Presumably you will need the ability to adjust the VAT return figures prior to submission
All being done on a spreadsheet at the moment.
Kashflow support were vague - the person who might know the answer is on holiday. Lucky them.
I have a client, a boarding kennels, on the FRS, and we were planning to use FreeAgent to capture the sales as they appear on the bank feeds which, as they are mostly credit card sales (or cash/cheque deposits into the bank), would be an agglomeration of several sales. Are they actually going to want the individual sales to each customer recorded ?
Surely the answer with fraudulently redirected refunds is to take us out of the equation altogether - let the client register their bank details directly with HMRC and we just tick if a refund is required or not. Or stick to cheques ! Much like reissuing a UTR, it would only ever be sent to the clients registered address (or registered bank).
Good luck with that !
Don't be sad - you're just being replaced with a free app on a mobile phone which takes photos of receipts and miraculously turns them into a set of accounts and a tax return.
What could possibly go wrong with that ??!!
What is going to happen in firms with large numbers of staff, or multiple sites ? Would there be one communal mobile phone ? What if 2 or 3 staff members logged it in at roughly the same time - you wouldn't know whose code was whose, would you ?
Perhaps they need to come up with a dongle thing like the banks do, or something like Google Authenticator or a similar app each staff member could use on their own mobiles.
How much fraud can really take place and what could fraudsters achieve anyway ?
When, exactly, did some moron think that taking crappy out-of-focus photos of receipts would become a substitute for book-keeping ?
But wait, I've just had a better idea !
Instead of waving a faded, crumpled, thermal-printed receipt for some diesel, a packet of Marlboro Gold, a Costa coffee and a bottle of Chardonnay around in the cab of your white van while wafting around a smartphone in the other hand (cigarette would obviously be in mouth at this point but give us another million years and evolution might whip up a third hand) in the vain hope that in the second you press the shutter button, both items are roughly lined up, imagine if only you could look after that receipt safely for just a few hours, take it back to the office/home/spare bedroom/shed, and there put it on some sort of special machine or device which avoids the wafting palaver, and then somehow, oh I can't think of a word for it, maybe "scans" it ? Possibly ? And then it could even, (imagine this !), "save" an "image" of this to your computer ? And then, maybe in a couple of decades or so, when technology has caught up, you might even be able to "email" this image to someone who actually knows what to do with it ? And maybe in another couple of decades after that, there would be people you could employ who might actually be able to look at this receipt and just enter the actual numbers that matter into some sort of device which could add up and even summarise all those numbers into some sort of useful format. Now that's what I would call progress !
But you shouldn't have to do that ! Grrrrr !
I have just spent about 30 minutes painstakingly ticking off 256 invoices on Kashflow for a single cheque batch payment (this is one months invoices for my supplier). You have to load 10 transactions, scroll down, load another 10 (and that's just to get back to April-16), I then had to tick them all off, pressing "load more" or whatever to get the next screen up, it took ages and my hand aches but I finally got the 256 invoices to agree to the amount of the cheque, pressed "Save" and was told the maximum amount of invoices I can include on a batch payment was 100 !!! So for every one of my suppliers cheques, I have to post three different payments to the bank to match off a month's invoices ? Let alone the hours and hours it would take of scrolling down, ticking boxes. This has just rendered Kashflow completely useless for this client. What a waste of my time and their money. These are the sorts of things we need to know before we waste days trying to implement a package which is not for the client. I have spent days just importing a whole years invoices for this client and getting the TB to balance and now it's all just wasted. I am gutted frankly.
Is there not a forum where we can all discuss the pros and cons of all the accounting software ?
I've been looking at Zoho, Quickbooks, Kashflow, Xero, Clearbooks and FreeAgent - trying where possible to actually use them for some real -life accounts, but they all seem to have some horrible shortcomings, most commonly in that lack of flexibility in the nominal code structure. For example, I loved the simplicity of FreeAgent, and the neat postcode and company details lookups of ClearBooks (which saves no end of typing), but you can't amend any balance sheet codes in FreeAgent (so to cope with a temporary loan of monies to a client, we had to create a bank account) and the code structure in Clearbooks is somewhat amendable but so many are undeletable you couldn't possibly have your own code structure.
Quickbooks outputs a TB with the code number and the code name as one text item (why would you do such a thing ?), Xero is quite inflexible when it comes to posting cash received which doesn't pertain to a particular invoice, on Zoho, when I tried to put some real accounts on it where the first deposit into the bank account was £101 being £1 share capital and £100 directors loan account - I gave up at that point - it was just too hard !
So it would be useful if everyone's findings (good or bad) can be posted on here to save everyone else from reinventing the (square) wheel !