"UK fraud leaps to £2.3bn - Reported cases of fraud are rising and the amounts involved are getting larger – but still fewer than one in seven fraud offences are reported to the police."
No comment on what percentage of reported offences were successfully prosecuted by police.
Seems to me that AML is a waste of time, particularly given the amount of resources wasted, that could be better utilised elsewhere, and cost of those resources.
I moved away from Iris to Digita (desktop) - Iris is better, but was getting way to expensive for me as a sole practitioner, and Digita is good enough for my purposes. Hopefully Iris will maintain Taxfiler prices for you, rather than bump them up to Iris pricing!
I've nothing to compare it with, but it's not too bad. Still a lot of work to do to make it a good product. It produces a lot of unnecessary e-mails if you are not careful. We put e-mails on pause so we can check what it is sending.
As 'partner' (sole practitioner), I tend to find it doesn't prompt me at all, I have to be in the program to get information, and have to be perpetually filtering to see what I want. There are not really any reports as such. For example, it doesn't ping me an e-mail to say I have 10 accounts, 5 CS01s,8 CT600s and 20 tasks due by the end of the month. I have to go and filter the tasks to check.
Things like graphs cannot be interrogated to see which clients they relate to, so they are a waste of time.
Really you are asking the wrong question. You should be asking how much is my accountant saving me?
Sometimes I would charge more than £5k for a similar case, but that would normally be because either:
a) the client fails to provide full information on a timely basis, so a lot of time is spent chasing for information and compiling reasonably accurate figures (which could save clients penalties they may otherwise incur), or
b) I have carried out a lot of tax planning work, which will almost certainly save a lot more tax than the fees involved.
My preference is QBO. It has a very good bank reconciliation facility and a lot of useful reports. But the best feature for a newbie is the fact that it has web chat and call back (normally within 5 minutes), as well as a helpful community.
Xero isn't too bad, but the bank reconciliation feature is, in my opinion, poor, and the support was useless last time I used it. It is (or was) e-mail only and it often took 24+ hours to get an incorrect answer, so you have to e-mail them again, and so on!
Iris and Digita can do all these, at a price. I was with Iris, moved to Digita, mainly due to the fact that Iris prices were getting silly.
Digita isn't as good as Iris, but does the job OK, and was/is a lot less expensive.
I haven't had experience of TaxCalc and VT, but I'm sure they do the job, probably with less bells and whistles. I also used to use Absolute many years ago, but that (at the time) was very clunky - felt like a spreadsheet with reports bolted on, and presentation of documents for clients wasn't great.
My answers
They are mainly using franchise systems and suppliers, etc and are quite tightly controlled, so should be a fairly easy audit.
Aylesbury area.
ICAEW Daily Insights (just to prove I do CPD!):
"UK fraud leaps to £2.3bn - Reported cases of fraud are rising and the amounts involved are getting larger – but still fewer than one in seven fraud offences are reported to the police."
No comment on what percentage of reported offences were successfully prosecuted by police.
Seems to me that AML is a waste of time, particularly given the amount of resources wasted, that could be better utilised elsewhere, and cost of those resources.
QuickBooks (QBO) does do microentity accounts.
I moved away from Iris to Digita (desktop) - Iris is better, but was getting way to expensive for me as a sole practitioner, and Digita is good enough for my purposes. Hopefully Iris will maintain Taxfiler prices for you, rather than bump them up to Iris pricing!
I've nothing to compare it with, but it's not too bad. Still a lot of work to do to make it a good product. It produces a lot of unnecessary e-mails if you are not careful. We put e-mails on pause so we can check what it is sending.
As 'partner' (sole practitioner), I tend to find it doesn't prompt me at all, I have to be in the program to get information, and have to be perpetually filtering to see what I want. There are not really any reports as such. For example, it doesn't ping me an e-mail to say I have 10 accounts, 5 CS01s,8 CT600s and 20 tasks due by the end of the month. I have to go and filter the tasks to check.
Things like graphs cannot be interrogated to see which clients they relate to, so they are a waste of time.
Really you are asking the wrong question. You should be asking how much is my accountant saving me?
Sometimes I would charge more than £5k for a similar case, but that would normally be because either:
a) the client fails to provide full information on a timely basis, so a lot of time is spent chasing for information and compiling reasonably accurate figures (which could save clients penalties they may otherwise incur), or
b) I have carried out a lot of tax planning work, which will almost certainly save a lot more tax than the fees involved.
My preference is QBO. It has a very good bank reconciliation facility and a lot of useful reports. But the best feature for a newbie is the fact that it has web chat and call back (normally within 5 minutes), as well as a helpful community.
Xero isn't too bad, but the bank reconciliation feature is, in my opinion, poor, and the support was useless last time I used it. It is (or was) e-mail only and it often took 24+ hours to get an incorrect answer, so you have to e-mail them again, and so on!
Iris and Digita can do all these, at a price. I was with Iris, moved to Digita, mainly due to the fact that Iris prices were getting silly.
Digita isn't as good as Iris, but does the job OK, and was/is a lot less expensive.
I haven't had experience of TaxCalc and VT, but I'm sure they do the job, probably with less bells and whistles. I also used to use Absolute many years ago, but that (at the time) was very clunky - felt like a spreadsheet with reports bolted on, and presentation of documents for clients wasn't great.
On what basis did the ACCA decide that Gladys wasn't low risk?