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Good move from Free Agent. They will begin losing public sector contractor clients when the new off-payroll working rules come in from April 2017. They will lose even more clients if these new off-payroll working rules spread to the private sector in April 2018. Small businesses are going to be Free Agent's new target market going forwards (rather than these micro contractors).
What you will find is that inexperienced new business owners who open a bank account will have Freeagent foisted on them as the bank staff will be expected to push it. Bank staff are not accountants and so are not well placed to make any judgement as to whether it is actually suitable for the nature of the businesses. You need an accountant involved at this stage.
Well done FreeAgent, some very good marketing/distribution for them.
Will RBS/Natwest have real-time access to their customers data? Or will the bank just ask them to run off a few reports that are needed?
Either way, it's 1 thing having real-time cloud software, it's another ensuring it's 100% accurate and up to date.
I'm also envisaging lots of questions from the bank along the lines of..........why aren't the figures I'm looking at similar to last year's filed accounts? Oh that'll be because I'm a very busy engineer and not an accountant/book-keeper, so I don't update accruals, prepayments, work in progress, stock adjustments, depreciation, deferred tax, loan interest, dividends, mileage, use of home/charge to company. So you can't really rely upon them.
A positive step and if it encourages sensible bank lending then that's great, but as long as everyone knows the limitations of it all.
You've got the bill in your accounting system. So you know when it needs to be paid. Why is it a separate thing to switch to your online bank account and type in all that same details again, and press the button that says pay?
I agree and, if Molyneux can persuade RBS to accept a transaction request posted from within FreeAgent, that will be a massive time-saver for its users.
In order to preserve security and division of responsibilities, I would expect such a request to be received by RBS as a payment pending authorisation. In this way, the company bookkeeper can process the payments in FreeAgent and then the bank signatory (which may well not be the bookkeeper) need only log into RBS and choose whether to authorise each payment. Access to FreeAgent alone will not, therefore, allow payments to be taken from the bank account, but the signatory (perhaps a busy CEO in a small company) need not waste time setting up all of the payments, but need merely check what has already been set up by the bookkeeper.
I hope that it won't be long before all of the major banks accept this method of setting up payments from within connected accounting software.
Sounds good but it's hardly "the dawn of web finance" and, anyway, I'm not sure how this news is any different from this news https://www.freeagent.com/central/freeagent-powers-mybusinessworks-for-b...
The govt/treasury plan to bring limited companies into the "cash accounting" regime eventually, so there'll be no need for accruals, depreciation, stock adjs, etc., so, looking to the future, the FAC data based on bank live feeds WILL match the published accounts to Co House etc.
I suppose this is a natural progression but will it mean that all customers of RBS, have to use Freeagent to get best out the system or will they be doing similar arrangements with other software providers.
Also I am not sure a good a tie up RBS would be? They carry a lot of baggage still from the crash and the operation of their GRG team, I am suprised if they get much in the way of new business?