Sole trader, accounts spreadsheet?

morgani

Vt cashbook is free and pretty simple to use.

Www.vtsoftware.co.uk

dktreesea

How about Solar accounts? Quite easy to use and full double entry. Click of the button VAT return, if you are registered for VAT.

lynnemcf

anyone used quickbooks?

Savvy_Sue

lynnemcf wrote: »

anyone used quickbooks?

I have, but not recently. Can't compare it with Sage but it's meant to be slightly easier than Sage. However, don't think you can just click and go: you'll need to invest a reasonable amount of time in working out how to do what you want to do ...

nickj_2

lynnemcf wrote: »

anyone used quickbooks?

i use qb , it's fairly easy to set up , you just go thru a few questions at the start and then it gives you all the accounts you need, plus you can add any extra of your own . - i use the simple start , although if you need it , it doesn't do rti , for that i use brightpay
if i've had any problems i've always had them answered on the users forum

ChristianJ

Good online (cloud) accounts packages are:

> SageOne for £12 a month which will give you a fairly thorough system
> QuickFile which is completely free and pretty good (even if it wasn't free it would still be well worth it)
> Freshbooks which is free if you only need to set up less than 3 clients and gives you unlimited expenses (or around £10 a month if you need to set up more than 3 clients). Now that sounds daft, but I use it for free as I have a company that I use PayPal to invoice, therefore, Freshbooks only needs to have PayPal as my one 'client'. Freshbooks is probably the best 'simple' accounting tool you could use for a small business to keep good basic records.

I've used all of these and they all work very well for small businesses and you can send invoices that look professional if you need to! The joy of these are that you obviously can use them from anywhere as they're cloud based.

lean&mean

Eliza wrote: »

That's all foreign language to me. I went on one of the HMRCs short courses (free) for the newly self employed and they gave us a spreadsheet to use which I found really helpful. I use Open Office by the way, works really well. It's among the handouts here: http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/bst/advice-team-events/newly-self-employed-handout.pdf, they call it a record-keeping grid and I found it easy just to put the same or similar headings to my own version and adapt a bit. Works well.

Another alternative is to post this question on a forum where lots of accountants live (eg ukbusinessforums) and they will all send you simple freebie spreadsheets.

By the way, I found the whole HMRC course really useful, not just about the tax aspect, but they're very knowledgeable about lots of things to do with small businesses, and it was helpful to meet others in the same situation.

HTH

Liz

Any chance of posting up the spreadsheet template you got? Unfortunately the link you gave just takes me to the HMRC online learning, no handouts.


I have found some good templates at MrTemplate.co.uk They aren't free but at 30 quid they'd save a lot of time, and the use the sorting and drop down features of Excel well. There's different templates according to whether you are standard VAT registered, flat rate VAT or no VAT.


There are loads of free templates at Microsoft but nothing that looks like book-keeping templates.

paddyrg

Honestly, the best spreadsheet is the one you make yourself, as you'll understand it fully. It doesn't need to be fancy, just date, who, what for, amount (gross, vat, net if vat registered) will do. Good things to add are line/sequence numbers so you can mark receipts to find them easily, project names if you have multiple cost/profit centres etc, then a big sum() at the end.

Understanding your data is much more valuable than pretty templates with gizmos if HMRC ever investigate. It's why I stopped using one commercial accounting package as it wasn't clear what it was doing under the covers, so if I was ever asked to justify a vat return or similar I'd be in trouble!

sequence

paddyrg wrote: »

Honestly, the best spreadsheet is the one you make yourself, as you'll understand it fully. It doesn't need to be fancy, just date, who, what for, amount (gross, vat, net if vat registered) will do. Good things to add are line/sequence numbers so you can mark receipts to find them easily, project names if you have multiple cost/profit centres etc, then a big sum() at the end.

Understanding your data is much more valuable than pretty templates with gizmos if HMRC ever investigate. It's why I stopped using one commercial accounting package as it wasn't clear what it was doing under the covers, so if I was ever asked to justify a vat return or similar I'd be in trouble!

This. Openoffice, column for date, description(info, reference etc) . column for in, column for out, add them up. You not likely to need much more than that. Free and easy.

madhusudan

I know one .. but i can't post link ..so simply posting url in different way
http:// freespreadsheet. net/2015/05/excel-self-employed-spreadsheet.html