Quick Books?

mrs.butler

Hi I have been Self Employed as a Sole Trader since April 2010, and have always used an Accountancy Firm. However their fees have increased by 60% since I started using them!

I am nervous about doing it myself, so was wondering if anyone has used Quick Books? Have seen the advert and looks good. Does anyone recommend them? At the moment they have it for £2.99 a month for the first six months. Or would it make sense to wait until the new Tax Year in April 2017?

TIA.

spadoosh

Our accountant costs £1000 a year, He saves the business about 20 times that (and does it pretty quickly, i could probably do the same but it would take a few weeks). Im fairly confident doing it yourself will cost you money. The proviso being youve had training or spent a very long time learning about tax.

The worst place you can cut costs is with your accountant.

Having said that, it is easy, its just following the rules and practices.

Quick books is a software package, its made so anyone can use it with little training.


Just to be clear being able to use quickbooks does not make you an accountant. It means you can enter data into a software package. Taking that data and producing something useful is what accountants do.

mrs.butler

Thanks I do appreciate your advice. My earnings are pretty low, as I only work part time due to my LG. If my earnings were higher, I would not flinch as like you say, they save you money. I do pay Tax as earnings are over personal allowance, but not much higher.

spadoosh

mrs.butler wrote: »

Thanks I do appreciate your advice. My earnings are pretty low, as I only work part time due to my LG. If my earnings were higher, I would not flinch as like you say, they save you money. I do pay Tax as earnings are over personal allowance, but not much higher.

Fair enough, they can normally give good advice on all aspects of finance that can still make them worthwhile.

check out these, whilst not recommended they regularly provide accurate enough info for HMRC (hmrc will not recommend a specific programme). Some are freebies, some are free for smaller users etc. Or you could go old school and just use a book.

mrs.butler

Think I will have a look in the local library to see if they have any Idiots guides to accounting!

Pennywise

Quickbooks is a fairly high end book-keeping package. In my opinion, it's NOT for the amateur and is very easy to make mistakes if you're not experienced in book-keeping. The clients who usually come to me after they've played around with it tend to get themselves in a right mess, so if you want to do that, at least get some proper training from a book-keeper or accountant.

A fair better simple software for the novice would be VT cash book (free) or VT transaction (about £130 one off purchase), both being desktop rather than online, but both very simple and very hard to mess up, yet do exactly what you need in terms of simple book-keeping for a simple business.

But, either way, it's only the book-keeping. The annual accounts and the tax return are completely different things, in that there are various adjustments needed to bridge the gap between the book-keeping and accounts/tax returns, not to mention you need to know what is an allowable expense and how to treat capital assets such as computers etc.

If cost is the issue, I'd suggest you do the book-keeping yourself but still let the accountant do the accounts/tax. Probably most of their cost will be the book-keeping element if you're not doing it properly yourself at the moment.

Bluebirdman_of_Alcathays

A dummies guide to accountancy will not get you far. It will take you some time to get your head around double entry bookkeeping, and that is just the first step of many. Add to this the statutory accounting and tax requirements (that change annually), and you are entering a minefield.


As well as all the other useful suggestions, something obvious has been missed - negotiate with the accountant on fees. 99% of professionals will be willing to compromise, and if you are with the 1% that won't, find somebody else.

Pennywise

Bluebirdman_of_Alcathays wrote: »

As well as all the other useful suggestions, something obvious has been missed - negotiate with the accountant on fees. 99% of professionals will be willing to compromise, and if you are with the 1% that won't, find somebody else.

Fully agree. We're always open to re-defining the "who does what" and are happy to reduce fees if the client is willing to do more themselves (such as their own book-keeping, submitting their own vat returns or payroll, etc which are the main time taking tasks) or improve the standard of their book-keeping.

That's why I suggested it in my earlier post. For our average client, our fees are 3 or 4 times more for clients who don't do their own book-keeping or who do it badly, simply due to the time taken to sort it out.

mrs.butler

Thanks All!

I think I will have a word with my accountant and see if I can do anything to keep the costs down.

After reading your comments, I think honestly I should probably stick with an accountant, as I am likely to get myself into a muddle.

Thanks.

DebbieR

I've used Quickbooks since 2008 but still use an accountant to finalise the accounts and submit VAT and tax returns. Last year we went over to the online version which is a lot easier. I input all the transactions,reconcile the bank accounts etc. Then our accountant pulls up what he needs to complete whatever return is due. I maybe could do it all myself if I really had to, but I prefer the safety net of an accountant.

waveneygnome

We used to use SAGE, moved to QB 8 yrs ago...but have just moved to Xero...cloud based online system.

I have several friends who run businesses and coincidentally we're all independently moving across to Xero - might be worth looking into.

If you are really small though - I'd be looking to change accountants rather than take on the book keeping side of things - as others have said - you'll still probably need one for fill in all the statutory returns.

We've just had a beauty parade of accountants - all had access to last 3 yrs accts and spoke to our book keeper. The quotes varied massively - which shocked us.

Cheapest was £800...most expensive was £4k.