Sole Trader - Business Account Software

biddy2101

My husband is a self employed sub contractor.  We send 1 to 2 invoices a week at most.  I am the company accountant and I have used excel spreadsheets to do the accounts for the last 10 years - its me that also submits the January SA online too - he is not VAT registered & unlikely to ever be VAT registered.
I am fully aware of MTD and have talked about going digital for the last 5 years, so my husband has had a XERO subscription that I have never used.  I know it was a waste of money but I just found XERO to be quite accounts heavy - I was never able to tweak the set up to be similar to my basic accounting that we do for my husband.
I work full time in the NHS and my husband is severely dyslexic - so it needs to be easy to use.
QuickBooks seems to be more what we need, straight forward to use & I just wanted to find out other peoples opinions.
I like the fact that it has free UK telephone support - this isn't offered by Xero.
I can tweak the chart of account to emulate what i have set up in my simple expenses spreadsheets
Photos can be taken of receipts
It looks straightforward to use
And the big plus is that it is geared up to MTD
Thank you.

Sandtree

Personally prefer Xero but you also have Kashflow, Quickbooks, Freshbooks, Zoho and Clearbooks... imagine there is a variety of Sage too but never liked Sage

biddy2101

Thanks for the other suggestions Sandtree

Jeremy535897

I have used Quickbooks for three years plus and find it very simple, but I am an accountant, and I haven't tried the QB for self employed version (which has a tax add-on too I think).

Grumpy_chap

There are some "bridging" software packages that would allow you to continue using your spreadsheets and also submit the data to MTD.  Apart from being aware that these products exist, I've never used one myself and cannot comment on their ease or suitability but thought I'd mention as it gives the OP another choice. 

For a very small business, anything more complex than a spreadsheet is probably unnecessary.  The other big advantage of a simple spreadsheet is that you have absolute knowledge of what it is doing and no risk of "behind the scenes" functions resulting in an unexpected outcome.

Jeremy535897

Grumpy_chap said:

There are some "bridging" software packages that would allow you to continue using your spreadsheets and also submit the data to MTD.  Apart from being aware that these products exist, I've never used one myself and cannot comment on their ease or suitability but thought I'd mention as it gives the OP another choice. 

For a very small business, anything more complex than a spreadsheet is probably unnecessary.  The other big advantage of a simple spreadsheet is that you have absolute knowledge of what it is doing and no risk of "behind the scenes" functions resulting in an unexpected outcome.

For VAT, yes (OP is not VAT registered), but it is most unlikely to deal with MTD ITSA, but that is a few years off.

Grumpy_chap

Jeremy535897 said:

For VAT, yes (OP is not VAT registered), but it is most unlikely to deal with MTD ITSA, but that is a few years off.

Aaah, yes.  A bit of confusion as MTD is only for VAT at present but the OP is not VAT registered.  Clearly the OP is preparing very well for the future.  If it were me, I'd keep it simple and stick with my spreadsheets until required to do something more complex.