MTD quickbooks vs xero

zanderpanda

Hi, first posting. I have seen this question came up a few years ago before MTD and all that it entails. I do find keeping my books stressful and I'm not a natural with figures. Although MTD is a few years off for sole traders, I'd love to be able to have an app where i put my mileage in snap my receipts etc and keeps track of it all for me. I'm leaning towards quickbooks as i think the starter plan offers more features, but anyone any thoughts? How bewildering are they?
Is there a good free alternative I can use that allows inputting receipts of expenses and recording mileage easily, alongside my income? I've used separate free apps before but when they don't sync with one another, it just gets messy.

NannaH

I use Freeagent. It’s very simple to use and free if you use a Mettle business account.
I just photograph receipts and add them to either the bank feed or self created expense.
There is a mileage gizmo I believe but I just put down the cost of diesel that goes in the van. 

I can also create ‘virtual’ bank feeds for say, cash income that I can match to the invoices I also create within freeagent.
The only thing I don’t like is that I have to create a contact in order to create an invoice. 

numbersrule

I use Xero for my Ltd but after subscribing to Xero Expenses earlier this year and trying out an 'integrated' mileage app at the same time to trial it, I quickly decided to abandon it and just reverted to creating monthly 'spend money' transactions in standard Xero.  I record my expenses in Excel and then enter them in Xero as a monthly 'spend money' transaction.
I found the mileage app really irritating and fiddly.  It's far simpler to just look up mileage on Google Maps and enter it in Excel.  The other thing is I couldn't find a way of getting Xero Expenses to record the VAT element of the mileage rate correctly based on the advisory fuel rates.  So all in all, even though online accounting software is great and I wouldn't want to be without it from a VAT MTD point of view, I find it is still useful to maintain a certain degree of manual control over some things such as expenses.