If you use accounting software what are you using and are you happy with it?
I'm currently using Xero because that's what our accountant recommended. I don't get on very well with it, I feel like i'm paying a fair chunk of money to make a job more of a drudge. I'm not getting what I was promised.
I suppose it depends on the nuts and bolts of the business as to which solution fits best but there's too much that's bugging me, features you'd have though should be standard, and when I search about them there'll be threads on the Xero forums running for years with people complaining about the same things so they plainly don't GAF.
Sage, and is "ok" but if it were not for the "Making Tax Digital" nonsense forcing businesses to use "approved" software for submission of anything to officialdom, we would have been happy to carry on without it!
I think that is one of the key problems - much depends on the nature of the business. All of the platforms are fine at handling traditional sale of product or sale of service type businesses, but it can get a bit more muddy when you want a combination of the two, or need to deal with groups of customers in one transaction.
We always used to run mostly manual accounting - spreadsheets, electronic forms and web entries for HMRC reporting etc (Or paper if you go back far enough). When we were just supplying contract software development for big companies that was easy - small handful of invoices a month, not many expenses etc it was easy to manage. As we started taking on more SME customers it became more onerous coping not only with the number of accounting "events", but also the variable nature of them. There came a point where I was spending 2 - 3 days a month generating invoices from assorted log sheets of work done, and apportioning things bought and sold, and services resold etc.
So the next problem was I could define what services I needed (they were not necessarily "typical"), but how could I find out what accounting packages could supply them? I needed something that could handle time logging for work done for customers, resale of product, or service, recurring monthly sales of "bought in" services, the ability to bill groups of customers from one event and so on.
I figured I could go through the hassle of setting up one and entering some data and trying it, but there was the danger of wasting lots of time going through half a dozen of them before finding what I needed (if I found what you needed). So at that point I thought "spherical objects" to this, I will just write my own, then I know it will do what exactly I need! (I appreciate this is not going to be a realistic option for many - but it sis surprising what you can achieve with a platform like google sheets, forms, and a bit of scripting)
It's not quite a matter of "keep a dog and bark yourself" but it's possible your accountant recommended Xero 'cos it's what they use so the data feeds into their system smoothly. No harm in that if you get the benefit of lower charges. But you could ask them if that is still their recommendation. And also ask some other accountants for a quote for your business, including what software they'd expect you to use.
Making tax digital only applies if you're above the VAT threshold of £85k per year. If you have elected to be subject to VAT and below the threshold you don't need to use appropriate software. I still use Excel.
What makes it worse is that all the packages that HMRC list as free in reality are cut down shareware or worse.
We had a perfectly good (and free) system. I've no issue with submitting numbers more often than we used to but I don't get the whole being bullyied into picking one of a handful of solutions which you only find out doesn't work for you when you've gone to great pains to implement it.
I've been using Money Manager since it was a DOS programme and the business edition for more than 20 years. Although I'm not running a business that version suits my needs. It's not expensive (£120 plus VAT) and they don't keep releasing chargeable updates. The website
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says that it is compatible with HMRC's VAT requirements.
One wonders how much to waffle on :) Some grievances below.
What it's great at. You put a bill in, the same amount goes out of the bank, you reconcile it with a click.
What it's terrible at, You've sent your wholesale clients an invoice every day using a custom/self built solution which would not integrate with Xero without some serious professional input, You're supposed to have these invoices detailed in Xero as separate entities (a monthly total is not per the new MTD rules) so you end up with hundreds but there's no batch entry, manually adding each one would take an age But you CAN batch enter them via a spreadsheet and import, a procedure which is fraught with ways to ruin your day!
And there's no batch delete if you get a gotcha, I once spent all morning clicking view-edit-delete because i'd forgot to change a tick in a box to 'tax inclusive'.
You can only edit the statement templates in Excel!!!! And it's a fairly complicated issue. And statements don't split up what's current & overdue by month.
If anyone ever pays the wrong amount against a monthly total it takes me about half an hour on Google to work out how to deal with that.
You've sold stuff in your shop, you can put these sales in as daily totals apparently but reconciling them against what hits the bank is a chore.
The bank connection is seriously flaky, with Lloyds having a particular problem with duplicate transactions, though to be fair I think that's largely a Lloyds problem.
It keeps creeping up in price while they add features most don't need but refuse to add those being demanded.
I think it would be OK at fewer/larger transactions, great for a builder perhaps. Or an instance where you were using it to manage the sale from start to finish.
Of course it would be easier if the authorities weren't such a bunch of controlling, power pissed, pains in the arse.
Over six months ago I pointed one of my long-term clients to Bokio. He had been using Sage Line 50 for years but followng a change of computer and Windows 10 it could not be reinstalled.
Bokio is free. It is genuine. They make their money from lending money to users who want to borrow from them. You do not have to.
I can access his data remotely because he has authorised it and did so while we were testing the software. Yes it is MTD compliant.
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