Accounting software vs not

[TheCyclingProgrammer]

FWIW I find FreeAgent's out of pocket expense handling one of its weakest features. I do actually record my expense claims in a spreadsheet and enter them into FreeAgent in batches.

[zudecke]

Good stuff guys.

I'll probably start on spreadies and upgrade to Kashflow if it's too burdensome!

Many thanks!

Z

[Alan @ BroomeAffinity]

FWIW I find FreeAgent's out of pocket expense handling one of its weakest features. I do actually record my expense claims in a spreadsheet and enter them into FreeAgent in batches.

Do you mean because you have to enter each transaction individually? I agree that it'd be good if you could enter multiple transactions on one screen. Have you mentioned it to Freeagent? If enough people ask they will put the feature on the roadmap.

[SpontaneousOrder]

I used to use the spreadsheets from SJD which I really liked. Easy to use, pretty clear but didn't do much on the calcs. Switched to an accountant using Freeagent and I love it. Autobank feeds, easy to submit stuff to HMRC, plenty of graphs, dates for submissions etc etc. I love it. Anything that gives you more control over your finances can't be a bad thing surely as long as you have the accountant in the background for questions?

Not a chance I'd go back to sending anything over. My accountant can look at my figures anytime and I get a quarterly review of my account from them proactively to boot.

Are they really bank feeds? Or are they using your login details to screen-scrape?

[northernladuk]

Are they really bank feeds? Or are they using your login details to screen-scrape?

Erm, I'm not sure what the differences are but it's explained here. Yes you put your details in at setup but it auto imports your transactions overnight.

An introduction to Bank Feeds - FreeAgent

[pr1]

Are they really bank feeds? Or are they using your login details to screen-scrape?

Yeah you have to hand over your login and password - I personally don't trust it after reading some bank small print thatif you get frauded (made up word) and you've willfully given your login and password to a 3rd party you might not be covered

I am happy to spend the 30-60 seconds it takes to download and import the statements

[PerfectStorm]

Yeah you have to hand over your login and password - I personally don't trust it after reading some bank small print thatif you get frauded (made up word) and you've willfully given your login and password to a 3rd party you might not be covered

I am happy to spend the 30-60 seconds it takes to download and import the statements

They wouldn't be doing their jobs if they didn't include such a disclaimer... although you should be covered by the Freeagent company if they were found to be in the wrong

[pr1]

They wouldn't be doing their jobs if they didn't include such a disclaimer... although you should be covered by the Freeagent company if they were found to be in the wrong

Sorry, to clarify - I trust freeagent, my concern would be if someone completely unrelated to freeagent was the fraudster, the fact that you'd handed over your details to freeagent would potentially void you from the banks fraud protection, and I doubt freeagent would be interested in paying up if it was nothing to do with them

[SuperLooper]

FreeAgent use Yodlee as the third-party agent which fetches your bank data. Their security is pretty robust IMO. FreeAgent never sees or stores your bank credentials; they're securely sent directly to Yodlee.

(I have no affiliation with either FreeAgent or Yodlee!)

[TheCyclingProgrammer]

Are they really bank feeds? Or are they using your login details to screen-scrape?

AFAIK the only official feed they have is Barclays. The rest use Yodlee which does use scraping and therefore does store your banking credentials.

Yodlee are supposed to be very secure but it's still very much a case of using at your own risk (including the possibility of violating your online banking terms).

Auto import also only works if you do not require two factor authentication. In my case I need to enter a OTP token (HSBC) so nothing is automated.

In an ideal world banks would provide read only limited access account credentials for this kind of thing.