Payroll and VAT software for electronic submissions?

[willendure]

I am using Quickbooks through a £10/month subscription that is linked to my accountant.

I have never liked QB, but so far have managed to navigate it reasonably well. Kept on using for about the last 7 years mostly on a better-the-devil-you-know basis than for any other reason. In the last year they have started making a lot of "upgrades" to it, and holy crap am I tearing my hair out now! Entries missing from VAT submissions, payroll vanishing, mismatch between docs and the software, ... Today I tried to do my end of year payroll EPS submission and yeah. Where even is that in this steaming pile of ... I seem to have 3 FPS submissions outstanding that it won't let me post - or it posted 1, then when I tried the other 2 it unposted the first one.

Before QB I was using gnucash. Fantasic and free piece of double entry accounting software, although its lacks any kind of automation around fetching your bank transactions and doing a good job of categorizing them. Also no PAYE and VAT and these must be done electronically nowadays and gnucash has no ability to do that. I would happily go back to gnucash because its so simple, I can actually understand my accounts!

Mostly I just need something with simple double entry that easily lets you see and navigate the chart of accounts. And something that can do PAYE and help put a VAT submission together.

What do you use? Anything you would recommend? I really need to ditch QB, I now deeply resent paying them anything for their bloody awful sofware.

[hobnob]

I use FreeAgent. It can do VAT submissions, but you need level 8 access for that. (If you don't have that level, you can confirm the details then your accountant can file the return.)

[willendure]

I use FreeAgent. It can do VAT submissions, but you need level 8 access for that. (If you don't have that level, you can confirm the details then your accountant can file the return.)

Thanks for the suggestion. I looked at their pricing plans - £165/year for Ltd. Would that give me the level 8 access?

My accountant uses either Quickbooks or Xero, but not FreeAgent, so I would be arranging and paying for access by myself. (I did try Xero, but it looks complex).

[jamesbrown]

Thanks for the suggestion. I looked at their pricing plans - £165/year for Ltd. Would that give me the level 8 access?

My accountant uses either Quickbooks or Xero, but not FreeAgent, so I would be arranging and paying for access by myself. (I did try Xero, but it looks complex).

Just open a Mettle business account and get FreeAgent, er, free. Just need one transaction per month, so loop some money between accounts on a standing order.

[ladymuck]

I used to use Xero. It's not complex, it's just designed for people who have a bit more bookkeeping knowledge, compared to FreeAgent which is so handy holdy it drives me potty. However, I am interested in the micro accounts submission and CT calculations that no other cloud based software offers, so I'm sticking with it for now.

I stopped using Xero because they kept "enhancing" the product and changing stuff. Much like what you're experiencing now.

Your accountant doesn't need to directly connect to your accounts system to do their job. Mine get sent a trial balance and copies of closing bank statements and produce everything they need from that each year. It depends on how comfortable you are with basic accounting.

I used Sage for a while, many years ago. Not bad, but again they kept tinkering with the damn thing. I used QuickBooks back when it was desktop only, and MYOB when I first started out! Currently having a play with M365 Business Central as it's part of the M$ Partner Launch Benefits pack (that replaced the old Action Pack subscription). Now that's complicated! More like proper enterprise accounting systems that I used to use back in the 90's.

[willendure]

I used to use Xero. It's not complex, it's just designed for people who have a bit more bookkeeping knowledge, compared to FreeAgent which is so handy holdy it drives me potty. However, I am interested in the micro accounts submission and CT calculations that no other cloud based software offers, so I'm sticking with it for now.

I stopped using Xero because they kept "enhancing" the product and changing stuff. Much like what you're experiencing now.

Your accountant doesn't need to directly connect to your accounts system to do their job. Mine get sent a trial balance and copies of closing bank statements and produce everything they need from that each year. It depends on how comfortable you are with basic accounting.

I used Sage for a while, many years ago. Not bad, but again they kept tinkering with the damn thing. I used QuickBooks back when it was desktop only, and MYOB when I first started out! Currently having a play with M365 Business Central as it's part of the M$ Partner Launch Benefits pack (that replaced the old Action Pack subscription). Now that's complicated! More like proper enterprise accounting systems that I used to use back in the 90's.

Yeah, I saw the CT and micro accounts stuff in FreeAgent, seems great that it can do all that too.

I am very comfortable with basic accounting, from using gnucash for about 10 years. My accountant used to get given a spreadsheet export of all my accounts from gnucash and prepare my accounts from that. Would love to just go back to using it, but digital subsmission for VAT and PAYE would seem to rule that out.

FreeAgent looks good. Only thing making me nervous about it, is there does not appear to be a chart of accounts - assets, equity, expenses, income, liabilities and all sub-accounts - that I can navigate around and see all the transactions in their raw form. Useful if you miscategorize something and need to go figure out why it ended up in the wrong place. I feel like it might leave me feeling like I never quite understand what is really going on. Not that QB does not already leave me with that feeling.

That would be my ideal, something that exposes the mechanics of double entry bookkeeping, but has AI for categorizing your bank transactions, and a little bit of automation around creating the structured multi-legged entries you need to record PAYE and VAT, but always with access to the raw entries so I can "make sense" of it.

[ladymuck]

You can do all that from the Trial Balance report. That should help you see where things aren't looking right and then you can view all transactions in the errant account to see what needs recoding

[courtg9000]

If you go down the FreeAgent route and you bank with NatWest remember to see if NatWest are still doing the freebie.

[eek]

If you go down the FreeAgent route and you bank with NatWest remember to see if NatWest are still doing the freebie.

They are - you can also get a Mettle account which should be free but is rather limited.

[hobnob]

I looked at their pricing plans - £165/year for Ltd. Would that give me the level 8 access?

If you're paying directly, I'd assume so. If you go via an accountant, they might put you at level 7 (with their team on level 8), but if you ask nicely then they'd probably "promote" you.