FreeAgent

[sadkingbilly]

Hello all, anyone know if freeagent is cloud based or can it be local M/C only??
I have an innate aversion to putting sensitive data on Someone Else's Server.

[jamesbrown]

No, your data is on their servers. You can minimize data feeds, like bank connections, to make your life more painful and choose to upload from files, but there is no amount of pain that they are willing to offer that results in no data being present on their servers. It is not a piece of software you install locally, which is what you are after. The good news is that, if you like pain and hassle, there are locally installed apps available!

Not trying to convert you or anything but, the chances are, if you do your accounts on a machine that is connected to the internet, your machine is - most likely - far more vulnerable than FreeAgent's servers (but, either way, the risk is not zero and pretty much never will be). Bear in mind, a lot of your info is on Gov't servers too and, er, they have a less auspicious history of protecting your important data

[willendure]

Definitely cloud hosted.

I am using GnuCash - honestly its clunky but still better than most of these fancy ones.

I encrypt my sensitive data, then put it onto an encrypted disk partition that is only mounted when working with the data.

[sadkingbilly]

I use excel, but guv wants it MTD compliant, and gnatwest gives freeagent (which IS compliant) away wiv a business a/c.

[ladymuck]

I use excel, but guv wants it MTD compliant, and gnatwest gives freeagent (which IS compliant) away wiv a business a/c.

If you're happy with a bit of duplicate effort, you could just manually post a quarterly journal (or whatever max frequency you can get away with) into FA with the totals for each account? It won't work for bank entries but for that I would enter a manual bank transaction that represents the period closing balance to a dummy account (you'll have to play with the options to get a sensible dumping place) and then deal with it with your manual journal.

That way, minimal transaction data is held in FA and you remain "complaint"

[malvolio]

If you're happy with a bit of duplicate effort, you could just manually post a quarterly journal (or whatever max frequency you can get away with) into FA with the totals for each account? It won't work for bank entries but for that I would enter a manual bank transaction that represents the period closing balance to a dummy account (you'll have to play with the options to get a sensible dumping place) and then deal with it with your manual journal.

That way, minimal transaction data is held in FA and you remain "complaint"

Oh we can be sure SKB already is..

[sadkingbilly]

Oh we can be sure SKB already is..

oh look! - here's Taffy the Tory Twat now.......

[willendure]

I use excel, but guv wants it MTD compliant, and gnatwest gives freeagent (which IS compliant) away wiv a business a/c.

Yeah. I am using https://mytaxdigital.co.uk/ to paste in VAT returns and so on for MTD. Bit of a pain.

Maybe I should get AI to rewrite GnuCash into something that is not perl, and then modify it for MTD.

[sadkingbilly]

thanks for link.

[dharmeshpatel01]

Yeah, that's a common issue with Excel — it works for records but isn't really built for MTD compliance, so you end up taking extra steps anyway.

Tools like FreeAgent help, but they can feel a bit heavy if you just want something simple for submissions.

A lot of people are now moving to lightweight MTD-specific tools that handle record-keeping and direct HMRC submissions in one place, especially with the 2026 changes coming in. Makes the whole process much less manual than copy-pasting returns.