Living up to the old cliché

Oh my goodness, this week I am living up to the cliché that accountants are boring. With the joint aim of getting a firmer grip on my personal finances and of investigating a piece of free bookkeeping software, I have been using a free bookkeeping app called Waveto effectively pull together a set of accounts for my personal spending. It’s been quite eye opening, the biggest surprise was the staggering amount that we are spending on food. It also made me think that it would be useful to have a quick review of some of the bookkeeping software available.

Wave is a free piece of bookkeeping software so it’s a great choice for small businesses and fledgling businesses that don’t want to spend the Earth before they have any income. It offers a lot of the features that the paid software offers including automatic links to your bank accounts and uploading of bank statements so it’s nice and easy to get the transactions in.

A slight downside for me was the lack of bank rules which you can set up to automatically post transactions to where they should go. For example, I would have like to have told the software that all of my many trips to Tesco should be posted directly to the account “Food”. There is an option that allows you to post many entries to the same account at the same time but a bank rule would have saved even more time.

At the moment, a further downside for those VAT registered businesses is that submitting VAT returns under Making Tax Digital (“MTD”) is not an option. That said, bridging software is now becoming available that would solve this problem and maybe in due course Wave will be updated with this functionality.

Overall, as a free piece of software to be used for basic bookkeeping I thought it was great.

I use QuickBooks as my main bookkeeping software, so I am very familiar with it. I find the layout simple to use and the

QuickBooks is a great piece of bookkeeping software for those businesses that need the extra functionality. Bank rules are available, saving lots of time for those businesses with lots of transactions. Once your write the rules once, QuickBooks will recognise your transactions and automatically post them to the correct account as they are uploaded.

QuickBooks has also been updated with the ability to make your Making Tax Digital submissions. This means that you can send in your VAT return straight from your bookkeeping system, maintain all the digital links that will become mandatory for most VAT registered businesses from 1 April 2019.

Another advantage when it comes to paid software is that you can integrate other apps into the software to create further efficiencies for your business. These could facilitate anything from receiving payments to recording time. There is generally an additional charge for these add ons.

QuickBooks is not free software so there is a charge but there are various different levels of access that attract different rates.

Xero is another popular piece of software that I am familiar with. It does have more functionality than some of the other pieces of software on offer. It does all of the things that QuickBooks does (including being MTD ready) and there is also additional functionality in the reporting section to customise the reports to you and your business. For me, the flipside of this is that it can also be more complicated to use. When you have more options, I find that sometimes they lead to more complex processes.

Also on offer by Xero are the vast range of apps you can integrate into your bookkeeping software, more than QuickBooks offers. Of course, these all come at an extra charge but the facility is there if you require it.

Xero comes in slightly more expensive than QuickBooks as if you want to link your bank transactions directly into Xero there is an extra charge. Again, there are a few different options depending on what you are looking to use it for. Xero is a great piece of software that will grow with your business as you start to require the extra project and expenses functionality that is on offer (that I haven’t reviewed here). I think the offering from Xero would even support larger businesses, growing to accommodate larger teams and larger volumes of transactions that smaller businesses don’t have.

There is a piece of bookkeeping software for everyone. If you were looking for a great piece of bookkeeping software as you get your business off the ground, you should look very closely before dismissing something like Wave. Most providers will offer a free trial to get you started.

Do speak to your accountant before you invest in the software as they will be able to advise you of the best package for your business and may be able to offer you a discount on the usual rates. If you’d like more information on any of your bookkeeping needs, drop me a note at laura.arbuckle@armetaccounting.co.uk.