Bookkeeping Software
Every business has the responsibility of keeping accurate accounting records to judge the performance and profitability of their business.
There may be external organisations that also need look at these and one of them is HM Revenue & Customs should they decide to look into your or the company tax returns.
Having accurate and good accounting records can also make your accountancy fees cheaper as a lot of accountants these days work on a fixed price rather that time based billing.
Once you reconcile the bank accounts you will have and accurate debtors and creditors list of who owes you money and who you owe money to.
Another great feature of these packages is to process your VAT returns through the software and submit them to HM Revenue & Customs electronically.
You can also run profit & loss reports to see how the performance of the company is doing.
These packages are not that expensive to purchase but you may need some training on these to get you up and running.
When making tax digital starts with VAT on 01 April 2019 where you will have submitted your VAT return in digital format (no more typing the figures in to the government gateway) by using software this will make your VAT process easier to do.
If you submit this by software you will be able to save reports of exactly what is in the VAT return and you can review this before you submit the return to ensure you have not missed anything from this and also to review any errors that may me in the report.
Great article! Quick question though, What do you think about cloud bookkeeping software vs desktop software? I’ve been searching for the best option when it comes to security. Thanks in advance for your answer. 😀
This is a great question and one that should always be addressed.
I believe that the cloud bookkeeping has some much more to offer than desktop as I found desktop being very restrictive as all the information is held on one computer unless you have a server or multi licence user options which again is more money. The other great use of cloud bookkeeping is where a client has queries so we both log into the software, they log in from their end and we log in via the Accountants option and help guide them to though the query and if you compare this to using a desktop to do it is a far better system and less cost of remote access software.
One of the biggest advantages from a Accountants point of view is the completion of the year end for financial statements and tax as with some desktop bookkeeping packages once the accountant has it then the client can not work on this and in the past we used the accountants link on Sage and we could do the year end but when we tried to do the roll forward it would not let us do this it had to be done by the business so it meant training the client on this which was extra expense for the client do in this case we still had to travel to there premises to train them no saving there at all.
Another one year end we have going on at the moment is where they are on desktop software and only get the laptop with the date when they don’t need it so the year process has dragged on for over eight weeks now.
The security issue is always going to be there and It was an issue that we had to consider and so far have not had any issues and the way we approached this to get our house in order so the use of passwords
being kept on a password protection programme. But where the client does the bookkeeping they are ultimately responsible for this and we cannot force them to do it.