My son has a small 2.5 person electricians business turning over approx £20k per month.

He isn’t making much or even any, profit at the moment and I have offered to look over his accounts. I am not an accountant or professional money person…. just a chap who is ok with numbers.

He has a part time person who looks after his paperwork as he is dyslexic and she does them on excel. They are a bit of a mess and done in a way that she understands but nobody else.
He needs a book keeping system that quickly and simply shows him the state of his finances and Quick Books seems OK to me!

Any advice/experience folks?

Personally no experience of Quickbooks, but I use Freeagent and get on quite well with it.
I’m a one man band limited company and it covers all aspects of what I need.
Designed by accountants, but straight forward to use.
One month free trial online to see if it would suit.
If you consider using it I have a 10% referral code that is going spare.

Used Quickbooks for many many years, liked its easy of use and features. Its now trying to move online, not very successfully as I understand. So Xero may now be the way to go – built as an online service from the ground up. My wife is a management accountant and loves it. I’d just watch as the starter version is very basic – perhaps too basic – YMMV.

I’ve used free agent and QuickBooks. Free agent is more expensive but it is very very easy to use. Saying that, it is set up for one man bands. QuickBooks is a wee bit more difficult to set up but easy to use once you’ve got that done. It does seem a bit more suitable for multiple employees than Free agent.

I’d wait until the start the next tax year before starting it as, while it does all you payroll for you, it doesn’t seem to handle starting mid year very well. There is a big discount on QuickBooks at the moment though.

QuickBooks offline went rapidly downhill, an absolute mess.

QuickBooks online started poorly but is now really simple to use and brilliant for me as an accountant. Cheaper and easier then Xero or competition (which are also very good I must add).

£7.50 a month, a no brainer. Free 30 day trial too. I must have swapped 20 clients onto it in the last 4 months. No compaints and plenty of positive comments from them in that time.

QB online user here, not an accountant but fairly tech savvy.

I find it easy enough to use and we have e-commerce and quite a few wholesale customers.

Watch the VAT rates when producing invoices – I found it confusing to begin with.

QB online for the last 2 or 3 years having used the old Quicken PC program. Moving online was the best move I ever did accounts-wise. Easy to use from anywhere and imports all bank transactions automatically which is bleedin marvlous.

Its now trying to move online, not very successfully as I understand.

Not quite sure how you’ve reached that assumption.

I haven’t used QB for a while, but the online and desktop versions used to be quite different. The online version was a bit more dumbed down.

This, of course, might be a good thing.

I think all the online accounts packages will give you a free trial for a bit, so it might be worth having a play with a few different ones.

Pros and cons for all the online accounts packages. If he is just starting out and no, or yourself, understanding of accounting then the business maybe profitable but due to capital expenditure being treated as revenue expenditure may appear to be making no profits.
Assuming being an electrician he will be getting stung for CIS deductions too, which will effect his cash flow especially if not offsetting it against his PAYE from the staff salaries.
You would probably benefit from an accountant or at the least an experienced bookkeeper otherwise you could spend lots of time putting info into the accounts package and it still be meaningless to the actual performance of the business.

Just moved to Quickbooks ourselves. Seems generally pretty good.

I use quickbooks and I’m an idiot. So even if theres easier ones to use its easy enough.

As above – free one month trial. I was sceptical so continue to use my old methods / software and duplicate all my actions in QB so that I had the option to bail at the end of the trial.

anyone got any codes/referrals stuff for quickbooks?
I think this is jsut what my wife needs..

DrP

Had a choice between Sage and Quickbooks when oped Biz bank account, went sage, but year or so down the line, thinking quickbooks might of been better, due to them having “stock” control that would of been v handy.
Sage now has stock control. (but come to late)

What I am getting at is try and find out what he might need his account system to do in the next few years, like paying wages/PAYE, stock control, invoicing, ordering etc. Thou might not need it now, (he might be doing it by hand or another system) might be worth picking the one that offer the things you might need in the future as his biz grows.

Used quickbooks pc based for years on 2013 version now cost about £120 , I would of stayed with original version but it seem to go skewiff after new version came out so had to upgrade. Turned auto update off on my current version as read online that quickbooks make it go wrong via updates. So turned off updates and all is fine five years on.
What I have found over the years is it does do you good to know whats happening in your small business, costs, who is paying or not etc. So sitting down once a month to make it all balance is time well spent.

Its now trying to move online, not very successfully as I understand.

Not quite sure how you’ve reached that assumption.[/quote]

We kept being offered it as an option on our yearly subs renewal. Our accountants warned us off for a couple of years on the trot – said online wasn’t up to scratch. Sounds like those issues are now resolved.

( it wasn’t an assumption )

anyone got any codes/referrals stuff for quickbooks?

I don’t think they do them but theres a month’s free trial and often theres discounts on the first few months too.

Gowrie – Member
We kept being offered it as an option on our yearly subs renewal. Our accountants warned us off for a couple of years on the trot – said online wasn’t up to scratch. Sounds like those issues are now resolved.
( it wasn’t an assumption )

That was true – when QBs went online to start with their systems and layout were terrible. They were late on the scene too, but then when Xero and Clearbooks and others showed it was getting popular and with the Making Tax Digital reform lumped in by HMRC then they spent big bucks. But I would say QBs online has only been decent for the last 3 years tops, original was on a different platform altogether and as said, wasnt up to scratch.

maccruiskeen – Member

anyone got any codes/referrals stuff for quickbooks?

I don’t think they do them but theres a month’s free trial and often theres discounts on the first few months too.

30 day free trial. Ask your accountant if they have any offers too, we used to get them although they seem to have stopped since they set the price at £7.50 a month. Xero offer good offers to accountants for their client’s which might also be worth a look (if you use an accountant that is).

blastit Older QuickBooks was great, soon lost it’s way, but don’t see that happening in the online version. I’d still bet you could save a fair bit of time and have a good overview if you went online, which would outweigh the monthly fee, but every business is different of course.

All very useful comments thanks for your input folks.

He has been steadily growing the business for a few years and has an accountant but has come to the realisation that it is just getting too big to be done by Excel.

I’m using Gnucash, as the name suggests it’s open source. Easy to use, synced to Dropbox so I can access my stuff from anywhere. I only started using it because it was the only way I could find (at the time) to get bilingual invoices but it’d take some convincing me to swap for quick books.

Use QuickBooks offline because need to consolidate between multiple home currencies but otherwise would use the online version as even with offline you need to budget for the updates. Much better than Excel.

However, I would go with whatever the bookeeper is used to. I would also consider paying someone to set it up for him if the bookeeper can’t do it. These things are tools rather than solutions and won’t help if used in the wrong way.

We use FreeAgent, get it free with Natwest business banking.