Getting back into contacting again, and I’m thinking of not bothering with an accountant and using Freeagent instead.

Anyone doing/done this? How’s it work out? Is doing it all yourself worth the c£100 a month saving?

I use Freeagent to manage the finances of our small business (nine people). I like it, it’s easy to use and their support is also very prompt.

DM me if you want us both to save a few £££s for the referral 😉

I use it, but to be fair, more for bookkeeping than for accounting. It also gives me a “rough” idea of how much tax I owe which I then compare to a spreadsheet of CIS payments made on my behalf. I give my accountant a log-in and password and he submits the accounts and gives me a discount of around 80% of what the subscription to FreeAgent costs. I realise it’s old-fashioned but I still prefer to have a CA submit my accounts. Yes, I realise that whether you’re self-submitting or getting a CA to do it, HMRC says you’re just as (un)likely to be inspected but anecdotal evidence suggests otherwise.

As a user, it’s relatively neat to use, but I’m not impressed with their mobile app. I’m also shite at inputting receipts/bills/expenses as-I-go so I only have myself to blame for it being a pain in the arse once a year. 😀

I use it, it’s a great bit of software, takes a lot of pain out of doing your own bookkeeping – however, I still use an accountant – my Freeagent subscription is provided via them, and they use it to check stuff, make adjustments and submit stuff on my behalf.

I use GNUcash, does all the reporting I need but lacks some automation – eg at the start of each month I send out 70 invoices manually by dragging them into a template email, while other (paid) programs will do that for you.  I could probably write a script to do it tbh, so it obviously doesn’t bother me that much.

No complaints other than that, and it was the only one I could find to output the bilingual invoices I need (that might have changed since)

For a two-person limited company we don’t use software (I say we, it’s my wife that does it). But the accounts are very simple, currently one customer with two (substantial) invoices paid!

We use it, simply because we get a free subscription with our business banking.

Once you get used to it it’s quite easy, although we are a relatively straightforward small business with little complication as we sell labour, not products effectively.

I’ve just started setting it up – as above free subscription through business banking. It looks like it has possibilities, I still will use an accountant but it may help in hading over numbers to them, as well as making sense of my VAT returns.

with little complication as we sell labour, not products

But you can create price lists so invoices can be pre-populated with a description and price. We don’t use it that much as we sell time too, but we do have some items (such as website hosting) that are fixed costs.

It’s also very easy to set up recurring invoices so those hosting invoices I mentioned – they can be set to automatically send periodically.

Cheers all, I may give it a go then.

Book keeping should be quite straight forward.

A good accountant should be giving you advice on tax efficiency