# accounting package for sole trader starting up



## nvg (10 Dec 2007)

does anyone have any recomendations on a simple easy-to-use accounting package for someone starting a service business? It will be a service business below vat threshold and there will be 1-2 employees max. There will not be a need for a load of analysis of accounting figures.


----------



## xxx (10 Dec 2007)

You could just stick with excel. Big red book though is really easy to use and gives reports which are awful easy for anybody to understand.


----------



## z107 (10 Dec 2007)

You could use Excel, depending on how may transactions and how complicated your business is. You do say that it'll be less than the VAT threshold.

If you have plans to expand in the future, or you see yourself exceeding the threshold, you should seriously consider some accounts software. It makes producing balance sheets and P&Ls a great deal easier. You will probably need to do _some_ analysis (such as cash flow) to make sure you're not going bust.

SortMyBooks or Mamut (I'm affliated with Mamut), both of which offer free trials.

Do you also want to process pay for your employees? You can try Payback (Which I'm also affliated with) [broken link removed]


----------



## TripleA (10 Dec 2007)

If as you say its less than the VAT Threshold then the proper use of Excel spreadsheets is more than enough.

However if you want an accounts package i would suggest TAS Books (i am not affiliated with TAS). I have worked in Practice for 8 years and find TAS Books the most simplistic/user friendly of the lot. Honourable mentions to The Big Red Book and MYOB....


----------



## nvg (11 Dec 2007)

Thanks for your suggestions-appreciate them


----------



## BobbyFowler (11 Dec 2007)

Stay well away from Excel.  I'm fairly tech savy.  Set up in Business nearly 4 years ago & used Excel for the first 18 months or so.  Thought I was great with the way all my pages linked up & all that good stuff.  When it came to it my accounts ended up in a bit of a shocker. I had 12K I just couldn't account for.  Spent hours trying to work out where the mistake had been made.  Have a golf buddy who's brother is an accountant. He got me to buy Sage (think it was 120 Euro) & then we went transaction by transaction through the accounts. It was a right pain (and took a day and a half) to sort out.  I've been using it since and it's really good.


----------



## E. Fudd (6 Jan 2008)

In the same boat as the OP.
Would anybody have, by any chance, have a set of blank excel spreadsheets, ready to go?
ie formatted in the correct way so all I have to do is enter the figures.

Probably wishfull thinking!


----------



## solidrockman (11 Jan 2008)

BobbyFowler said:


> Stay well away from Excel. I'm fairly tech savy. Set up in Business nearly 4 years ago & used Excel for the first 18 months or so. Thought I was great with the way all my pages linked up & all that good stuff. When it came to it my accounts ended up in a bit of a shocker.


 
I've used Excel pretty extensively and I'd also recommend caution. It's easy for errors to creep into formulas and cell ranges (especially if you are going to embed code in macros) and these glitches can be very hard to track down.

No doubt there are Excel accounting packages available but I doubt they would come free of charge. One free option you could look at is OSFinancials (http://www.osfinancials.org). My wife is starting a small business and after a bit of research I selected this - although I haven't started using it yet!


----------



## BetterBiz (11 Jan 2008)

Have you considered using a bookkeeper? I hear of a lot of business owners wasting a lot of time figuring out their accounts. If you are not trained to do it and it is not core to your business then it can be a false economy to try and do it yourself. I use www.bookkeeping.ie and starting at €50 per month they provide full bookkeeping and payroll. In my mind this is money well spent each month and leaves me free to focus on running my business.

Matt

www.betterbusinessresults.com


----------

