Back from Accountex 2018 and all the big ones were there like Xero, QB of course but also Freeagent, Cloudbooks, Pandle and others but no Quickfile ??
I’m a big supporter of QF but a no show at Accountex makes me worry about the commitment for the future and in particulat MTD. I’ve seen the early development by yourselves of the MTD reporting tools but is there anything else in the pipeline like links with Receipt Bank etc as automation seems to be the way forward or enhanced reporting tools ?
Or should I be reviewing my cloud based accounting software of choice for my clients ?
That would really depend on your priorities I suppose. If attendance at these types of events is an important factor in you making a decision about what software you use then maybe.
Rather than divert resource away from actually developing our product (we are a small team afterall), we much prefer to get on with the work at hand. We’ve already received HMRC approval for our MTD VAT implementation and are 100% on target to meet all MTD related release dates. It’s a significant opportunity for us and we’re engaged in monthly discussion with HMRC to work on the finer details. We’re certainly not turning a blind eye, even if we’re maybe not out there generating as much hype as some others.
We’ve also just completed a 100 page FCA application so that we are able to consume the new Open Banking APIs, this is really a major priority in terms of streamlining and automating accounts.
In regards to Receipt Bank, I’ve covered this in the past. The bottom line here is it’s Receipt Bank’s decision not ours, we can’t build an integration without access to the appropriate APIs. These need to be exposed on their side. If there’s willingness on their part we can easily move forward with this.
So that’s it really, I can’t say that we won’t be there in future years but this year in particular we didn’t feel it was worth the trade-off.