I have come across quickfile recently and very much like the idea that its a free system or very competitive rates via the affinity platform.
As a professional accountant for over 10 years I have used many book keeping software, more recently the cloud based programs. There are a few good ones in the market with the monthly subscription of anywhere between £15 - £25 + VAT per month. However all of them have some sort of limitation. I see this as good opportunity for quickfile to take advantage of these limitations and become the best software out there.
I have a few suggestions, which i think would make quickfile better in terms of user experience and saving valuable time for businesses who will use quickfile.
my suggestions:
The dashboard should be streamlined and slightly bigger font size will help.
On the dashboad, it will be ideal to list what a business would like to see as soon as they login.
In addition to what you already have on the dash board, users would like to see a tax time line and profit figure from the profit & Loss account.
In the tax time line, include deadline dates for PAYE payment, VAT return, corporate tax return and payment - all this in addition to companies house information that you already have.
The profit figure, should ideally show the profit after corporate tax i.e. distributable profit, so that business owners can make better decision on how much dividend to pay themselves.
This will require to have a bit more than basic profit and loss account under reporting. It will be great it it can calculate the profit after tax, and this figure would feed to the dashboard.
And if any dividends are declared, a summary of that should also go on to the profit and loss and to the dashboard.
To have a more accurate profit and loss report, i think you will need to implement a system whereby the depreciation can be calculated by the system once the asset is entered on the system.
Individual user reporting.
It will be great to have some of the reporting grouped per user i.e. per director/employee
Ideal reporting for this would be payroll/salary amounts per user, dividends declared per user, personal expenses to be reimbursed to each user.
Speaking of personal expenses, it will again be great to have a button (more likely under each user) to add ‘out of pocket’ expenses. Expenses that are not paid via the company bank account.
I think currently one has to do a journal to directors loan account.
Also, it will be quite handy if the system can generate the dividend vouchers when dividend is declared. This is mandatory requirement for any business and it will be extremely handy if the system can generate one as soon as dividend is declared, to avoid any penalties in the future.
Also when tagging a bank transaction, it will be handy to have more options:
broadly like this:
OUTGOING PAYMENT
Payment (this can then have additional drop menu for all nominal accounts, taxes etc)
-Transfer to another account (this can then have additional drop menu for other bank accounts/paypal)
-Money paid to user (this can then have additional drop menu for expenses, salary, dividend, loan)
-Purchase capital asset (this can then have additional drop menu for expected age of asset etc to calculate depreciation-which can directly be posted to depreciation)
-other money out - this can cover anything else.
INCOMING MONEY
sales (non-invoice sales)
Invoice receipt
Transfer from another account
Refund
Money received from user
Dispose capital asset
other money in
Sorry for a long post, these are the ones i can think of right now. There is a room for lot more adjustments to make quickfile better.
Thank you for your comprehensive post Sam. When we provision new features we tend prioritise those that are frequently suggested on our forum.
I have tried to respond to each of your points below:
It is already possible to go into the ledger view for dividends and run a search against specific names, this will show you the individual transactions along with a gross total for a specified period.
There is no association in Quick File between users as defined in the “Team” section and specific accounting records. Only account activity, i.e. this user created this invoice on this date. We could certainly look into this, although I’m not sure the team management area is the way we’d go about it as team members for access purposes are not necessarily going to feature in the accounts.
RE: Dividend Vouchers - I believe this has been mentioned previously and it’s something we may look at in the future, I agree it would be handy.
I’m not sure specifically what additional option you’d require here? You can already tag outgoing purchase payments from the bank?
Again if you’re referring to bank tagging you can already directly tag purchase and sales invoices to a nominal category of your choice. You can also tag transfers to merchant accounts like PayPal (or any other bank account for that matter), payment of salaries, dividends and director loans as well as tax payments and receipts. For anything that doesn’t fit into one of the predefined options you can post directly to any nominal account of your choice using the option Something else not on this list.
sorry, there seems to be a typo. there is no point 5. all of that is point 4. not sure how that happened!
4 Also when tagging a bank transaction, it will be handy to have more options:
broadly like this:
OUTGOING PAYMENT
Payment (this can then have additional drop menu for all nominal accounts, taxes etc)
-Transfer to another account (this can then have additional drop menu for other bank accounts/paypal)
-Money paid to user (this can then have additional drop menu for expenses, salary, dividend, loan)
-Purchase capital asset (this can then have additional drop menu for expected age of asset etc to calculate depreciation-which can directly be posted to depreciation)
-other money out - this can cover anything else.
INCOMING MONEY
sales (non-invoice sales)
Invoice receipt
Transfer from another account
Refund
Money received from user
Dispose capital asset
other money in
Thanks Glen for the reply. i will look into each in more detail.
What about additional tax time line and for this to have more advanced P&L reporting to include depreciation calculation , CT calculation and distributable profits after deducting the dividends distributed.
regarding users and team, i feel the team will be the users i.e shareholders, employees, directors - who are the users, not sure if there is any business whose team dont fall into the three categories above.
it will be handy to connect the team members to accounting records. The tagging can also become user/team member specific
On the dashboard you should see a link Show key filing dates. This will reveal a timeline covering key tax related events.
The advanced P&L reporting is something I’d need to look into further. Although we do support recurring journals which you can use for periodically adjusting for depreciation. As for CT calculations this is likely to be more complex as it may require split periods at different tax rates and other considerations that may affect the NET figure. We are conscious not to overload the dashboard as if you can imagine with 1000s of users logging in every day it tends to put quite a load on our servers and diminish overall performance.
The team section is also used by accountants, bookkeepers and financial advisers which would probably not feature in terms of drawings and other expense related items for the company. This I think would require more thought.
At the moment we do have a significant back-log of feature requests we are working through and we are trying to prioritise these in terms of popularity. Some of the features you mention may appear next year although I unfortunately can’t provide any specifics just yet.
thanks Glenn, for the tax timeline i meant additional tax deadlines for submissions and payments i,e. PAYE, VAT , CT
For other features, its good to know that new things will be coming. I am looking forward to that.
As for the dashboard, i think i would like it to be more ‘user friendly’
1)I was wondering if it will be possible to add the deadline dates for VAT return submissions in the KEY FILING DATES box?
Also if its possible to have the KEY FILING DATES appear as display box rather then a link to press?
I noticed that there is a green ribbon appearing in my client’s accounts You have one or more active jobs with your accountant/bookkeeper, click here for details.
Why is this? and when i click on the click here for details, there is nothing and also it displays a link to Quickfile pricing for consultancy work. I am wondering about this as as an affinity user, it i thought quickfile won’t be directly advertising to my clients. (2 issues in this question i guess!)
3 How can i record direct sales i.e. sales for which a sales invoice is not raised.
The amount paid by the client is paid to the bank account and when i try to tag it directly to General sales by clicking something else not on the list - although it picks up the amount, it does not pick up the VAT.
4 One other item that i thought would be handy for the dashboard is cashflow graph.
This should indicate all the cash in and cash out in various bank accounts (especially the main Business current account).
This is handy as most of the times, all the cash that comes in is not sales, it can be VAT refunds, loans etc
The current graph showing sales & purchases is very good feature, and the overdue invoice alert as well (thumbs up!)
5 is there issue with Barclays bank feed - it did not update this morning?
I have a transaction that has not come through from Saturday.
Just a general pointer with regards to feature requests. It’s definitely better to post them under separate headers, that way other users can find them and add their vote. Much of our development is based on feature demand as gauged through the forum. When features are all lumped together under one post without a meaningful title they’ll most likely get overlooked.
Sam, I’m holding a few of these points in memory and will discuss feasibility with our developers later today. I think having the VAT return dates in the Calendar makes sense! Although always showing the calendar and adding further reporting to the dashboard may not be practical for two reasons.
Overloading the dashboard is fine for competent users and those with accounting and bookkeeping experience but this does not represent the vast number of QF users. We want to keep the dashboard clean and intuitive and put all the relevant reports within one click. Putting the whole application on the dashboard does not make for a good UX.
From a technical standpoint the dashboard has a lot of work to do, calculating bank balances, debtors/creditor totals monthly breakdowns etc. It’s also the most frequently hit page in the application. Adding more work for the dashboard has a global impact on the performance of the application for all users. Cloud applications are different to desktop applications in that resources are shared, this is something that we have to consider whenever we develop new features.
