I am a sole trader of a craft/art business. I have been going for a year now and have been using an accounts book to keep track of money in and out. I’ve been fine using this but need to get ready for MTD so have created an account here.
I have absolutely no idea how to start with QF. Most of my transactions are cash with no invoices or receipts involved. How do I keep track of these here? Other transactions are by card through a sum up reader. Again, I don’t know how to record these.
I’ve tried looking in the knowledge base and searched the forum but I really don’t understand how to get started; it could all be in a foreign language, that’s how much I understand it.
All income is treated as an “invoice” in QuickFile - regardless of whether you issue invoices or not. A common way to record takings like this would be to create a client called something like “Daily Takings” and enter a days worth of takings as one invoice.
In fact, QuickFile has a tool which could help speed this up, called the Cash Register Tool. There are more details on this here: Cash Register Tool
Does SumUp take a fee before depositing the funds into your account, or do they invoice on a monthly basis?
If I were in your position I’d consider putting all the sales through SumUp (it lets you record cash sales as well as card ones) so you can then extract a single report from SumUp giving you the total cash and total card sales for a given day/week/whatever. You’ll need to create a “merchant” type bank account in QuickFile to represent SumUp, and then you can use the “cash register” tool based on your SumUp report to record one daily or weekly “invoice” for all the sales in one go.
Cash sales will show as being paid into a “cash” bank account in QuickFile - if you spend cash on buying supplies etc. then you can record those as purchases paid straight from the same cash account, and if you deposit cash at the bank then you represent that as a bank transfer from the cash account to the current account.
Card sales will show as being paid into the SumUp merchant account, and when you receive payouts from SumUp those can be treated as transfers from the SumUp account to the current account. SumUp does net settlement, i.e. they deduct their fees before transferring you the difference, so by the end of a month you’ll have a residual balance in the SumUp merchant account representing the fees for all that month’s payments. I believe SumUp provide you with an invoice at the end of the month detailing all these fees, and at that point you can record a purchase against the “bank charges” code in QuickFile and “pay” it from the SumUp bank account to clear this residual balance.