Important changes affecting “Large” and “Extra Large” accounts

Knowledge Base Announcements
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Towards the end of 2015 we will be making a change to our policy on unlimited free accounting software that will require any users who have a Large (L) or Extra Large (XL) account (excluding Affinity connected accounts) to obtain a Power User Subscription (£45 + vat per year).

Since we launched QuickFile in 2010 we have always strived to deliver unrestricted use for businesses of all sizes. As our user-base has expanded, the costs and complexity of scaling QuickFile to meet the demand has increased. The introduction of a subscription for higher volume users will allow us to direct more of our resources towards feature development activities in the future.

###How much will it cost?

Under the proposed changes L and XL accounts will require a Power User subscription, this will cost £45 per year. All L and XL users will therefore automatically benefit from our expanding range of advanced features.

###When will this be implemented?

Currently we expect this change to come into effect by early December 2015.

###Will I be affected by this change?

If you have an L or XL account (You can check this in Account Settings >> Company Settings) and you are not currently a Power User or Affinity Subscriber, then from December you will require a Power User subscription to continue accessing your account.

###How is the account size determined?

QuickFile grade all accounts based on the number of ledger entries over a rolling 12 month period.

XS - Extra Small (200 or few entries)
S - Small (201 - 500 entries)
M - Medium (501 - 1000 entries)
L - Large (1001 - 4000 entries)
XL - Extra Large (4001 or more entries)

We recheck your account every 2-3 days and reclassify accordingly. If you want to know more about how accounts are graded please refer to this guide.

###Why is this necessary?

Since launching QuickFile in 2010 our user-base has approximately doubled year-on-year. Developing new features in the first few years was far quicker and simpler than in 2015. This is largely due to the fewer interdependencies between the different systems within the application and the less time needed to manage, audit and scale-out data. As the feature-set has grown, there is also an additional requirement to maintain and update all the different integrations and features periodically.

More data, bandwidth, features to maintain and active users to cater for has ultimately steered us in this direction. The decision was not taken lightly and deferred for as long as possible. We are nonetheless confident that it will deliver the best long-term outcome for all QuickFile users.

If you decide not to continue using QuickFile following this change then we respect that decision and we will be sad to see you go. We have made this announcement some months in advance so that if you choose to take this route you will have sufficient time to backup/download your data.

We understand that this will not be welcomed news for all users, if you have any questions or concerns I would be more than happy to address them here.

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We have always been expecting QUICKFILE to start charging for their service, we as a company believe that the subscription of £45.00 is a reasonable price to pay per year. We trust that if we are paying a subscription that the software will continue to advance, ie add features for PAYE & CIS…

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Glenn, I think that is more than reasonable. That works out at just over 12p a day. Very reasonable in my book! The support is included too :slight_smile: With plenty of notice it gives users the opportunity should they decide to leave to get their accounts sorted. I am still impressed with the ongoing services and improvements.

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Worth noting that even with this subscription requirement, QuickFile still works out quite a bit cheaper than the competition (FreeAgent, Xero, Kashflow, …).

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We will certainly continue to develop the software and have recently hired more developers to take on some of the bigger projects, in some way this has brought forward this decision. I know there are some very popular areas like CIS that we’d love to address in the next 3-6 months.

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I completely agree @jojo - 12p a day is extremely reasonable, especially seems our plans were to pay the £45 anyway for the additional features.

I support QuickFile, and appreciate it being free this long. Look forward to many more features appearing as a result of this change :slight_smile:

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Yup - I think most folks understand that using any software comes at a price ie the free version has adverts etc. Will the subscription now mean that CIS is properly taken care off as well as finally being able to PROPERLY reconcile a bank statement and show which entries are reconcided??

There are CIS workarounds which sort of work but the current bank statement reconciliation simply doesn’t (as seen in the long list of users asking about this in the forums) We should be able to enter a statement starting balance and end balance and then reconcile the entries in QF thus ensuring nothing is missing.

Is this £45 inclusive of vat or £54 per annum for us non vat reg companies?

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It would be wrong of me to suggest that this change will suddenly increase the rate at which we are able to implement new features. More recently however we’ve being spending an increasing percentage of resources just handing maintenance and scalability, this is somewhat frustrating but must always take priority over feature development.

We’ve made some big leaps forward this year with stuff that is mostly invisible to users, things like provisioning extra load balancing servers, rewriting the code-base in C# and migrating old web forms to newer technologies, setting up more manageable backup and recovery systems, implementing faster deployment cycles etc.

In terms of features, we will continue to look at those areas that gain the most attention on the forum as we’ve done previously. We often refer back to the features request list here and try to prioritise based on activity. It’s not always easy to take forward some requests, the truth is, certain features are just simply a pain to implement and can end up taking months to fully resolve, other little fixes can take just a couple of hours.

I am very optimistic about what we can achieve in the next few years, much of the heavy lifting is out of the way and we have a very strong development team to take us forward.

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Is there a way to see how many transactions I have used.

Thanks

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We will shortly be adding a slide out view here that will show the number of entries in the last 12 month period. This is what we use to determine the account size.

In the mean time I will send you a private message with the details for your account.

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I’m all for the charge, great software and fantastic service, you might want to make some amendments to the homepage of the www.quickfile.co.uk and here http://support.quickfile.co.uk/why_is_quickfile_free.htm :slight_smile:

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Yes, we will be looking at fixing the editorial on the website within the next week.

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I cannot thank the QF team enough for keeping the service free of charge for last few years. As a small business owner I completely appreciate that QF needs to pay for the expansion to accommodate growing number of users & add more features to the software. I will be happy to pay for this service & the charge is reasonable as compared to others in the market. The tier system also sounds very reasonable, as it does help the start-ups having fewer transactions during initial period, to use the service for free. I look forward to additional features when they come, many thanks QF team for providing this service.

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I don’t think you will find any regular users complaining about paying for what is an excellent piece of software with superb support.
I want to pay up anyway for the extra features, but was very surprised to see that I was on a Large account on a rolling basis as my transactions are few (though it has been a few years!).

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Can someone with 2 quickfile account open an affinity account and put them under that?

In preparation for the new charges for L and XL users I’ve compared the total cost for an L or XL user with 2 Power User quickfile accounts against using Affinity with the same 2 accounts (that is if one can do that?)

Power User with 2 L or XL accounts@ £45 each = £90 per year
Affinity price with 2 L accounts @ £0.1642/day = £59.93 per year
Affinity price with 2 XL accounts@ £0.1918/day = £70 per year

If the above costings are correct (taken from the Affinity calculator) anyone switching to affinity will pay less?

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In fact, based on those calculations a single L or XL account would be cheaper on affinity than on the power user subscription, so if you don’t need the extra features that the power user plan buys you then that could be an alternative there too.

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With that being the case I would probably be inclined to make L or XL accounts chargeable at the same rate as the Affinity account, otherwise non tech-savvy users will either be charged more or have to cope with the additional complications of Affinity.

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We are aware of this and these details will be worked out over the next few months. Affinity is a different proposition and doesn’t come with many of the advanced features included in the power user sub.

It is likely that we will increase the fee on Affinity accounts with just 1 or 2 managed profiles to eliminate or close the difference. Most Affinity users are accountants and bookkeepers and will typically have 5+ accounts.

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Glenn,

Is there any way that I can find out and monitor the number of nominal transactions on this account?

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Within the next 1-2 days you should see something like this in the Company Settings area:

This will give you the rolling 12 month ledger count from which the account size is derived.