Just to add a few points here:
RE: Payroll
We haven’t ruled out developing a payroll solution for QF. It is however a significant undertaking in terms of development and maintenance. If we were to go down this route it is likely that we’d need to introduce another tier to our pricing.
QuickFile works very well with “The Payroll Site”, so I would recommend taking a look at this. We would also gladly consider other API integration with suggested online Payroll systems.
RE: Bank Feeds
As @QFMathew mentioned, there’s really very little we can do here. None of the major UK banks provide any sort of open API access for 3rd party developers. This may however change with the new challenger banks (e.g. Fidor Bank, Atom Bank etc), there was also an announcment in last year’s Budget that will mandate banks to provide data feeds. Until customers start using the availability of “trusted bank feeds” in their decision on selecting banking services, we can only rely on intervention from government to force them down this route.
RE: Accountant Preferences
In my experience most accountants who actively try to dissuade their clients from using QuickFile have never used our software, or have used it for 5 minutes to extract some information from a client account and become frustrated that it doesn’t work exactly like Xero/Sage.
There’s also a good reason for accountants to want to put all their clients on the same software as this then reduces the amount of time they’re spending to learn different systems. In some cases accountants will also earn referral income from signing up clients. All I’m saying here is your accountant’s recommendations may not align with your own best interests.