I have been setting up Quickfile and have come across a couple of issues for my usage/needs. Any help would be appreciated.
I am Treasurer for a “club” (not an accountant). Our financial year starts on October 1st. Therefore I intend entering all transaction from 01.10.2018. I don’t think my existing package will export the information to enable me to import into Quickfile. Therefore I’m adding every transaction manually.
Issue 1. Our members pay monthly subs in advance. No invoice is raised until October 1st. I can see that I can do this with prepayments. When I set the client up, I added a prepayment before October 1st. I then set the bank starting balance on October 1st. However the ending balance at the bank(today) is far in excess of what it should be.
Issue 2. I’ve set the account up as a Sole Trader. I’m not sure this is correct. Please advise on which type of company I should use.
Issue 3. As I’ve been “playing” with the account I’ve set up, I’ve come across these issues. I assume I can delete everything and start again if I needed?
Issue 4. Million Dollar question. I found Quickfile through Google and have no knowledge of it. I would appear to fit my needs as I require an online accounts package. How do I know it will be around this time next year. What/whos behind it? No offence.
Welcome to QuickFile! I’ll try and help you with your queries - I’ll go through them individually below.
What package are you using at the moment?
In this case, you can just adjust the opening balance to reflect the other transactions. So if you add a prepayment of £10 before the opening balance, reduce it by £10 otherwise it’ll be counted twice.
There’s an example here, although this references suppliers. The process would be similar for clients however (just reversed).
What’s the legal status of the entity? Is the club registered with anyone (like Companies House)?
Absolutely! All accounts come with a “delete all” option should you need to use it. There’s more on this here: How do I clear my account?
Yes absolutely we will be around this time next year and many years beyond. We’ve being going for over 8 years now and have ambitious plans for the future. The company was founded by my colleagues Glenn Drake (software developer) and Joseph Chaer (accountant). Both Glenn and Joe remain very active in QuickFile.
If you aren’t going to start using QF “in anger” until the autumn I would suggest running in parallel with your existing software for a few months to get the feel of things and then clear everything down.
With regard to point 2 sole trader is incorrect as an unincorporated body still pays corporation tax, I think you should use Ltd Company but I can’t remember what all the options are. If you are below the VAT threshold it doesn’t really matter much, I made the same mistake. The only thing that I have noticed is that the Tax Summary report will be wrong and I have never needed to use that. Tax liability can be worked out in about half a minute from the P&L report with a pencil and paper.
Issue 4 - we signed up in 2014 and QF is still here.
Firstly, thanks for such a quick response.
I am presently using Easy Books. This is a Mac only package, hence the reason for the change. If anything happened to me we would effectively loose the accounts.
Issue 1. I have added the prepayments before the Finacial year end. Each customers balance matches that in Easy Books. I didn’t put an opening balance for each customer as it would have created an invoice. The customers balances are correct but the bank balance is way over.
Issue 2. No the club isn’t registered with anyone. We just run a current account for day to day finances, and another current account as a Benevolent account which we make charitable contributions from.
Hi, Thanks for the reply. Slight misunderstanding. I’m starting from October 1st 2018. So inputting manually from there. I’ve been used to using EasyBooks for Mac OS for some time, so I just need to understand how QuickFile works. Not being an accountant means I don’t have any real experience of the correct way of doing things. I do know whether it adds up or not though.
What he meant was leave the prepayments and customers as they are and adjust the opening balance for the bank account accordingly.
I’ve just had a quick look at this (by doing some Googling) and it appears you can export your data to a CSV which should be able to be imported to Quickfile.
Easy Books does export to CSV, but I have to export each customer individually, it only exports transactions, no other info such as customer name, address etc. and it will export their whole transaction history, right back to 2013. As I’m only inputting transactions from Oct. 2018, it’s quicker just to input manually.
It’s likely that something else could be inflating this. As of the opening balance date, is the balance correct on the account compared to a bank statement/online banking? That would be the first thing to ensure is correct.
Following that, perhaps it’s worth reconciling the account against monthly statements. There’s a tool that can help with that: Reconciling your bank
