Power subscription required?

I have just logged in and been told that I need a power user subscription.

This is a small club, with 150 members, how on earth can we be considered a large organisation. The timing could not be worse as well.

It is not the amount of money that is being asked £45 for the year is not going to break the bank, but when we started it was that 'Quickfile was free and always will be" Now you land a subscription notice at me and it feels like you have pulled a gun to my head as January is a busy month to collect subscriptions.

I would like to have a conversation with someone about this.

I’m sorry you feel that way, we’ve had a subscription model since December 2015. It becomes effective whenever the number of nominal entries over a 12 month period exceed 1,000. Account sizes are explained in detail here, you can also get a detailed breakdown by entering “Account Usage” in the left hand Quick Search bar.

We did have a very extensive conversation going back to August 2015 about the introduction of an annual fee, it was broadly accepted at the time and the fee we charge is highly competitive when compared to many similar systems.

The way the size of an account is calculated in pretty strange in that it should in my opinion be the transactions that occurred in a rolling 12 month period, not the amount of transactions submitted.

That said… I paid the fee. Do you realise how complex a system like this is to develop and how much in costs? You are supporting a great product.

It is a great system and the support is great as well. That is not in dispute. I am aware, being a retired Chartered Accountant as well as being a software developer, of how much work will have gone into the system.

Had a message been displayed a week or so ago on the lines of ‘The number of transactions in your account is getting to the level where a subscription will be needed’ with say a month of grace to make a decision, then I would not be in the least annoyed. Indeed QuickFile is so useful to our Club, and being unaware that there was even a fees model for it, I have been minded to ask Glenn whether he should consider introducing a fees model.

It was the sudden shut-out that really shocked me. Being a club of volunteers there is no single person who can sanction the fees. I have to get the permission of a committee - this takes time and with the chairman on holiday there is a real prospect of a decision not being available within the three days. It’s just the way things happen in not-for-profit community organisations where the surplus at the end of each year is small change rather than tens of thousands of pounds or more.

I have already emailed our committee recommending that we do subscribe. I just have no idea how long they will take to decide. At least the Treasurer has already replied supporting my proposal to stay with QuickFile.

Glenn, you are aware of the positive comments that I have always fed back to you and your team. I think you have made an error in how you present this.

It is calculated on a rolling 12 month period.

The other thing you could do is sign up for an affinity account - with just one “large” account attached the initial free credit should tide you over for plenty of time to get a decision out of the committee, and it’s a slightly lower cost option than the power sub in the longer term if you don’t need the additional power features.

I have not been offered the opportunity of an Affinity account and I’m not sure if that was appropriate.

I am hoping for a response from Glenn at the moment, there are plans in the offing for the club which may be relevant. @Glenn please could you PM

It’s not always easy to implement these advanced warnings, often because volumes can be unpredictable. You may be around 500 ledger items on one day and then after some intense activity (e.g. around year end) you may be over 1,000 the next.

We don’t purposely lock people out of their accounts and we’ll always try to accommodate where we can. We do have an option to defer for all users transitioning into “Large”, we’re always open to suggestions on ways we can handle this more smoothly.

@Mike I will drop you a PM to discuss some specifics about your account.

Thanks Glenn, much appreciated

Mike

same issue, for me, I expect mine is due as i decided to put on all of my transactions for the last tax year (for the return being done now) as well as this years accounts when i have moved over from another program, thinking it would be better to have it all in one place. I have tried to do things to minimise transactions - put all ebay sales into a daily amount rather than separate payments, so I really have tried to keep mine as small as possible, but I have just paid up, I have no idea if once the system realises that we are after all a small business with minimal transactions, the payment will drop back down. Interestingly enough the same has happened with my partners account on here, and his really is minimal.

The way the system calculates the nominal ledger closely reflects our costs - as you can probably appreciate, the more data put into the system, the higher our costs, as it is with most cloud based packages.

If the account drops below the L threshold once your subscription has expired, you don’t need to renew. We do send you a reminder email several times prior to expiry, but it is an optional subscription at that point. However, the subscription does also give you access to more features compared to using QuickFile without one.

so is it worth still condensing my ebay paypal sales from say 16 on day 1 to 1 and deleting the associated invoices, or have you already taken 16 into account on the limits ? I thought it was these that were bumping things up, so have made sure every day i condense them down.

If they have been created within the last 12 months, we would have taken them into account. You can view a full breakdown of your ledger count by using a report in your account. There’s a guide on this report in our knowledge base

so i can save myself the daily hassle then, as i thought i was helping keeping them down, by condensing and deleting them.

Condensing them may certainly help. Checking the above report should help clear that up and help you plan going forward.

If you need help with anything else, please don’t hesitate to ask

It is as i thought then, bringing over the old accounts. But i think you will manage to keep me on subscription just from paypal if condensing it everyday makes no difference, as although low value i have a high number of sales.

Hmm…definitely maybe; it is a rolling 12mths so whilst it won’t necessarily make any difference to your account today, it could still do so in the future.

The account size is in effect derived from the volume of data stored, which is broadly linked to the number of transactions entered in QF. So more transactions = more data to be stored = increased overheads for QF, which is reasonable to expect that they will try to recover some of these costs from regular users etc.

@ian_roberts presented some very useful averages in a previous post, which should give you a better indication on whether you will need the subscription or not going forward.

Hope this helps.

John

With PayPal there would then be an additional two nominal transactions for each transfer of funds from the PayPal merchant account into the current account.

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