I’ve recently started using QuickFile and I’ve been busy keying in about 6 years historic invoices and purchases so I’ve got a full record in a single system.
I’ve noticed a few quirks in the purchase entry screen that I’ve hit quite a few times over the last few days - they’re not showstoppers, just little glitches that would be nice if they were tweaked a bit.
In no particular order:
I haven’t been able to find a “Quantity” column for purchases, so where I’ve got a purchase invoice and bought, say, 5 units of something I need to calculate the “5 x unit cost” figure myself and enter that in the “Sub Total” column rather than entering “Unit Price” and “Quantity”.
When cutting and pasting currency figures from a PDF purchase invoice into the “Sub Total” column it doesn’t accept figures that include the currency symbol. For example, pasting “£20” into the subtotal and clicking into a different field leaves “0.00” in the field just pasted into.
When keying in figures less than a pound, the decimal point is suppressed if you click into the “Sub Total” cell, press Ctrl-A and start typing “.35” (i.e. “[dot]35”). The end result is “35 pounds” instead of “35 pence”. If you type “0.35” it works fine, but my muscle memory skips the leading “0” most of the time…
A small number of my purchase invoices have lines like “Delivery £0.00”. If I try to enter a line with a zero value and save, it tells me the line is incomplete. I realise this is probably to stop people making mistakes, but it means I can’t represent the full purchase invoice. It’d be good if the message was maybe a warning with a “save anyway? yes / no” question instead of a hard error.
From what I’ve seen so far, I’m very happy with switching to QuickFile, so the above aren’t complaints - they’re just suggestions to make entering purchase invoices a little bit slicker.
Not an answer to your questions, but just an observation that it’s much less importan to enter full details on a purchase record in QuickFile compared to a sales invoice, as you are the only person who will see it. As long as the totals are correct and you have the original invoice from the supplier then it’s fine to aggregate things.
For example I have lots of purchases from wholesalers with up to a hundred individual line items on them, but what I enter in QuickFile is just the summary from the VAT breakdown section
Goods for sale - zero rated
Goods for sale - 20% VAT
(And sometimes a separate line for the delivery charge if there is one). If you ever get inspected for VAT they won’t care how you’ve recorded things as long as the totals are accurate, what they’ll want to see is the original VAT invoices from your suppliers.
Purchase invoices don’t include numbers or unit cost. There is a feature request outstanding at Purchase Invoices - Quantity Field and you should add your vote there.
The currency field wants pure numerics. That would be the same in any database.
Purchase invoices don’t have a facility for zero value lines. You can start a feature request for this if it is a serious issue. QF do take feature requests seriously but it needs a body of support to be given any priority. (Sales invoices do allow zero value lines but not a zero total)
Yeah, agreed it’s not as important to HMRC. However, if I’m at a client site and I want to check a purchase invoice, it’s much more convenient to be able to pull up a high-fidelity representation of the invoice in QuickFile than it is to VPN in to my office, open the folder with invoices in and pull down a PDF / scanned image.
It’s not a problem - I guess I’m just trying to use QuickFile as a system of record rather than an accounts package. With a few small changes to the UI I could have my cake and eat it but I appreciate there’s probably limited demand in general for zero-value lines and “qty * cost” data entry.
I attach my invoice PDFs or receipt scans to the purchases in QuickFile via the receipt hub but I can see it would be a bit of a pain if you don’t or can’t use that for whatever reason.
i’ve not looked into the upload stuff yet - it’s probably something I’ll come back to at some point.
At the moment I’m re-keying about 6 years worth of accounts as a migration from a set of hand-built SharePoint / Excel accounts so it’s going to take several weeks to just enter the purchase invoice data, let alone pull out the PDFs and upload them.
It’s mainly a problem of my own making - i should have given up with SPPS / Excel a long time ago, but that’s where I am right now :-S.
Being able to enter zero value and “qty * cost” rows would help me, but probably not that many other people…
“Purchase invoices don’t include numbers or unit cost. There is a feature request outstanding at Purchase Invoices - Quantity Field and you should add your vote there.”
Cheers for the pointer - I’ve added a “me too” comment to the thread you linked…
The currency field wants pure numerics. That would be the same in any database.
The underlying database might want a numeric, but the UI could support pasting, e.g. “£0.35” and turning it into “0.35” for me. It already does stuff if I post, e.g. “0.12345” which gets turned into “0.12” so I don’t think it’s too far fetched a request. I’ll create a feature request for it so it’s at least out there…
Purchase invoices don’t have a facility for zero value lines. You can start a feature request for this if it is a serious issue. QF do take feature requests seriously but it needs a body of support to be given any priority. (Sales invoices do allow zero value lines but not a zero total)
It’s not that big a deal for me in the scheme of things. I’d rather it did allow zero value lines, but it’s not really a painful enough problem for me to raise a feature request for.