Recently active discussions in FreeAgent Central

Can free agent automatically calculate intrest and compensation for late payment of invoices and add this to an invoice. Also are there any standard /template letters for notifying clients of action.

My balance sheets do not currently balance - this appears to be due to the opening values, specifically Capital Assets.

I've entered a value in the Opening Balances screen for "Asset Pool Value" (which admittedly appears under a heading of "Corporation Tax Returns"). This value was lifted from the Net Book Value in my company's accounts made up to y/e 31/12/2005 (my FAC start date is 1/1/2006).

I would have expected this value to have appeared on the Capital Assets line on the opening balance sheet (as indeed it does in the published accounts).

Am I missing something? Or is FreeAgent? ;o)

Has anybody got an example of a suitable format for submitting accounts with Corporation Tax return? i.e. HMRC suitable Profit/Loss and Directors Report (I only submit abbreviated accounts to companies house)

Basically before I started using FreeAgent, I used QuickBooks and submitted my company returns myself. I unfortunately didn't attach a copy of the accounts and directors report with the corporation tax return, and am now incurring penalties and interest on the non-filing of the return. I only submitted abbreviated accounts to Companies House, and I believe these are not suitable for accompanying the return, and I need a full set of accounts. Is the Quickbooks/FreeAgent p/l report suitable to just submit to HMRC? Along with a copy of the abbreviated accounts as a directors report?

Could anyone advise me as to how this should be laid out, or if there are any accountants willing to do this, advise me with the cost and estimated time to produce the p/l in HMRC format. (I've got the accounts in QuickBooks 2006, and all expenses/receipts as PDF's/paper, if required).

...just a little short. I was almost sold on the FreeAgent idea and ready to ship over from Freshbooks but I'm not quite there yet. Definately impressed with the reporting features as it is more UK based than Freshbooks but think you fall a bit short in a few areas, namely:

1. Estimates - General workflow for me is project - estimate - time tracking/cost - invoice - payment, so an estimates area would be nice to fit in with the workflow.

2. Project numbering - Would be nice to tally together the project number with the projects listed on the invoice aswell as the folder on my system containing the project files. Makes searching for them later easier as you're not having to remember the name of it.

3. Multiple projects on one invoice - Clients could get annoyed with invoice after invoice.

4. Fixed cost option - Not all my work (and Im sure other people too have this) are invoiced based on time. I can't see at the minute where to enter a fixed cost for XYZ project?

5. No Basecamp import (as yet) - do I really have to re-input all my clients details? :(

6. Send reminder button - This would be nice for late payer (like a few of my clients who seem to be happy to skip round the paying process). The idea being all overdue invoices get listed separate from the payed and open ones. I click into overdue invoice no.321 and their sits a nice big button labelled "Send Reminder", which on press immediately dispatches a heavy mob with big sticks....ok Im kidding....more a gentle email reminder saying something like "This invoice is now overdue by XYZ days, if payment sent please ignore this reminder, otherwise prompt action is apprecated blar blar blar".

7. Set hourly rate and payment terms globally - 28 days and hourly rate are pretty normal for me for all projects so a global setting option would be nice. Bit of a pain redoing them for each project.

8. A message window to send with the invoices - Just incase users want to/need to send a message along with the invoice.

That's what Ive found so far from my playing anyway. Not by any means dissing it, it's showing real promise and no Im not affiliated with Freshbooks (it has some of the options above but looks awful I think and falls short in areas too).

Ill keep my eye on this though for the future and come back to it later.

Keep up the good work.

Andy

I keep coming back to FreeAgent Central to look on it's progress. I so want to use it, the accounting is priceless to an unorganised freelance designer such as myself. But I need very thorough time tracking, like you see at FreshBooks <http://www.freshbooks.com/timetrackin...> in that I need to start and pause timers on a per project level many times during a day and have all the individual periods of time added as individual entries to bill.

I'm afraid a daily timeslip just doesn't cut it for me or for those who happen to go and out many projects in a day spending bits of time fixing and tweaking designs.

So what I need to know is, is this ever going to appear in FreeAgent or do I have to keep using Studiometry forever which is driving me nuts!?

We currently raise a purchase order for items/services that are paid for by the company and these are then reconciled with the bank statement when it comes in. Would it be possible to incorporate POs into FreeAgent in a similar way to Invoices so that when the payment shows on the account it can be reconciled with a corresponding PO?

There is this annoying thing when you come to the end of the tax year, called 'work in progress'. I need to declare any work that we've done on any current projects, even if they haven't been invoiced or paid for. It's always a bit of a contentious issue, because it's hard to put a figure on how much of a particular contract has been completed before April 5, but the taxman wants you to do it.

What we need to do is account for a percentage of fees inside this tax year, without an invoice against it. At the moment there isn't any way that we can do this, and it may well be too much to expect from FreeAgent, but I thought I'd ask...

Wolf.

A Canadian user here... I've been talking with Ed Molyneux about an issue with expense calculations (thanks again Ed!) and am wondering if any other Canucks have a similar issue.

I charge (and reclaim) GST, but not PST. Since in the vast majority in cases, GST is calculated from the before-tax subtotal (not the subtotal + PST), in the Expenses screen I can't enter the exact total that's on my receipt, as that total also includes PST and therefore the GST will calculate incorrectly. My current solution is to manually calculate and write the "new" subtotal on the receipt, so all the numbers will match up with my FA records whenever I do reviews.

That's fine for the occasional receipt, but when I have lots of expenses, it's a real pain and twice the amount of work. :-)

Any suggestions? FA only uses one tax assignment, not two -- yes, you can specify multiple rates, but you can only apply one of them. Maybe I'm missing something, but I can't see a viable solution. This is a big issue for my business, and it's the only thing preventing me from becoming a paid subscriber... otherwise I am very impressed with FA!

ETA: For some reason, GST isn't being added at all to my invoices for one particular client. The "GST" line and my registration number aren't even appearing on the invoice. I've gone through all the settings I can think of... how can I fix this? Thanks.

Sorry to pester - another problem due to trying to get historic data loaded....

I have a number of monthly recurring invoices that I need to tie up with my Jan08-Mar08 bank account transactions in order to produce a Q1 vat return.

I've set up one for Jan08 and changed its status to sent, then linked it to corresponding payment. However no invoice has been generated for Feb08/Mar08.

Do I need to wait 24 hours for a batch run to generate the next instalments, or does the fact that we are now in April mean these will not be set up?

// James

If you haven't already seen our recent email update, or our post on The Central, we're announcing today our initial list of FreeAgent-Friendly Accountants.

If you have a good (and friendly) accountant who's not on the list, get them to get in touch with us and we'll get them on it.

Quay Accounting - specialists in providing accounting services to freelancers for 12 years, and based in Poole and Manchester. Quay offer a £56/month fixed-fee service for FreeAgent users (a £10/month discount on their standard fee).

Nixon Williams - a highly-regarded practice based in Blackpool, Nixon Williams offer a cost-effective fixed-fee package that also includes a FreeAgent subscription for a total of £75/month.

Blevins Franks - based in London, Blevins Franks are a multi-disciplinary accountancy practice with a particularly strong micro-business team. They'll put together a fixed-fee service tailored to your individual needs.

SJD Accountancy - a multi-award-winning practice and one of the largest in the UK, with offices country-wide and an excellent reputation for meeting the needs of IT Contractors in particular.

3CA Accountants - leading an especially-friendly small practice based in The Lake District, 3CA's Stuart Jones is a regular on our customer service site Satisfaction and is a thoroughly nice chap.

Hi,
I've just started looking at the beta API, and also started writing an implementation in PHP for the Zend Framework (as that's what I use for all my development work). The class basically makes it as easy as possible to make requests to FreeAgent, without fiddling around with sending manual requests through CURL or whatever else.

It's in very early stages right now (I started it about an hour ago), and I've only implemented the GET side of things so far, plus there's no error checking yet, but I was just wondering if it's something anyone else would find useful, I'm happy to share it.

Also, reading through the API documentation I noticed a couple of mistakes:

Under users the resource URI is referred to as "/company/users" (correct), but also "/clients/user_id" and just "/users", I assume the latter two are wrong?

Also under users it says "Single clients can be requested directly using GET /clients/user_id where user_id is the ID of the user.".

Should I add my personal bank account to manage expenses incurred through it or just use the out-of-pocket feature to add the expenses manually? My personal account would have so much stuff to explain in it, most of it completely irrelevant to my business so I'm guessing I shouldn't and add the expenses manually.
Also, with expenses I'd prefer to group a whole bunch of expenses like travel together into a month and add the total in as one sum. Are people doing this and what are they using as a reference to this bunch of receipts?

We're all ears for early feedback on the new Invoice Gallery...

The Good Stuff coming Real Soon Now. In the meantime:

UK Accounts: Opening Mileage Balance

In the UK the amount you can reclaim for mileage depends on how many miles you've done in that tax year. It's 40p/mile up to 10,000 miles and 25p/mile after that.

FreeAgent works all that out for you, but you can also now specify if you've already done a number of miles in the time leading up to your FreeAgent Start Date. It's a mileage opening balance, if you like, and you can specify it along with your other User details (Home > People).

UK Accounts: Payroll Improvements

The UK Budget 2008 has been announced, so you can now setup a 2008/9 Payroll.

We've taken the opportunity to improve the payroll setup process too: you no longer have to have a 6th-of-the-month payday (!) and you get the gross salary split equally between the appropriate number of months.

Invoice Devkit

We're just about to release our Customized Invoice Template Devkit for you design gods out there.

Our Invoice Gallery will be along in release 'Prosecco' two weeks from now, but we wanted to get started on designing on your own templates so that you're ready to go too.

More details on how to submit designs for your own account, or for our standard gallery, will be posted on The Central later.

This Week's Tweaks

• Added a new Explanation/Expense category 'Charitable Donations'.


• Fixed a problem with generated Invoice references.


• Some general interface tidying.

Hi,

I purchased a Capital Asset (£811.93 / Laptop) on the 23rd November 2007, which shows on the profit and loss as a "501 Depreciation Charge" of £345.50.

It is my understanding that the laptop computer should be shown under "270 / Computer Hardware" as a debit in full. Thus, correctly reducing the corporation tax liability.

Was I wrong to use Capital Asset for this laptop?

...is a common question we get here at FreeAgent Central.

The simple answer is that, most of the time the VAT rules require you to because they're part of your service - just part of the rich tapestry of value-added-tax economics.

In specific circumstances though, expenses can be treated as 'disbursements' and rebilled with no added VAT. This is where you pay money to some third party on behalf of your client and your client actually received the goods or services.

Normally, travelling and accommodation and admin expenses don't count as disbursements, since you made use of them rather than your client. Of course, if your client is another business they would just reclaim the VAT they paid on your services anyway, so neither of you lose out.

For the full rules, see the HMRC rules
here.

As always, consult your accountant if you have any queries. We know some friendly ones...

It's really important to us that we have a real and ongoing conversation with our users, so that we can make FreeAgent even better as time goes by.

For a while we've been looking for the best way to do this, and experimented internally with email, blogs, wikis, forums, you name it. Nothing seemed quite right, quite welcoming enough to allow us to invite you in and build a real community.

Well now we've found 'Satisfaction' - an online service run by some thoughtful people in San Francisco - which allows us to really provide 'People-powered Customer Service'.

And since you're here, it looks like you've found it too.

We've already added our initial Frequently-Asked Questions here, and from now on it'll be the best place to report bugs, ask questions and make suggestions.

You can still email us individually (or at support@freeagentcentral.co.uk) of course, if you need to. But the conversations we can have openly are more valuable for everyone concerned, I reckon.

Go ahead and try it! We're listening.

This is a space for an open conversation between you and other people with interests and passions in this company or organization. Sometimes representatives from the company or organization may take part in the conversation too.

This is a place for real people to get the most from their products and services, and for companies to get real with their customers. It isn't a collection of generic responses, but rather a community that collaborates on answers, solutions and ideas through conversation.

The community here isn't owned by any one person, company or organization. It is brought to life through the care and feeding of all the participants.

If you need some help getting started, go here. And be sure to go here to check out our community guidelines for some simple ground rules.

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