Unanswered topics in FreeAgent Central

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.

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.

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.

For questions, comments, ideas or anything you want to say to or about Satisfaction, please go here.