Olga's dashboard

Sundries tends to be an emotive issue with HMRC - the higher it is the more likely HMRC will want a breakdown. They think taxpayers are hiding non-allowable expenses in it!

I would use Cost of Sales/Cost of Sales with a description.

Olga,

You can indeed claim expenses up to seven years prior to the company start date. FreeAgent includes these in the accounts as if they were part of the first accounting period.

We only display tax periods from your company 'FreeAgent start date', though, and your 'expenses owed' opening balance is based on that date.

If you look at the first available month, though, you should see a negative 'brought forward' balance. Since your opening expense balance is (presumably) zero, FreeAgent works backwards through the pre-start expenses and assumes a negative owed balance.

It looks like actually that historical opening balance should be the zero one, so you should enter a FreeAgent opening balance of the same value as that historical one, but with the sign changed.

For example, say you have a few expenses totalling £500 incurred before start.

If your FreeAgent expense opening balance is zero, you'll see the first month of pre-start expenses shows a starting balance of -500. You should adjust the FreeAgent opening balance to show +£500 instead.

(you can change your Expenses Owed opening balance as part of your user details under Home > People).

Olga,

Sounds like a bug - sorry for the inconvenience - could you let me know the details of the offending expense by email (ed at freeagentcentral dot com) and we'll take a closer look?

Your other question - books, magazines and most kinds of travel are 'zero-rated' for VAT in the UK. You don't pay VAT on them, so there's nothing to reclaim.

If you incur a travel expense of some kind that does include VAT (check out the receipt - it's legally required to show it) then just change the VAT rate on that expense to show '17.5%' instead of 'Auto'.

Thank you Olly, really appreciate your fast reply!

Hi Olga

We don't support multi-currency in this way right now.

If you paid for these expenses from a credit/debit card then you'll see the amount in your company denomination on your bank statement. If you paid cash in the local currency, you'll have to convert the currency using an online tool (we don't have this built into FreeAgent right now).

You can get historical currency conversion rates from here: http://www.oanda.com/convert/fxhistory

Does this help?

Thank you Olly, I hope you will add custom categories soon.
It seams like several types of my business expenses will have to go in Sundries. – Olga, on July 07, 2008 20:10

Hi Olga,

Right now you can't create custom categories, although it's something we do plan to add support for.

Regarding the category for renting handsets, I would recommend you use Sundries

Thank you, everything worked this time.
I will have to remember it next time...

Olga,

Only Sent invoices (not Draft, and not Paid) are shown in this list. If there are no Sent invoices to shown, we don't display the Invoice Receipt option.

I agree that this is confusing, and what we should do is display the Invoice Receipt option, but display a message showing why it's not possible to create an explanation of that type. We'll get on the case...

Once you have some invoices of that type, you can follow the procedure above to allocate the payment - a series of explanations each of the appropriate invoice amount.

I have a similar problem. I often receive a single payment for several invoices.

When I select an unexplained payment and click question mark to select a payment explanation, in the drop-down list for 'Set Type' I do not have an option: 'Invoice receipt'.

I can see in the credit section the following options:
Refund; Money Received from User, Transfer from another Account, Disposal of Capital Asset, Other Money in.

Which one should I choose, and why do I not have an option 'Invoice receipt?
I find this part very confusing, having spent half an hour trying to figure it out.

Could you please explain how to easily assign 1 payment to 4 invoices, possibly with different dates?

Thank you in advance