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yay for FreeAgent Central

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    yay for FreeAgent Central

    as a newbie to the whole contractor market (especially managing a limited company) i've found freeagent central to be pretty helpful. i had (and still have) no idea about a lot of this stuff, but freeagent seems to take care of a lot of it for you.

    i still have a proper accountant that i check things over with, but for getting an idea of where the company stands and just day-to-day book-keeping it seems pretty good to me. no doubt the experienced guys out there already have all their book-keeping routines etc in place, but FreeAgent seems to offer quite a lot for the newbie - and i believe it's free for the first 6 weeks so you can try it out.

    definitely a plug, but no affiliation. just a happy user .

    #2
    yeah right

    Comment


      #3
      I suppose running a limited company is tricky for those that have yet to master capital letters.
      Will work inside IR35. Or for food.

      Comment


        #4
        ouch vectra, you got me . OK I'll punctuate and capitalise for the rest of this post, at least.

        Honestly, no affiliation. If anyone cares enough you can PM me and I'll tell you exactly where I work and what I do - short version, I'm another foreign import who is testing the contract market here, and I'm having enough trouble getting my head around just living and working in the big city, never mind coming to grips with the tax system.

        I'd been putting off doing the books and working out where the company stood for a few weeks but once I sat down and actually did it I found that FreeAgent provided a fair bit of hand-holding, certainly more than I'd found in the Excel spreadsheet my accountant had provided. I punch in my timesheets, and it can generate some invoices which it will then reconcile against your bank statements (which you can upload). I also put in my expenses (which you can sort into various categories, though I don't know if there are any other smarts that hang off that). I also popped in my annual salary and it worked out how much I should be paid net, and what the tax and NI contributions were. And I get a nice summary screen showing what the turnover is, minus expenses minus corps tax etc to show me the profit. Sure you can calculate all this yourself manually but it seems kind of neat to have something that just shows you - it means I don't have to come to grips with all the various taxes that apply in order to have a ball park idea of where the finances are. Come end of year I'll definitely be getting my accountant to do the books properly, but for an on-going 'how are we doing' report I thought it was pretty handy.

        I suppose there are off-line software packages that do similar things (which I have not bothered to look up yet), does anybody know of any? I guess the only thing is that you are reliant on the software vendor (whether online or offline) staying up to date with the current tax regime or the figures could be messed up.

        Like I said, if you're experienced and you've had your company for a while, it's probably not going to offer a whole lot to you as you're likely to be on top of most things. But if you're a newbie (and it seems there are a few on this forum, in spite of the 'I'm better than you, haha' attitude that seems prevalent at times), then it might prove helpful. And as it's free at the moment, what's the harm?

        Comment


          #5
          http://www.domyinvoice.com/

          A friend of mine has written http://www.domyinvoice.com/.
          ...my quagmire of greed....my cesspit of laziness and unfairness....all I am doing is sticking two fingers up at nurses, doctors and other hard working employed professionals...

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