Book-keeping freeware / software

[MsGee]

I have been sole trading for 10+ years and just moving over to a limited company. I have my own invoices and excel sheets to keep track of everything but I wondered whether it was worth having it all in one place with some proper software to generate invoices etc.

Does anyone else use this? Is it worth it? And would you reccomend anything?

I do realise the power of being a company director might have gone to my head and I might be better sticking with my little excel sheets.

I read up a bit on this a year ago, before realising that I only invoice about a dozen times a year so have very little need of this sort of thing.

But Wave Accounting got good reviews.

I follow a couple of freelancing and working-at-home blogs which have been invaluable to me for these kinds of tips.

Do you have an accountant? If so they will probably be able to recommend something. If not, how are you going to produce accounts compliant with all relevant regulations and standards in the iXBRL format required by HMRC?

I do the accounts for my DH's limited company (single director/employee plus me) but our business is really straightforward and currently only generates one invoice a month. We use Payroo for payroll and for keeping track of tax and NI, as well as generating P60s, P14s, P35s etc. So far we have completed all other submissions using HMRC's own software.

I've had a play with Sage Instant which looks ok, but we don't really need it at the moment. It's £100ish on Amazon so we might think about getting it at some point.

I have used Freeagent. I like it, but I haven't really used any others so nothing to compare it to. If you have a business account you can set it up to link with that, so that transactions appear within the software automatically.