Self-employed best simple accounting package?

[Sicario]

I have always kept an old-fashioned red book ledger for my self-employed accounts and a bag of receipts which my accountant sorts out every year. What I do is very simple and I know I don't need an accountant.

I would like to learn to do my own books and tax returns but I have no idea where to start. Is there a simple online system or software that I can sign up to which will help to bring my accounts into the 21st century?

I am not great with computers and technology but I'm ready and willing to give it a go.

Thanks in advance!

QuickBooks is very simple and cheap. It is always on 'offer' so don't get sucked in to the super special price deal if you aren't sure straight away, there will be another offer next time you look. I found Sage more complicated, but it is an alternative.

If your accounts are really simple then excel will help you keep track. It depends how many transactions you need to record and expenses.

It’s not necessary to use software. Excel is fine my parents run a medium limited company employing 30 people and she keeps immaculate records on excel. The accountant installed some free software for the online tax return (as it’s compulsory to use software for that now) and we use Moneysoft to rn payroll.

We’ve just set up a new business.

We opened a business account with Starling which took ten minutes and so far great service (so would recommend these too).

We signed up to Quickbooks and it’s truly outstanding. Extremely user friendly. The Starling business account is linked so any credits into the account or anything spent on the Debit Card or by Direct Debit/Standing order goes automatically onto QB - and then there’s an easy drop down list to categorise it correctly.

There’s a running estimate of tax due. Loads of other easy features I can’t remember now.

Overall though (although we’re only a few weeks in but we’ve used it a lot so far) i’d highly recommend Quickbooks.

I’ve been there and done that with Excel before. And however organised you are there still an awful lot of manual inputting which takes time...and is open to error, no matter how good you are.

Quickbooks is almost zero effort. Link your business account and use it for all your debits and credits and Quickbooks does it all for you. Spend 10 minutes once a week categorising the transactions and that, as far as I can tell, is it.

Take a look a xero as well, that works with starling bank

FreeAgent works well for our needs. It's free with Natwest business accounts.

Thanks for the advice. I've never managed to master Excel. I just seem to screw it up every time!

There is an old computing adage: garbage in, garbage out. Computers - no matter what the package - don't magically produce accounts, they are only as good as the data that you input.

Speak to your Accountant. From a practical POV it's probably simplest to run a package that they support so you can easily transfer over your data files and they can do any necessary year-end tidying up at their end.

Xero is brilliant