Cloud Accounting and FreeAgent
Cloud Accounting is the term used for accounting for and recording your business’s financial records on a remote server (not on your own computer/laptop) – the data is sometimes referred to as being held ‘in a cloud’.
You can access this ‘cloud’ through the internet. This means you can access your business records from home, while out and about, from abroad………etc. Basically, wherever you have an internet connection!
…is a cloud accounting bookkeeping package with its head office based in Edinburgh. FreeAgent is a cloud based accounting package aimed at small businesses.
A lot of our clients use this package – here are some of the advantages they are already benefitting from;
1) The software can be directly linked to most business bank accounts (so no more requests from your accountant asking for missing bank statements!) or you can simply download and upload your electronic bank statements. You can ask us for help with this.
2) The software is aimed at business owners – not accountants. This makes it easier for non-accountancy trained people to use.
3) You don’t have to worry about backing up your data – as this is done automatically and held in the ‘cloud’ – securely. So if by chance your business premises are destroyed e.g. by fire (but hopefully not!) – You don’t have to worry about saving your financial data. In fact, you can just pop round to a friend or family’s house and access your financial data from there.
4) You can give your accountant access to your data – without sending any back-ups by post/e-mail. This means you can talk to your accountant from your home/office whilst you are both looking at the same figures.
5) You can design your own sales invoice using a FreeAgent sales invoice template with your business logo included and simply send you sales invoices out by e-mail – or you can print and post them out.
6) You can prepare and send out estimates to customers – then turn these into sales invoices when ready.
7) Cash expenses can be recorded using the ‘out of pocket’ expenses section of the software.
8) Actual expense receipts can be scanned in and linked to expenses recorded.
9) You can set up projects within the software – and link sales and expenses to a specific project and monitor how a project is going.
10) You are never tied in to the software – most users pay a monthly fee – speak to Cardens about discounts we can offer on this. If you want to stop using it then you can at any time. You can just download your transactions to date.
11) The software can be updated without you having to ‘buy in’ a new version. FreeAgent make regular updates and improvements.
The list goes on!
If you fancy giving FreeAgent a trial then you can do this for free – just let us know and we can arrange this for you.
If you have any specific questions about FreeAgent then please just ask.
