Software setup and training

The software is not the problem, and neither are you

Many businesses we see are already using accounting software, and a good many of them are using it slightly wrong in a way nobody ever told them about.

That is not a competence problem. Accounting software is sold on the promise that it does the accounting for you, and it is genuinely good at the mechanical parts. What it cannot do is tell you that a transaction is in the wrong place, because it has no idea what your business does. It will reconcile to the wrong answer, produce a VAT return from the wrong answer, and report a profit based on the wrong answer, without a single warning at any point.

The accounting software faults we see over and over

These are the specific ones, and they recur across clients, sectors and all three packages:

• The software set up incorrectly at the very beginning, so every year since has been consistent with a mistake made in week one.
• A bank or credit card feed refreshed by following the prompt, which creates a brand new account in the software instead of reconnecting to the existing one. Both accounts then reconcile perfectly and one of them is fictional.
• Transactions allocated to the wrong nominal codes, and the specific version of that which does the most damage: income posted to expense codes, and expenses posted to income.
• Bank feeds that were never set up, or that stopped months ago and nobody noticed because the reconciliation screen looked calm.
• VAT, PAYE and CIS control accounts that have never been agreed to anything outside the software.
• Opening balances carried forward year after year without ever being checked.

What these have in common is that none of them is visible from inside the software. They surface later, usually when the year-end accounts are being prepared, and correcting them then is time-consuming and can cost the client more than doing it properly would have.

Setting your accounting software up so it stays right

A proper setup is mostly decisions rather than clicks. A chart of accounts that matches how you actually think about the business, rather than the default one. Bank feeds connected to the right accounts and tested. VAT settings that match the scheme you are genuinely on. Opening balances checked rather than typed. Rules and defaults set for the transactions you have every week.

Done once, that removes whole categories of error permanently. The alternative is a clean-up later on, plus every decision made in the meantime on the strength of figures that were not right.

Practical training using your own records

We train business owners and their staff to use the software they have, on their own data rather than a demo file. The point is not to make you an accountant. It is that you should be able to do the routine things confidently and, more importantly, recognise when something does not look right.

Knowing that the bank balance in the software should match the bank, and what to do on the day it does not, prevents more damage than any amount of bookkeeping theory. So does knowing which questions are worth asking us rather than guessing at.

We would rather teach you than keep you dependent. Some of our clients need monthly bookkeeping afterwards and some genuinely do not, and we will tell you which we think you are.

Training bought after a year end, by a client who keeps her own books

Not everybody needs the whole thing set up from scratch. Karen was already established and already using her software when she came to us, and the training she bought was about the handful of habits that were making her year end harder than it needed to be.

Training somebody who already knows their way around is a different job from starting from nothing, and it is usually a shorter one. If that is your position, say so when you get in touch and we will scope it accordingly.

Xero, QuickBooks Online or FreeAgent

We work with all three. Xero is generally our preferred platform: its bank reconciliation, reporting and accountant collaboration tools are the ones we find most effective, and it integrates well with the other systems our clients run.

That is a preference, not a rule, and we will not migrate you for the sake of it. QuickBooks Online and FreeAgent are better suited to some businesses depending on size, transaction volume and what the software actually has to do. Moving package is disruptive and it carries its own risk around opening balances and history, so it needs a better reason than the accountant liking something else.

If you want a longer read on choosing between them, we wrote accounting software for small businesses, which goes through what actually differentiates them in practice.

Two of our Google reviews are about the training specifically

We would rather point you at evidence than describe ourselves. Of the eight Google reviews on our reviews page, two are about training rather than about the practice generally, and both name Xero. One mentions that the session was prepared in advance, with the reviewer's own Xero account and questions looked at beforehand. The other describes an introductory Xero session.

Both are left by named people and both are on Google, where we did not write them and cannot edit them. That is the sort of claim we prefer to make: checkable, attributable, and not ours.