Freeagent

In this section we are going to highlight some of the features available in Freeagent that enable you to get things done in your business. For more details about the current features and prices, visit Freeagent.

Short video guides (COMING SOON)

Here are some short videos to help you see how easy it is to use the software, and also act as a reminder in case you haven’t used the features in a while.

• Create a customer
• Create an estimate for a customer
• Create an invoice for a customer
• Create an invoice for a customer with CIS and Reverse Charge
• Create a recurring invoice for a customer
• Send a customer statement
• Send a customer a reminder to pay

Work

This is where most business owners spend their time. It’s where estimates are drafted and sent to their potential customers. It’s where time is tracked so not a second of work is forgotten about, and it’s where those estimates are flipped into sales invoices once their customers accept the offer and the work is completed.

Other features in this area are creating projects so that you are able to keep tabs on certain events and work types for particular clients, and outstanding invoices from them. It’s also where you to setup recurring invoices so that repetitive processes can be automated, minimising risk of errors or omissions for work that comes in regularly from certain customers and clients.

My Money

In this section of Freeagent, you are able to find all the areas relevant to you as a user of Freeagent. Things like Expenses, Dividends, Salary and Payroll are all areas that help you monitor and maintain transactions that affect you directly.

• Expenses allow you to submit costs you have incurred, perhaps due to being out and about on duties for the business. They will be things you have paid for personally but would like to claim back through the business at some point. Examples might be parking, hotels, meals and train tickets.
• Salary allows you to keep track of under or over paid salary or wages. This is great if the business doesn’t always pay you your salary or wage on time, and so having this section keeps track of what is owed meaning you can sleep easy knowing nothing gets missed. This updates automatically based on the payslip and the bank payment.
• Dividends allow you keep track of all dividends paid to you by the company. It also provides access to the dividend voucher for each dividend paid that you need to keep a copy of for your personal tax return.
• Payroll allows you to run the payroll for the business so that your employees have their taxes and national insurance calculated correctly on each of their payslips. This is also the location of workplace pension report that can be exported once a pay run is done.

Banking

This is the area where you will categorise all the bank transactions that are automatically imported from your bank account via a bank feed or from a bank statement you downloaded from your internet banking.

Freeagent will also learn how you deal with transaction and automatically categorise them once it determines a pattern. For example, if you have your telephone with Vodafone then Freeagent will learn that this normally ends up in Telephone and has 20% VAT reclaimed.

This section allows users to also monitor cash levels, as well as see historic balances for the last 12 months and estimate future balances up to 3 months.

It’s not just bank accounts that can be connected in this section. Accounts like PayPal, credit cards, payment processors and loan accounts can all be paired to ensure we don’t miss a penny.

Taxes

This is where we feel Freeagent runs circles around the competition because they offer so much real time information about various taxes that it’s difficult to understand why others don’t do this out of the box.

Freeagent has a feature on their dashboard called the Tax Timeline which allows business owners to know how balances are building up as well as when they become due.

Imagine that after a couple seconds of looking at your Freeagent dashboard you were able to see how much VAT was due so that when making that decision to buy a new piece of equipment was going help reduce the VAT due, or that perhaps there wasn’t enough cash available at present to buy this and pay the VAT bill.

Taxes that Freeagent can estimate and show in real time to you on the dashboard are:

• Self Assessment
• Corporation Tax
• PAYE & NI
• CIS
• VAT

Accounting

This section contains everything a business would need to get a better financial understanding of their business. It contains the following reports.

• Profit & Loss to show how much profit the business has made, or loss if times get difficult
• Balance Sheet to show all the assets and liabilities the business has at any one point in time
• Trial Balance to show the balance of each category for a chosen date
• Nominal Activity to show all the transactions that make up the balance of a category
• Aged Debtors to see who owes the business money
• Aged Creditors to see who the business owes money to
• Customer Sales to identify the biggest customers in the business so you can potentially focus more on them

Add-ons & Connections

There are a plethora of connections that Freeagent can handle which will make automation of your business processes more streamlined. Some of the main providers that we see used on a daily basis are:

• Dext (formerly Receipt Bank)
• Auto Entry
• Stripe
• GoCardless
• Goodtill
• Shopify
• Basecamp
• Zapier

The list is constantly growing, so to see the latest integrations check out Freeagent’s dedicated support page.

Mobile App

The key to any good accounting and bookkeeping app is having it accessible on the go. Freeagent fits that bill perfectly, and here is a quick video showing some of the features.