Phil Norton's dashboard

Phil Norton replied on October 15, 2009 14:13 to the question "Recommended Bank Accounts?" in FreeAgent Central:

I'm in the process of moving my personal account away from Smile (owned by the Co-Operative Bank) because, despite being an internet bank, you simply can't download any transactions for use elsewhere. Something so basic, yet it's just not there.

I've no idea if the Co-Operative Business banking is also lacking, but if it was, then that would be a huge reason for me to avoid them: uploading and analysing bank statements to FAC is one of the main reason I use, and love using, the software so much.

Phil Norton replied on October 15, 2009 13:40 to the question "Recommended Bank Accounts?" in FreeAgent Central:

I use Abbey, and would highly recommend it. Fee-free banking (within certain constraints), good online banking (manage direct debits, payments, multiple Abbey accounts etc), and their downloads work perfectly with FAC.

http://www.abbey.com/csgs/Satellite?c...

Phil Norton replied on October 12, 2009 08:44 to the question "Report showing income from clients" in FreeAgent Central:

Sales reporting would be an excellent addition. The Client Account History is one way of doing it, but I'd love to be able to run a report for a certain period (similar to the way you can view invoices/bills) and have FAC show me the total sales over that period.

If nothing else, this would make it easier to decide which clients get the extra big box of chocolates at Christmas, and which get the "bog standard" size!! ;o)

Phil Norton shared an idea in FreeAgent Central on September 25, 2009 16:55:

Some Bill Lovin'

Much as FAC changed the way I did my accounts, using the Bills feature has helped give me an even better handle on what portion of the money in my account is actually mine, and what I'm gonna owe to other people.

But it seems that the Bills section needs one wee tweak to make it as easy to use as Invoices:

Why can't I see "Recent, Open or Overdue" bills? I'm restricted to viewing All OR Open OR Overdue, and not all of these status at once. And even then, there's a forced date range which isn't present in the Invoices section, which makes it harder to see what money is owed, especially if it overlaps the time scales in the secondary menu.

Anyone else agree?

Phil Norton replied on September 20, 2009 11:09 to the question "Car Parking A Benefit In Kind?" in FreeAgent Central:

Thanks guys, much appreciated!!

Phil Norton asked a question in FreeAgent Central on September 17, 2009 15:50:

Car Parking A Benefit In Kind?

Technically, this is an accounting question rather than a FAC one, but you guys are so helpful, I thought I'd ask. If I'm a director of a Ltd business with a city centre office, can the business pay for car parking for each director? Is that in any way a benefit in kind? I'd assume if it was an allowable expense, VAT could therefore be reclaimed on it?

Thanks in advance,
Phil

Phil Norton shared an idea in FreeAgent Central on September 03, 2009 11:05:

Invoice Tagging

I've raised this idea with the FAC guys by email in the past, but thought I'd stick it on here to see if anyone else thinks it might be a good addition to FAC.

For me, tagging of elements on an invoice would solidify my love of FAC. For example, I run a web development business. So we do design, development, hosting, consultancy etc. Thanks to the superb upload & analysing of bank statements, our hosting bills can be very easily calculated. What we can't calculate (automatically, at least) is what hosting we're actually selling.

So what I'd love to see is, when adding a New Invoice Item, there's a dropdown menu for Category/Type that, unlike the more strict Invoice Types (that are there for accounting purposes), would be populated according to each business' needs. And this isn't seen on an invoice: it's purely to allow each FAC user to track sales.

So, if our hosting costs us £200 per month, and we only sell £1,200 per year, we can easily see that we're either not charging enough, or selling enough hosting. For me, this would need to be on a per-item (as opposed to per-invoice) basis, as we tend to invoice several different items at once.

What do others think?

Phil Norton replied on June 26, 2009 20:04 to the question "Advice Sought: From Sole Traders To LLP or Ltd" in FreeAgent Central:

Thanks Phil & Ed. Will take a look at the blog page and speak with my accountant!

Phil Norton reported a problem in Dropbox on April 20, 2009 08:46:

Can't Sync File(s)... Permission Denied

Been having a few sync issues with Dropbox lately. I updated to 0.6.491 earlier today, and after indexing, I get an error that it "Can't sync "magpie_cache"; permission denied. I've done a quick look using Spotlight and I have quite a few of these folders, so I'm not sure where the problem is.

Anyone got any ideas how to solve this?

Phil Norton asked a question in FreeAgent Central on March 17, 2009 10:05:

New Invoicing Features

Great job lads: invoicing without a project is now possible! That'll be a real time-saver for me, as I tend to work on several small projects at the same time as larger ones! But, are you planning to allow us to add P/O Numbers to invoices that have been created outside of a project?

We have one client who needs a P/O for everything, no matter how small, and we like to invoice them immediately upon sign off. But this means we need to create a myriad of small projects for each invoice, which makes the project page somewhat overwhelming.

Do this, and I promise, I'll be your best friend!!

Phil

Phil Norton replied on February 25, 2009 14:22 to the problem "Company logo uploading problem" in FreeAgent Central:

I'm getting the same result. No logo displaying for me...

Phil Norton replied on February 03, 2009 12:33 to the question "Employees can access everything?" in FreeAgent Central:

Just wondering if the FAC team are any closer to implementing this. I notice that Xero.com offer this sort of functionality (http://help.xero.com/UserGuide.aspx?h...) and it'd be great if FAC had it too. It's not a deal breaker for me at the minute, but I'd guess if people were comparing the two products, the lack of permissions and better access rights might count against you.

Phil Norton shared an idea in FreeAgent Central on January 07, 2009 10:30:

Invoice List With Ex-VAT Amounts

Could the invoices shown in the Inovice tab and the Invoice Payment Timeline on the homepage also feature the ex-VAT amount? Or change the "Total Value" to the ex-VAT amount? For me, it's a little misleading to show full amounts, when the ex-VAT amount is more useful.

Phil Norton replied on January 07, 2009 10:26 to the problem "Tax Issues - Values Constantly Changing" in FreeAgent Central:

Thanks Ed!

Phil Norton replied on December 31, 2008 13:38 to the problem "Tax Issues - Values Constantly Changing" in FreeAgent Central:

Thanks Ed. Each time I refresh the page, I get different values. Want me to email some screenshots to the FAC support email to help diagnose the problems?

Phil Norton reported a problem in FreeAgent Central on December 31, 2008 11:32:

Tax Issues - Values Constantly Changing

Not sure if you guys are tweaking the income workings, but I am seeing all sorts of crazy figures in my tax returns. Apparently, for the 2007/08 year, I owed the tax man over £16k!! A few weeks ago, it was showing a fairly accurate figure closer to £6k.

The strange thing is, this figure changes depending on whether or not I view the full self assessment page (where I see a staggering £16k) or the income landing page, where the figures seem to fluctuate.

My guess is you're working on the live server, but wanted to report this just in case...

Phil Norton asked a question in FreeAgent Central on December 20, 2008 16:56:

Adding Capital Assets

Hi

Let's say I buy a car on hire purchase, and add this as a capital asset to my business (I'm a sole trader). Let's also say that the direct debit comes out of my sole trader business account every month. What's the best way of getting FAC to handle this? I can obviously add the payments every month, but if I want the "Income" tab to give me a pretty accurate reflection of my tax liability, then where do I put the capital asset?

TIA
Phil

Phil Norton replied on December 02, 2008 16:49 to the question "Correcting VAT Errors" in FreeAgent Central:

Thanks Stuart for all your help. I'll give it a go when the time comes!

Phil

Phil Norton replied on December 02, 2008 14:49 to the question "Correcting VAT Errors" in FreeAgent Central:

Hi Stuart

But will that mean I'll need to do some trickery in order to keep the figures in the VAT return sweet? For example, my current figures show that, at the end of Dec...

Box 3: £4,682.21
Box 4: £278.91
Box 5: £4,403.30

I was under the impression that I'd need to add a Journal entry that would effectively increase the Box 4 figure by £305.99 in order to even everything out. Is that not the case?

Ta
Phil

Phil Norton replied on December 02, 2008 13:36 to the question "Correcting VAT Errors" in FreeAgent Central:

Hi Stuart

Nope, I assumed I would just make an underpayment in the Oct-Dec return as it was under the £2k limit HMRC set:

At the end of the current period, if the net value of VAT errors you’ve found on previous VAT returns is £2,000 or less, you can adjust your VAT account and include the value of that adjustment in your current VAT return.

To work out the net value of VAT errors on previous returns, you should work out:

the total amount due to us, if any; and
the total amount due to you, if any.
If the difference between the two figures is more than £2,000, you must use Method 2.