The FreeAgent Blog

If you’ve ever found yourself hunting for an old pesky expense then you'll love our new search facility for super-speedy data digging.

Search lives in the header and you can use it to find: contacts, projects, invoices, expenses, and bank transactions.

You can search by keyword or even amount. Results are split by category and we display a bunch of other relevant data, like the invoice status or value of a bank transaction, to help you find what you're looking for.

Simple. Functional. Job done.

Mobile Timer

We've also updated the Time Tracking area of FreeAgent Mobile to include a new start/stop timer for creating timeslips.

It's dead easy - just start the timer when you start a task and leave it running until you've finished. Move around the app, put your phone to sleep (not like the vet does), even log out, and the timer will continue to run until you stop it.

As ever, this will work on iOS, Android or Windows phone device - just log in to your FreeAgent account on your mobile and get tracking time.

Coming soon...

In the next few weeks we'll start rolling out our long-awaited Bank Feeds feature. If you haven't heard (where have you been?) bank feeds allow you to connect your online bank account to FreeAgent in order to automatically import bank transactions on a daily basis.

We'll start enabling this over the next few weeks with a fairly healthy selection of the top UK and US banks, ramping things up over time. It’s probably the biggest single feature we’ve ever worked on, and we’re really excited about finally getting this into the wild.

Until next time,
Roan and the team at FreeAgent

During our last Facebook Live Q&A, we had a question from an unlucky taxpayer who said:

“I realised too late that I needed a code to access the on-line self-assessment form and it will take until after the deadline for it to arrive (7+ days). What do I do?”

If you know you aren’t going to make the deadline of midnight this Thursday (31st January) to file your tax return, then the best thing you can do is to file your return as soon as you can.

If you’re in the same position as the questioner above, wait for your code to arrive and then file your return. You will be fined £100 for filing your return late, but don’t worry, you can make sure it isn’t any worse than that!

What kind of penalties might I pay?

As well as the £100 fine for filing your tax return up to 3 months late (more than that and the fines start to increase), you may also pay penalties on any unpaid tax. Even if you’re going to file your actual return late, try to pay your tax bill by the 31st January deadline.

Paying your tax is a separate process from filing your tax return, so if you know your tax bill already because you’ve used a package like TaxCalc to work it out, go ahead and pay your tax even if you can’t file your return yet because you don’t have a code.

If you do pay your tax late, you’re likely to pay penalties, and these penalties increase the longer you leave the tax unpaid. So if you pay within 30 days of the deadline, you’ll pay a penalty of 5% of the unpaid tax, but if you leave it longer than six months, you’ll pay another 5% again, and so on. You’ll also pay interest on both the unpaid tax and unpaid penalties.

Could I ask an accountant?

You could go and find an accountant to file your return for you, as they will nearly always have agent rights to file as many tax returns as they wish, and the rules now say you don’t have to be registered with HMRC as a client of a particular firm of accountants in order for them to file your return.

But be warned, the accountant will probably charge a premium rate to prepare your return so near the deadline, which will almost certainly be more than the £100 fine you would pay to HMRC.

HMRC select a random number of tax returns to check each year, and they do also have a longer window to open a check into your tax return if you file late.

So unless you have an accountant friend or relative who is willing to help, or you really don’t want HMRC to have longer to open a check into your return, I would avoid this route!

What if there are extenuating circumstances?

HMRC may cancel any penalties if you have what they call a "reasonable excuse” for filing your return late or not paying your tax on time - for example, if a flood washed away all of your documents and you hadn’t kept back-up copies, you could appeal to HMRC to cancel the penalty.

In the case of our Facebook commenter, because HMRC warn that the activation code can take 7 working days to arrive, I would say that if you have only just asked for the code they are unlikely to agree to cancel the penalty - but it’s worth asking nonetheless!

Small business owners wear a lot of hats; even if you’re a web designer, you’re also a sales person, a writer, a bookkeeper, and a PA. We know it’s hard to stay on top of all those other jobs when you’re trying to earn a living, so this week we’re looking at ways to “automagically” save some time and hassle.

What services do you use to save yourself some trouble? Hit us up in the comments or on Twitter. And have a great weekend!

Like it or not, part of running a business is managing the books - you probably didn’t go into business to track expenses and generate accounts, but the bills and the tax man always have to get paid!

Here at FreeAgent, we’re always looking for ways to make your bookkeeping less of a burden. We reckon that if you dedicate just one hour a week to your business finances, you’ll not just save time on the admin work, but will suddenly have a chance to work through all those bigger-picture financial questions, like “how profitable is that client?”, or “how do I plan for seasonal business?”

The first step is to pick an hour that you can dedicate to your books, then draw up a plan of action so you can turn doing your books into a regular routine. Here’s a checklist of the things that I recommend every business should do every week:

Your hour a week checklist:

Keep up to date with your invoices

Invoices might be the key to getting paid, but it’s still amazing how many clients I’ve had who were too busy to send their invoices! Scheduling time to invoice every week is a great way to keep your cash flow healthy and teach your customers to pay promptly.

How FreeAgent can help: make use of FreeAgent’s automatic invoice email feature to make sending invoices easier, and even set up recurring invoice profiles that let you invoice the same customers for the same amount every month. To save time chasing money, set up automatic invoice reminder emails that remind customers about overdue invoices.

Manage your bills

Keep track of the costs you’re incurring and pay your bills promptly to keep good relationships with your suppliers and stay on top of your cash flow. As part of your hour, set aside some time to go into your online banking site and pay any bills that are due for payment.

How FreeAgent can help: If your suppliers give you credit, record your bills in FreeAgent and that way you will have views on both the overview and contacts screens to show what you owe and when.

Reconcile your bank transactions

Do you know what you spent your money on in the last week? The last month? Which customers haven’t paid you yet?

If you don’t keep track of your bank accounts, you will forget what you bought, and when your accountant asks you ten months later as she goes through your bank statements, you don’t stand a snowball’s chance in the Olympic flame of remembering what each cost was for. Use part of your hour a week to stay on top of your bank transactions to save yourself a last-minute scramble.

How FreeAgent can help: You can import your bank statement directly into FreeAgent, then just “explain” each transaction. FreeAgent can even automatically import transactions from your PayPal account and some UK bank accounts.

Check your projects are earning you enough

Quick: which of your projects is your most profitable? What’s your best earner, even after all those taxi fares and special delivery postage costs? It can be hard to know if you haven’t recorded all of your costs!

Use part of your hour a week to tie costs back to any projects that you’re running to make sure that you have a true view of how much profit you’re making on each project. Once you have the full picture, you can make even smarter decisions about where to spend your time.

How FreeAgent can help: Once you’ve updated your transactions, you can use the project profitability area in FreeAgent to spot your most profitable projects. If you aren’t making enough profit, you can use these reports to say “No more Mr Nice Guy” and re-visit your pricing!

Learn one new thing about your business

What secrets is your business hiding from you? Once you’ve got all the admin out of the way, you can use part of your hour to turn detective and learn to read what’s hidden inside your accounts.

As a start, take a look at your profit and loss account for the last few months. Don’t panic, this really is just a sum of what your business earnt and what its day-to-day running costs were. Did your income drop at a certain point in the year? Could you smooth this out by broadening your product range, or by invoicing your customers monthly instead of annually?

How FreeAgent can help: Dive into the accounting section of FreeAgent to start exploring your profit and loss account and other reports.

Two-minute tasks

Have you got two minutes to make things even easier? Here are two things that you can do every day to make your hour a week even simpler:

Record expenses as you go

How many receipts do you have in your wallet right now, waiting to be forgotten or lost? If you’ve got a smartphone, record that expense as soon as you spend the money, before you can forget about it.

How FreeAgent can help: FreeAgent is mobile-friendly, so you can just take a quick snap of your receipt on your smartphone, upload it to your FreeAgent expense entry, then throw it away, safe in the knowledge that the cost will show the next time you log in. And yes, HMRC will accept the scanned receipt as proof of the expense! Just make sure to take a picture of both sides if there’s any information on the back. For more help with receipts, we also integrate with Receipt Bank.

Track your time, even if it’s not billable

When’s the best time to track your time? As soon as you do the work, when the details are fresh in your mind! As soon as you finish a task, just take two minutes to record it, whether it’s billable time or not. Tracking unbillable time will give you a full picture of your profitability, and will help you make good decisions about where to spend your time.

How FreeAgent can help: You can track your time on the go with FreeAgent’s mobile-friendly interface, on FreeAgent at your computer, or you can even use an integrated time tracker like Eon to automatically send timesheet data to FreeAgent.

I like an hour a week because it’s a small habit that can make a big difference for your business - the regular routine will help you stay on top of the boring stuff, but also gives you time to think about your big-picture goals for your business, and how to achieve them. Small habits really can have big results!