Hello, and welcome to FreeAgent. Thanks very much for signing up with us!
Before you can start to use FreeAgent properly, there are a couple of things you must do. These will only take a few minutes and will help you get the most out of the software’s sophisticated accounting and tax features.
When you first log in to your new FreeAgent account after activating it, this is the screen you will see.
Click the blue “Get Started Now” button to start.
Step 1. Company Details
The first step is to confirm your FreeAgent account type and put in some basic information about your company. Fields marked with red asterisks must be filled in, the rest you can leave blank.
FreeAgent account type
The type could be either Universal, if your business is based outside the UK, or UK-based businesses have a choice of four account types: UK Sole Trader, UK Partnership, UK Limited Liability Partnership and UK Limited Company. Make sure you’ve chosen the one that matches your business, because otherwise you won't see the correct tax calculations.
This article is for UK-based businesses. If your account type is Universal, please see our separate article here.
Address and company number
Fill in your business address details. These details will appear on the invoices you create in FreeAgent so make sure they’re correct.
And if your business is a UK limited company, fill in its registration number. You’re legally required to put this on your invoices, so make sure it’s correct too.
Then click Save and Continue to go on to the next step. Or if you don’t have these details to hand, at any time in the Getting Started process you can click Go Back to return to the previous step.
Step 2. My Settings
At step 2, choose, from the drop-down list, which format you’d like to use to enter dates into FreeAgent when you date your transactions. If you keep the default “dd mmm yy”, your dates will show as, for example, “25 Dec 09”.
Click Go Back or Save and Continue.
Step 3. Accounting Dates
Now it’s time to enter your accounting dates.
1. Company Start Date
The first, the ‘Company Start Date’ is the day the business officially started.
For sole trades and partnerships, this will be the day it began trading, as notified to HMRC.
For limited companies, it’ll be the incorporation date as shown on the certificate of incorporation, which is issued by Companies House.
2. First Accounting Year End Date
The second date, the ‘First Accounting Year End Date’, will be used by FreeAgent to set the year end for future years too.
So if your first accounting year finished on 31st December 2009, FreeAgent will work out your accounts to 31st December 2010, 31st December 2011, etc. and produce reports ending on your first accounting year end date and for each year after that.
For most (but not all) sole trades and partnerships, the year end date will be 5th April, to coincide with the tax year, so unless you know differently, use this date.
For limited companies, this will be a year from the end of the month in which you started the company. So if your company start date was 5th March 2010, your first accounting year end date would be 31st March 2011. This applies unless you've filed a form with Companies House to change your accounting date.
If you're not sure what your year end date should be, then ask your accountant. Don't worry, you can change the date later. Please see this article here for where to find and how to change your accounting dates.
3. FreeAgent start date
The third date is your FreeAgent start date, the date from which you’re going to start keeping your books on FreeAgent. It might be today's date, or you might decide to start keeping your books on FreeAgent as from a new VAT quarter, or (perhaps the easiest because you'd be able to easily collect opening balances from your accountant), the start of a new accounting year for your business.
You shouldn’t enter any transactions dated before the FreeAgent start date, and all your opening balances will be as at that date too.
More information about the FreeAgent start date here for new businesses and here for those businesses that have been trading for a while.
Then click Save and Continue, or Go Back.
Step 4. VAT Settings
The next screen is where you fill in your VAT information.
Not Registered
If your business isn’t registered for VAT, choose “Not Registered” from the drop-down list.
Will be registered but not yet
If you’ve applied for registration but haven’t yet had your VAT certificate from HM Revenue, choose “Registration Applied For” and put in the date you expect the certificate to take effect.
Already registered
And if your business is already registered for VAT, choose “Registered” and fill in the details. You’ll find more information about this here.
If you don't have the details to hand, choose "Not Registered" so that you can finish the Getting Started process, but remember to fill in the details as you'll see here before you issue your first invoice.
Step 5. Bank Account
The final step is filling in your bank account information.
This is important, because in many ways banking lies at the heart of FreeAgent. It’s by analysing what goes in and out of your bank that FreeAgent builds you a true picture of your business’s accounts.
The only compulsory fields here are the account name, and the opening balance.
Account name
Give the account a name such as “HSBC Current Account” so that it’s easy to identify this account later, if you put in more bank accounts. Please see this article here for how to set up a new bank account once you’ve finished the Getting Started process.
Business and personal accounts
By default FreeAgent assumes that all bank accounts are business bank accounts. But if you’re a sole trader, or a partner in a non-limited-liability partnership, and you haven’t yet opened a dedicated account for your business, you can tick the box to make this a personal account.
See here for an explanation of the difference between business and personal accounts.
What’s the opening balance?
The opening balance is the balance as at the start of the day on your FreeAgent start date - which is the end of the previous day. So in this case, I would look at my bank statement as at 31st December 2008 and take the balance as at the end of that day, to put in here.
Sort code and account number
If you want to take advantage of FreeAgent’s quick and easy categorisation of your bank transactions by uploading your statements electronically from Online Banking, you’ll need to fill in your bank account’s sort code and account number. If you don’t want to do this, just leave these boxes blank.
Once you’re done, click Save and Finish to start using FreeAgent!
You’ll be taken to the Overview screen. Click here for more information about that screen.
What should I do next?
Here are some suggestions:
- Click on Settings, click Company Logo and upload your logo, which FreeAgent will then automatically put on to your invoices.
- Choose a template for your invoices. Click here to see how to do this using our Theme Gallery.
- Import your contacts, that’s your customers and your suppliers, from Outlook, Gmail or Mac Mail. Click here to see how.
- Browse our comprehensive knowledge base for lots of helpful articles to get you started, for example: