Stop wasting time on business admin: try our 8 expert hacks

Streamlining and efficiency - two magic words many time-poor small business owners and rushed-off-their-feet landlords love to hear! Luckily when it comes to paperwork and admin, there are some tricks to claw back a little time in your day. 

Every week, FreeAgent’s support accountants speak to thousands of small business owners, sole traders and landlords. They are experts when it comes to identifying ways you could save precious minutes, and even hours, on business admin. Here are 8 of their favourite time-saving tips.

1. Choose the right account type

This is a real case of “a stitch in time…” for those of you right at the start of your FreeAgent journey. When you’re first setting up your FreeAgent account, it’s important to “double- and triple-check the FreeAgent account type you’ve chosen, and make sure that it’s correct”, says support accountant Caitlin. “We mention this on account set-up, but we still see a number of people who set up the wrong type of account.”

If you get it wrong, it’s a mistake that is not easily fixable. To get your admin in order, you’d have to go back and set up a completely new FreeAgent account from scratch. The good news is - this time sink is easy to avoid.

2. Let the good times roll!

Watching the money roll in is one of the greatest rewards of running a small business. And that’s where the invoicing features in FreeAgent can really help, from professional templates through to automated reminders chasing up late payers. 

Caitlin recommends taking a minute soon after you’ve set up your account to explore invoicing features, which can make things much smoother when it comes to getting paid.

“Cash-based sole traders in particular should consider early on whether they need to create invoices, how to set up email templates and contacts for invoices, and how to mark their invoices as paid,” she says. “For CIS subcontractors [those registered under the Construction Industry Scheme] ensuring settings are correct before they start creating and sending invoices will save time.”

3. Make a connection 

Linking your bank account to FreeAgent is one of the most effective time-saving tactics at your fingertips. It means your bank transactions will automatically be uploaded to FreeAgent each day, ensuring your bookkeeping is up to date, and saving time that you would otherwise have spent manually recording transactions. 

As our support accountant Ope points out: “Connecting your bank to FreeAgent saves you hours of manual data entry by automatically importing your bank transactions for you, this means less time on admin, more time for running your business!”

4. Get the balance right

Once you have connected your bank account to FreeAgent, get into the habit of regularly checking that the balance shown on your FreeAgent account matches the balance in your ‘real-life’ bank account. This is important to get an accurate picture of your cashflow and business health, and will also ensure you’re reporting the correct amounts to HMRC when filing your tax return in FreeAgent.

“We hear customers saying, ‘My FreeAgent bank balance doesn’t match my actual bank balance,’ and when you ask when the last time they checked if they matched it can be four years ago, or it’s never matched!” says Lee-Anne, another of FreeAgent’s support team. 

“If it’s been a while since the bank balances matched, that takes a huge amount of time to work through and identify where the mismatch happened. It creates a lot of extra admin for individuals and requires them spending a lot of time with the support team. 

“If it’s only been a week since the balances didn’t match, it’s easy to work out where it’s gone wrong. So taking a minute to check on a regular basis will save a lot of time fixing any mismatches that crop up.”

If you do spot a discrepancy between balances, don’t panic. Lee-Anne’s colleague Megan has this top tip for quickly spotting the source of a mismatch: “If your bank balance in FreeAgent doesn’t match, the first thing to look for is any manually created transactions. These can often be the cause.” 

5. The incredible bulk

So, your transactions are automatically flowing in from your bank account to your FreeAgent account. There’s one more step to go - explaining those transactions to the correct category. 

Explaining your transactions correctly is important to get a clear picture of your business’s finances and ensure you’re paying the right amount of tax. When you explain your transactions, they will appear in the right place in your profit and loss (P&L) and balance sheet reports.

If you have a lot of transactions, picking a category for each one individually can be time-consuming. Which is where bulk-explaining transactions comes in. This feature allows you to select multiple unexplained bank transactions in your FreeAgent account, choose the correct transaction type and category and then explain them all in one quick click. (As shown in the image below.)

Megan says: “This makes bookkeeping quicker. If you have multiple transactions for one certain supplier, for example, you can click them all at once and quickly explain them in bulk. This saves you going into each transaction and explaining them individually.”

And to make explaining transactions even more speedy, our AI-powered Guess feature will use existing information in your FreeAgent account to recognise similar types of transactions and automatically suggest an explanation. “Guess does this by identifying the relationship between a transaction’s description and the category applied across your other FreeAgent explanations with similar descriptions. If you are happy with what Guess has chosen you can then simply approve the transaction AND you can even do this in bulk too!” adds Megan.

6. Make a bold statement 

Now your latest transactions are going straight from your bank account into your FreeAgent records, and you’re on top of your explanations… but you might still need to upload some older information from bank statements. Our Guess feature can help you here too, if you follow this tip from support accountant Niamh.

“Rather than uploading multiple months’ worth of bank statements in one file, upload one month first, and explain these transactions before uploading the rest,” she says. “This will allow FreeAgent to learn about your transactions and will increase the number of correctly guessed transactions when you upload the rest of them.”

7. Sync your dates 

Scrambling around to check important upcoming tax deadlines adds time - and stress - to your admin. Even worse, if you don’t stay on top of deadlines and miss one, you could risk a penalty. And if you’re one of the sole traders or landlords mandated to use Making Tax Digital (MTD) for Income Tax to report your income and costs - including filing the new quarterly updates that come with it - that might just pile on the worries. 

FreeAgent’s Tax Timeline is your handy calendar guide to all your important tax dates and payments. It’s always available on your Overview screen in FreeAgent, but you can save more time (and avoid any last-minute panics) by syncing your Tax Timeline to your iCal, Google or Outlook calendar, says Niamh.

“Syncing your Tax Timeline to your own calendar is a quick reminder of those important dates,” Niamh adds. Each deadline is then embedded in your daily, weekly and monthly planning - with no nasty surprises!

8. Knowledge is power

One more golden tip from our friendly support team - don’t forget to use the vast library of helpful step-by-step advice that’s at your fingertips, 24/7 from FreeAgent. We have short how-to webinars available on-demand, easy-to-follow guides and helpful tips on our blog. 

Ope especially recommends heading to the Knowledge Base as a first port of call to find speedy answers about how to use FreeAgent. “The searchable FreeAgent Knowledge Base is very useful in providing quick solutions to simple questions,” she says. “You can find it on our website or on FreeAgent’s mobile app - open the app on Android or iPhone, click on the menu [three lines, which opens your menu options], click ‘Support’ and you’ll find a button to take you straight to the Knowledge Base.”