FreeAgent Update: Release Roquefort

Ed Molyneux

Founder

We're building up the momentum towards our launch date (more on this in another post today) and there's a lot of improvements in this week's update. Check it out:

Support for Partnerships, and Limited Liability Partnerships

FreeAgent now supports two new company types: Partnerships and Limited Liability Partnerships (LLPs).

For tax purposes, these are treated like Sole Traders except that the profit is divided between the partners. To set how this division works, you can assign a 'profit share' to the Self Assessment Tax return details for each partner. The profit is divided into the ratio of the shares.

For example, by default each partner has a profit share of 1, so all profit is divided equally as far as tax is concerned (it's up to you to make sure individual drawings on the business are fair). If you wanted one partner to receive twice the share of the other, that first partner's profit share would be 2 and the remaining partner would be 1. This would give the first partner 66.66% of the profit and the second would get 33.33%, a ratio of 2:1.

Limited Liability Partnerships will need to enter their Companies House registration number under Home > Company Details , to ensure that it's included on invoices (which is a legal requirement, as it is for Limited Companies).

If you're currently running a Partnership from your Sole Trader account, just let us know and we'll convert it for you.

Better calculation of Profit for Self Assessed Income Tax

Previously FreeAgent made a quick estimate of profit to calculate the 'self-employment income' for your sole trader tax return. It now uses the full Profit and Loss accounts calculation to work it out, and you can select through to the P&L for the appropriate year, directly from the Income Tax page.

Support for Credit Card Accounts

We know some of our Beta Testers are using FreeAgent to upload data from Credit Card statements. Not because we're nosy, mind, but because they asked us to help out. So we did: you can now explicitly make that Bank Account a Credit Card Account instead.

You won't need to enter the full card number, in case you were worried - just enter the last eight digits and that will help with finding it from your multiple-account OFX upload (if you are lucky enough for your bank to support that). Next week we'll be adding fancy icons to make it even easier to distinguish these.

New Unexplained Transaction Info

To make it quicker and easier to find which statement months have unexplained transactions, we list those months at the top of each monthly statement page and allow you to select through straight to them.

Mileage over 10,000 in a year?

Lucky you. FreeAgent now correctly uses 25p/mile for your car mileage over 10,000 miles in a given tax year, instead of 40p as previously. See the HMRC guidance on travel rates here, and note that this week we will be adding support for motorbike and bicycle mileage, too! If you're doing over 10,000 miles on your bicycle in a year, we'll be offering a special prize.

PDF Invoice and Logo Improvements

We have a new method for creating PDF invoices for you to save and email. The technicalities would bore you, believe me, but it's faster than the old one and allows us to match the web page preview and the PDF document much more accurately. It also makes it possible to offer you a variety of Invoice Templates, which we're working on at the moment.

There have also been some improvements to our handling of your logo. You can now upload a high-resolution logo of any format, and it will be correctly sized and printed in it all it's crystal-clear glory on your invoices. A smaller version is also stored for use on your FreeAgent web pages and the invoice web page previews (which makes it faster to load over the internet).

Just upload a new high-res logo to take advantage of this new feature. Do give these new invoices a go, and let us know how you get on.