Skip to main content 5 ways FreeAgent can automate your admin
Why waste valuable time doing tedious small business admin when you could automate it instead? Here are five FreeAgent features that can cleverly automate some of those annoying administrative chores.
1. Synced up bank transactions
Whether you’ve agonised over paper bank statements or wrangled with unwieldy spreadsheets, you’ll probably know that keeping track of your business’s bank transactions manually can be a drain on your valuable time.
Fortunately for FreeAgent users, there are bank feeds, which provide a secure connection between our software and your bank account to automatically import your bank transactions into FreeAgent. To make our bank feeds to all major UK banks faster and more secure than ever, we recently rebuilt them using a new technology called Open Banking.
Find out more about bank feeds in FreeAgent.
2. Smart bank reconciliation
Bank reconciliation, the process of ensuring that your accounting records match up with the money coming in and out of your bank account, can be both tedious and time-consuming. If you perform your bank reconciliation manually, losing a single receipt could be enough to throw all your numbers off balance and set you back several hours.
The solution we’ve created for this problem is a feature called ‘Guess’. It intelligently categorises or ‘explains’ your bank transactions based on existing information in your FreeAgent account, matching up bank transactions to the appropriate bill or invoice. We recently made some exciting updates to make Guess even smarter.
3. Automatic reminder emails
If you haven’t had to chase a customer about an overdue payment, you should count yourself lucky. The Credit Protection Association reports that the average small business in the UK chases five outstanding invoices at any given time, wasting up to an hour and a half every day.
To help solve this problem, we've included the ability to set automatic late payment reminders in FreeAgent. You can set these reminders to be sent as soon as a payment becomes overdue. FreeAgent can then re-send the reminder a few days later if your customer still needs an extra nudge. On the bright side, you can set FreeAgent to send automatic thank you emails when you get paid.
Find out more about automatic reminder emails in FreeAgent.
4. Your own personal to-do list
You might have thought that scribbling a to-do list was one thing that couldn’t be automated. However, thanks to some tech wizardry, we’ve created a digital checklist in the Radar area of FreeAgent. The ‘Admin To-Do List’ gathers together your quick, outstanding tasks to provide you with an at-a-glance view of the jobs you need to complete in FreeAgent.
5. Super speedy support
Finally, we’ve made reaching our friendly and talented support team easier than ever, with the launch of our speedy digital live chat. You can now reach our accounting experts simply by clicking the blue ‘Help’ button in the bottom right-hand corner of your FreeAgent account and starting a conversation. Find out more about FreeAgent’s live chat.
See how much time FreeAgent’s automation features could save you by starting a 30-day free trial.
