FreeAgent Update: Cheshire

Ed Molyneux
Founder

Here's what we've been up to this week…

VAT returns

We've changed the VAT return page to directly show the numbers you need to write on your VAT return (or type into your online return).

We plan to improve this still further, better explaining how these numbers are calculated, soon.

Initial Balances

You can now specify an Initial Balances Date, and initial balances for Creditor, Debtor and VAT Liability. This is useful if have numbers to carry forward from before you started with FreeAgent, although if you start at the beginning of a new accounting year, and maybe enter a few invoices and overheads if the VAT period is not fully covered, you may not need to do this.

You can explain bank credits as 'Receipt from Initial Debtor', the amount displayed on the Overview page under Company Assets will reduce accordingly.

Soon we'll be revamping the simplicity of starting with FreeAgent when you're already in business, plus the ability to assign payments against Initial Creditor Balances.

Bank Address Details

We've removed these from the system, since they were only displayed on your invoices and that could potentially lead to confusion from your clients as to who they should be sending payment too. Gone,now. Next we will remove the bank name, too, since we can guess it from the sort code you supply.

Data Export

You can export data in Excel format now, with separate worksheets for each kind of data, which is much easier to understand and re-use.

Rebilled Expenses Total

Fixed a problem where the total project rebilled expenses was zero if you only had out-of-pocket expenses rebilled.

Pound Sign in Invoice Item Description

You can now use the pound sign in the description of your invoice items (perhaps to describe the nature of the discount you're offering) without extraneous weird characters appearing.

Blank Client Emails

People were having problems with leaving the client email blank if there was already a client with a blank email. This is now fixed.

Password in Signup Emails

We used to include your account password in the signup emails we sent out. This is not good practice from a security point of view, and we're not doing that anymore.

We recommend that if you did get your password like this, you change it soon. You can do this under Home > People > Edit.

Importing Clients

We've improved the import of clients from Gmail and Outlook a bit - the names are now sorted alphabetically when you select which ones you want to import.