Final Accounts is here!
News posted by Chris Storey 10 years ago
Today we’re launching Final Accounts, a new online accounting solution enabling businesses’ final accounts to be prepared using information directly from Clear Books’ cloud accounting software.
Final Accounts has been built in consultation with accountants and user experience designers and is now in its final beta testing phase. During this period, while we get ‘real-world’ feedback and iron out any last issues, the product is only available to Clear Books accountants and will be free to use.
At this stage, Final Accounts will only deal with micro entity accounts, generally for those companies with a turnover of less than £632,000. This represents over 90% of our company users.
What is Final Accounts?
Every accounting year companies produce a set of accounts which have to be sent to Companies House and HMRC.
Reports and data have to be taken from the business’s books, either in spreadsheet or printed format, and re-input into other software to produce the annual accounts in a format suitable for the Government.
Our Final Accounts product will be integrated with Clear Books Accounting, meaning that users can produce a set of accounts straight from Clear Books in the electronic format required by Companies House and HMRC.
What are the benefits?
- Full integration with Clear Books Accounting for profit & loss and balance sheet data
- Confirmation that you qualify to complete accounts under micro accounts rules before you start
- Automatic ‘tagging’ of accounts data for iXBRL electronic submission
- Generation of optional abridged accounts for submission to Companies House.
- Directors’ report
- Balance sheet
- Mandatory profit & loss
- Detailed profit & loss
- Directors’ loans note
What’s next?
After the initial period of testing and feedback, we will start charging to use the product and Final Accounts will also be made available to small businesses. Depending on the level of feedback and interest, there is potential for a future release that deals with “Small Company” accounts (not just Micro)
Although not in the initial release, we will be enabling direct submission of the accounts firstly to Companies House and then HMRC.
Try it out!
Accountants can take a test drive of Final Accounts by signing in to your account and going to the Reports tab
User feedback is essential in making Final Accounts as smooth as possible. Please leave a comment below to let us know what you think.
24/02 update: known issues
- Balance sheet approval: As happens with the directors' report, a name & date selector will be added.
- Balance sheet statements: These are being updated to reflect the statements approved on the Company info section, with the 4th statement being changed, if appropriate, should you chose to submit Abridged accounts.
- Unknown or mis-matched user created account codes: Because CB enables users to create their own account codes the system may not always pick up all the codes or allocate all the codes to the correct headings on the statutory P&L or Balance sheet and consequently, this might generate a difference on the balance sheet.
- We are working on enabling the allocation or re-mapping, by drag & drop, of individual account codes on the P&L and Balance Sheet to and between the different headings.
- Once we get a feel for the level of mis-matches we will also work on refining the default account code types and categories and, in this respect, a new category for "Provisions" is currently being worked on.
- Rounding difference: It is likely that, in rounding to the nearest £1 the balance sheet may be out of balance by £1 or £2. If this is the case the likelihood is that we will enable the user to specify the balance sheet heading that should be adjusted to remove the difference, eg Current assets or Creditors < 1 year. We would welcome feedback on this.
- Final Reports: We are working on improving the look and content of the final downloadable reports, ie to match margins, fonts, line spacing, alignments etc and to provide better looking totals & subtotals.
- In the FA Overview screen the year quoted on the left hand side, next to each accounting period incorrectly states the starting year rather than the ending year. EG 31.3.14 year end is shown as 2013 rather than 2014. This is being changed.
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