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

file

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.

12 Replies

Just an update on the above to cover some known questions and issues that might arise when testing FA.

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.

These are the main issues currently being given priority but please feedback anything else that you come across.

Many thanks

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.

Above date issue now fixed and others likely to go live next week.

Directors' dates of appointment: For any users not using Open payroll you will need to fill in the new From & To dates on the directors' "Supplier" data on the Invoice defaults page. This will enable the system to know who served during the year on the directors' report and provide only current directors to sign the directors' report and balance sheet.

Updates - 11th March 2015

Here are some of the changes for Final Accounts that we've been working on over the past week. These should be live within the next few days.

NB: PL, BS and DPL refer to "Profit & Loss", "Balance Sheet" and "Detailed Profit & Loss" respectively.

  • [New] You can now drag incorrectly-allocated Account Codes to different Headers on the PL and BS.
  • [New] Created a "Sign Report" page and moved all signing actions to this page.
  • [Chg] Added and XBRL-tagged Company Number to Balance Sheet.
  • [Chg] Moved the Notes step to occur after the Balance Sheet step.
  • [Chg] Lines with zero-values will now be omitted from the PL, BS and DPL on the XBRL and PDF Documents.
  • [Chg] Various styling improvements to the PL, BS and DPL on XBRL and PDF Documents.
  • [Fix] Abridged documents will no longer show lines on the contents list for sections that have been omitted.
  • [Fix] You will no longer be able to preview or download accounts if you do not have a Company Number set.
  • [Fix] Selecting full/abridged accounts will now use the correct declaration in the XBRL and PDF Documents.
  • [Fix] Fixed some issues with balancing on some BS amounts.
  • [Fix] Improved tolerance of different Director name styles, including for Directors who were created in CB Accounting before "last name" was a required field.

Known issues

This is a list of some of the known issues that are currently being worked on by the Final Accounts team:

  • Notes don't appear as part of the Balance Sheet.
  • Profit & Loss Sheet sometimes needs correcting by £1.
  • The Accountant's Report output should include the Accountant's postal address.
  • Pre-tagged placeholders sometimes lose their tagging but keep their styling.
  • "Phantom" notes that are only required for Small accounts reporting are sometimes being wrongly included in the XBRL and PDF Documents.
  • When confirming the Profit & Loss statement, the Balance Sheet becomes unconfirmed.

Is this available for general use yet? I have just completed my first financial year and am preparing accounts for submission.

The silence is deafening, CB. Is this going anywhere?

Hi Micheal

Currently, Clear Books Final Accounts is being tested by our accountants and needs some further fine tuning before it can be released to all our customers.

Once we have all the boxes ticked on the software feature, we will let you know before it is released.

Best regards

Latha

Meant Michael, sorry typo. :)

Thanks Thala. Looking forward to trying it out.

Will this be available to me as a normal user? I do my own accounting.

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