Setting up as a bookkeeper- which software to use?

shaunpoll

Hi everyone, I'm planning to start working as a self-employed bookkeeper once I have completed level 3. Does anyone have any recommendations for accountancy software?
I have heard clearbooks is good. As my clients won't be spending much per a month (around £20 to £40), I can't really afford something too expensive.

burg

Xero.
On the face of it Xero will seem more expensive but as a 'partner' you will get access to cashbook versions from £5 + VAT per month. The automation that is available in Xero is brilliant and works far better than any competitors.

When we started offering cloud bookkeeping as an option we went with Clearbooks as the pricing was so favourable. However, due to functionality we failed to convince many clients to use it. Convicing clients to use Xero, since we made the switch back last summer, has been far easier. We aim to have 75% of clients on Xero by this summer.

Some of our clients are charged £20 + VAT per month. We have worked out we can absorb the Xero fees and still be fine in respect of fees as they will present accounts to us in a much more useable fashion.

KoopaCooper

We have our own (desktop) bookkeeping software, but obviously prefer to try to sign our clients up to an online bookkeeping service so that they can do their own bookkeeping and we can get their records easily when accounts are due - or can do their bookkeeping easily for them if they want (I'm the office resident bookkeeper so that job falls to me xD).

We do use Xero (mostly for invoicing our clients, very few of them actually use it), and Kashflow (somewhat more popular), but we actually recommend QuickBooks Online - the clients seem to find it the easiest to handle, and we bulk-bought QuickBooks Plus licenses from at £10/mo and sell the service on to the clients for no profit at all.

The whole setup is very intuitive, we have complete ability to access the books alongside our clients and enter invoices and such on the fly (I've been updating one clients' QB and actually saw they had updated the bank feed at the same time), and the technical support are very helpful.

At the moment, we have about 20 of our limited company clients on QB out of about 250, but we hope to get more of our clients onto QB in the future. We even offer to help train them in the basics for free, as the amount of time spent bookkeeping can be reduced greatly by teaching the client how easy it is for them to do.