Free Your Finances

A not-so-solid foundation

When we first founded SOLID at the beginning of 2009, I took it upon myself to manage the finances. As a small business, dealing with a relatively low number of clients, I figured keeping track of all incomings and outgoings would be a piece of cake.

Armed with my trusty Excel sheets, I set about keeping notes of all expenses in one document, and all income in another. Things got a little tricky when working with overseas companies – currency conversions and VAT calculations were a bit of a mind melter but I managed to get by.

What I wasn’t so good at keeping track of was aligning bank transactions with items in my excel sheets. I’d have to keep referring between bank statements, my income sheet and the invoice PDFs I’d sent out – trying to figure out who had paid what and what was still owed. Confusion reigned.

Time to change

When time came to fill out the tax return, I was never confident in my calculations. Every VAT return was submitted with the lingering doubt that I’d missed a transaction and was either underpaying or overpaying out of our hard earned funds. I decided it was time to ditch the Excel sheets and get a more professional solution in place.

Enter FreeAgent

I had looked at accountancy software before – but was never happy paying such a high premium for something I could do myself for free. Even FreeAgent, which I’d heard good things about from other designers, wanted a monthly fee in exchange for what looked like a nice interface masking limited functionality.

Once I’d done the maths, however, and realised how much time I was wasting trying to manage the finances on my own, I realised FreeAgent’s monthly fee had the potential to actually save me money.

FreeAgent has surprised me by just how much it manages for us – we can now create estimates and invoices directly from within the app, as well as sending automatic email reminders and receipts to clients. VAT and tax calculations are done automatically, and I can easily check how much we owe without worrying about missed transactions or dodgy calculations.

The biggest thing for me however is the ability to import statements directly from our bank accounts (both business and personal) and link transactions to invoice payments, expenses and office running costs. I now actually enjoy logging in to check up on our financial situation, instead of dreading opening up a number of messy documents to do the same thing. Confusion is a thing of the past.

What matters most

My best experience of FreeAgent, and the reason I recommend them so highly is the response of the support team.

When I first signed up, I found that their “upload statement” facility wasn’t working for statements from my bank. This would have rendered the whole system useless. However, one email to the support team and a few days later they had updated their system to support my bank’s oddly written statements.

Further technical issues have been solved in record time with a curteous and can’t-do-enough-to-help attitude. This is what customers want. This makes the experience.

A not-so-subtle referral link

To further save money, FreeAgent offers all customers 10% off for every new signup they refer. Recommend FreeAgent to 10 new customers and you’ll be using their service completely free!

Sign up using our referral code 3jz257mm (or use our referral link) and we both receive 10% off. A nice little helper to get started saving money.

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