MTD-ready spreadsheet for cash-based businesses
Hot on the heels of Clear Books’ September product enhancements, a new feature has been released that makes Clear Books Micro more efficient and intuitive to use for cash-based businesses.
Clear Books CFO and head of product David Carr explained; “Most accounting software is created for ‘pay me later’ businesses that issue an invoice and request a BACs settlement.
"These systems recognise income when the invoice is generated and allocate transactions recorded on bank statements to the invoice when it is paid.
"Whilst this is useful for many small businesses, it neglects those ‘pay me now’ businesses like cafes and shops who have no need to generate invoices.”
Makes accounting easy
The new cash-based business feature in Clear Books Micro makes accounting easy for ‘pay me now’ businesses by eliminating sales invoice and bill/expense entry.
Instead of using invoice generation to recognise business income, it guides the cash-based user to explain daily takings directly from a list of bank transactions - while still posting all the required double-entry accounting transactions behind the scenes.
The user interface for ‘pay me later’ businesses has three tabs and allows businesses to record a sales invoice and ‘allocate’ a bank transaction to it when the payment is made.
The new user interface for ‘pay me now’ businesses has only one tab and allows businesses to ‘explain’ takings directly from their bank feed.
David Carr said that the usability enhancements are evidence of Clear Books’ commitment to provide a clear & simple user interface that helps small businesses easily keep on top of their record keeping for MTD VAT returns.
Bookkeeping framework
“Clear Books’ online spreadsheet gives small businesses that all important bookkeeping framework in a familiar format. The tabs and column headers guide them through the bookkeeping process by showing what they need to record and where, and the sums, sorts and filters automate all the calculations in the background.”
Information entered into Clear Books Micro by either ‘pay me later’ or ‘pay me now’ businesses is available immediately to accountants who use their feature rich Clear Books Practice Edition to adjust the journal, and to create and submit MTD VAT returns to HMRC.
Accountants and Clear Books Micro users can switch their clients to the new ‘cash based view’ by disabling ‘sales invoices’ and ‘bills’ tabs in the settings menu.
