Why we love Xero (Quickbooks online and Freeagent are quite good too)
Xero is user friendly (according to our clients) software for small businesses. It sits in the cloud rather than on a single PC so that it can be accessed at any time by the business owner (that’s you) looking for management information, the bookkeeper (that may be you, Minerva, or somebody else) to input data, and your accountant (that’s us) to prepare your accounts or to give advice at any time.
You can put the Xero app on your phone to raise quotes and invoices on site. You can buy a small card payment machine such as Square or Zettle for around £20 and, with the app on your phone, you can take payment on site.
You can include a Stripe payment button on your invoices (although bank transfer is the cheapest method) to make it easy for customers to pay you by card.
You can forward electronic invoices directly to Xero (or to Dext if you have the app) or upload them manually to attach to your transactions. Once you have attached a digital copy you can get rid of your paper copies although we recommend that you keep them somewhere until we have completed the year end. If you ever need to check an invoice it is easy to search the supplier in Xero to find it.
Xero multi-currency version handles all your foreign currency purchases automatically.
As long as your Xero is up to date we can estimate how much tax you will expect to pay at any time.