Can anyone please recommend a Free or Cheap simple accounting software package that meets the UK Government VAT requirements for a simple app? All I need is to record receipts from Apple and payments to suppliers. No Payroll.
Accounting software
A very good question.
For anyone who doesn't know, for a couple of years now they have required that VAT data must be submitted directly from your accounting software to their servers. The aim is to avoid the errors that happened previously when you had to copy-and-paste those four numbers four times a year into a form on their website. They call this "Making Tax Digital" and it will roll out to other forms of tax data submission over the next few years. Software that connects to their servers needs to be approved by them and be issued with credentials to connect; this makes things difficult for open-source software and the sort of home-made bookkeeping systems that software developers like us might prefer to use. Potentially profitable for accounting software vendors, but a pain for people with existing systems that they will need to replace.
As it happens, I wrote a simple VAT return submission app and put it through the approval process to see what was involved. It required a live video call where I demonstrated it correctly interacting with their test servers. Readers on this forum will understand the idea of "app review"; this was less impersonal than the Apple version. I am not currently doing anything with this software other than submitting my own returns.
One friend recommends Xero. I've not used it myself.
Do you currently use something for record keeping?
Do please let us know what you end up doing!
I use a simple spreadsheet.
Xero is good, but overkill for such a simple operation as an app developer/