All news » Why as an accountant I prefer ClearBooks over Xero, Quickbooks and FreeAgent.
Why as an accountant I prefer ClearBooks over Xero, Quickbooks and FreeAgent.
We, at 2 E Accountants, provide accounting and bookkeeping services on a range of different accounting systems including Clearbooks, Xero, FreeAgent, Quickbooks, Kashflow, Wave and even spreadsheets.
All these online accounting systems have good features and are mostly suited for the job, but they have some drawbacks too.
While we work a lot with Xero and others for our clients, as accountants & bookkeepers our preferred online software has been Clear Books for over 10 years now. We have seen all systems updating their features over the years yet we remain pleasantly surprised how Clearbooks remain ahead of others from the beginning. When Xero became popular few years ago, we did think of switching as it’s bank feed feature was very good and still is but overall it wasn’t enough and we are glad we stuck with Clearbooks for our own bookkeeping and for many of our clients.
Clear Books
User friendly interface
Clear Books’ interface has been especially good from the start and it was always easy to find the modules and then manoeuvre to your desired location.
Whereas some of the other systems are not as intuitive. If it’s taking a long time to get to a point in a system that you start thinking of calling the support, it means the system is not intuitive and user friendly.
As an accountant, I will eventually find my way in any new software but I always give value to a good design.
Quick reports
I like the reporting module in Clearbooks especially for Profit & Loss account and Balance Sheet; it is very easy to use compared with Xero or Quickbooks.
I have been using Xero for clients for so many years but each time I go to the Reports module it irritates me. Thankfully, they added the ‘New Reports’ feature which you can select to get straight to Financial Period reports quickly. However, that is still an extra step.
Small businesses want to quickly look at how the month has been or monthly breakdowns for the financial periods. It’s very simple to do this in Clear Books.
Another useful report is Income by Customers or suppliers, which can quickly tell you your top income generating customers or suppliers on the cost side. Makes it easy to do 80:20 pareto analysis.
Flexible accounting periods
Most accounting systems have a standard 12-month financial period, which is fixed. We were surprised to see Xero unable to cope with changes in the accounting period.
When companies register with Companies House, their financial periods could be July to June but later they may decide to do a 6 month’s period up to Dec so that following years can coincide with calendar year i.e. Jan-Dec. Such adjustments are common in small businesses.
It’s very annoying when your system show ‘Financial Periods’ reports that don’t match with the actual financial period of a company.
Granted, it’s not the end of the world but it’s annoying to see incorrect retained earning balances in the balance sheet.
Clear Books allows you to set financial periods of any length, be that
shorter or longer than the standard 12 months, which is great because you can always match Clear Books reports with final accounts as per companies house submitted accounts.
Change VAT schemes with ease
Clear Books has a really nice settings module for VAT. When working with small businesses, you’ll oft
en encounter scenarios where the client will change VAT
schemes and at different period might be running different vat schemes or be registered or not registered for VAT in certain periods. Xero, Quickbooks and many other systems are not flexible enough to handle such scenarios. Clear Books allows you to have periods on different VAT schemes and takes care of transaction treatments with ease.
Journal module
You can post bulk journals and copy them with much ease on Clear books compare to FreeAgent.
Accrual date
Another good feature Clear Books has that Xero and others don’t have is when posting any bill in addition to transaction date, you can also enter ‘Accrual date’. This brings the cost to the right month for accounting purpose without worrying about doing journals.
Conclusion
In conclusion, Clear Books is a pretty decent online accounting software and technically, from an Accountant’s perspective, superior to many other popular systems.
We can help you with starting your new company
Tagged in: VAT Accountancy Services accounts Advantages of VAT accounting scheme Annual Accounting Scheme monthly management accounts Online accountancy Small Businesses Web based Business website business year-end accounts