Prelude Archives

First of all, let us be clear – Making Tax Digital will happen in one form or another. We have talked to several accountants who believe that the project will be scrapped due to cost, logistics or Brexit (or other political considerations), but as recently as 13^th July 2018, HMRC has reiterated the current deadlines on the Government’s own website.

I think, however, what is up for debate is the eventual form that Making Tax Digital will take, the speed of its implementation and what facets of it will go live (and when). This is why I believe that Making Tax Digital is a journey, not a destination – accountants, taxpayers, and HMRC are all working towards a 21^st Century approach to accounts submission and tax gathering, but the speed of technological implementation is such, don’t be surprised if MTD evolves mid-implementation.

If you think I am exaggerating, consider the recent partnership between Amazon and HMRC to use the former’s Echo devices and Alexa smart assistants to remind people about tax credits. Of course, this is at this stage more PR than process, but it has already led to headlines in the tabloid press such as “Alexa… Pay My Tax!”, which gives the impression to the general public that in the near future they will not even have to touch a keyboard (or even a touchscreen) to file their accounts with HMRC.

This is why, as a software developer, I am only looking to implement functionality to my accounting software packages as and when specified or needed by either HMRC or Accountants themselves. To do otherwise, would be costly, presumptive and potentially a waste of time, and that misspent development cost would have to be passed onto the end user… i.e. you, the accountant!

This is not meant to be a dig at other software developers or a sales pitch, but a statement of fact. It hopefully articulates an ethos that I think all concerned with Making Tax Digital would be wise to adopt, as it will result in a practical and effective adoption, and not failure or panic.

I suspect that despite my arguments above, many of you remain sceptical as to whether MTD will eventually see light of day, so let me give you another perspective. In a past life I worked in the City of London, trading energy derivative investments – buying low and selling high. Rather than attempt the impossible task of quantifying the impact of all the world’s events on the energy markets, we would identify a small number of major influencers – the fundamentals – and base our trading decisions on the impact of only these fundamentals. Yes, this approach did risk ignoring the impact of events that we didn’t consider to be major, but it made our decision process more clear – and we were right far more often than we were wrong. With this mindset, I think there are only three fundamentals that make MTD an inevitability:

the UK Government needs to lower its overheads and become more efficient generally;
the UK Government needs to increase its tax revenues;
the UK Government doesn’t want to wait nearly two years (in some cases) to be paid the tax it is owed.

Given these three factors, Making Tax Digital is the Occam’s razor to take to all these problems as far as the Government is concerned. Electronic submission of taxes will mean (in theory) the automation of tax returns, which will lower the overheads and staff requirements of HMRC (saving the Government substantial amounts of money) and demanding quarterly payments of tax owed will address the Government’s own cash-flow and revenue forecasting problems. If you think there is another way for the Government to meet the objectives I think underpin the Making Tax Digital project, I would be interested to hear them.

As I have written before, I think Making Tax Digital provides a huge opportunity for accountancy as a sector and it shouldn’t be seen as a threat. However, remaining in denial about the inevitability of MTD will lead to the failure of your practice, because the accountancy world outside is changing as I write this, and you are not. The way you currently work will soon cease to be viable, so I genuinely urge all accountants who have yet to embrace the digital revolution to do so for their own sakes, and not just for the benefit of software developers like myself.

Making Tax Digital is not immediately going to be a panacea to all of HRMC’s problems nor does it necessarily mean extinction for an older generation of accountants (if they’re proactive), but it is a journey we’re all currently on with a final destination being a hazy landmark on the distant horizon. It is a journey we’ve all undertaken (either by choice or circumstance), and it is one I am glad to be on, and one that I want to enable others to make.

For more information about Prelude, e-mail info@preludeaccounts.com or call 0845 223 2170.

Lee Coombes has run Lee Coombes Accountancy in Swansea for the last 8 years, and he is determined to provide the most cost-effective and efficient services to his clients possible.

With the advent of Making Tax Digital, the accountancy sector as a whole has to adopt new processes and technologies to remain compliant and relevant. Lee, being a progressive accountant with his finger on pulse, addressed these changes by adopting Prelude, from Diamond Discovery.

How An Accountant Makes Prelude Work For Him… And His Clients — *Lee Coombes of Lee Coombes Accountancy*

Prelude is a secure Cloud-based accounting software package that allows simultaneous access to accounts by accountants and their clients. It can be accessed from any device that has an internet connection and web-browser.

With so many accounting software packages out there, what was it about Prelude that made Lee sign up? “There are many things about Prelude which appealed to me, but its main appeal is the ease of use and its simplicity”, said Lee in July 2018. “It is written for ‘the man in the street’, which is very important if accountants want to encourage their clients to engage with the software too”.

Lee has adopted a range of technological processes that interact with Prelude that makes his own work easier and more time-efficient, which in turn means he has lower overheads, passing on cost-savings to his clients. This makes Lee a more attractive proposition to potential clients than his competitors, and he can do this without compromising the quality or accuracy of his work.

Lee achieves this by striking the perfect balance of what he wants his clients to undertake in terms of managing their books and what services he provides. Prelude allows for the generation of branded invoices that can be easily created by the client within the software, while Lee focus on the ‘back end’ processes of reviewing the books and consolidating the accounts.

By creating this division of labour, Lee is empowering the client to keep on top of their invoicing while simultaneously updating their accounts package in the process. Lee undertakes his own work in the background, and the two mesh seamlessly together. “By working in this way, I am minimising the chance of error in the accounts, and the client and I can review the accounts at any time” said Lee. “Not only am I saving myself the stress of ‘end of year’ tax return, it means that the client themselves will have a clear idea of their tax obligation at any given moment. It can also help clients more effectively manage their cashflow and business development”.

Lee believes that accountants spend to much time undertaking ‘repairs’ of accounts, and the process he has developed by using Prelude intelligently means that his own business is far more effective, giving him the capacity to take on more clients without increasing his own overheads.

Lee likens his use of Prelude with his clients to the a ‘dual control’ car used by driving instructors; you’re enabling the client to get the full business benefit of modern accounting software without them running the risk of doing anything too dangerous or catastrophic to their accounts. “The beauty of Prelude is that I can give the client only the functionality that they need” says Lee. “Too many other accounting packages are overloaded by features that most small businesses never use and which could potentially cause problems or confusion – Prelude is straightforward and easy to understand”.

By focusing on only what is essential, Prelude is a substantially more cost-effective software package for the accountant and their clients. “I don’t want to be paying £30 per month per client to a software package I will only ever use 10% of; Prelude is a fraction of the price yet does everything I need it to do so I can manage the accounts of my clients”

Lee also presents Prelude as his own inhouse software; all accountants who use Prelude can brand the main dashboards with their own logo and marketing material. “For all intents and purposes, the software and the service I provide is seen as one” said Lee. “Every time my clients login into the software, which they do through my website, they see my logo on the dashboard.” On a repeated basis, over time, this can only subconsciously strengthen the bond between accountant and client.

“If a client of mine uses Sage or Xero, they are repeatedly exposed to those software packages names and not mine” says Lee. “In effect, I would be selling the software rather than my skills or services, and that client could easily go off with another accountant who uses those accounting packages. By using accounting software that is branded as my own business I am reinforcing that I the accountant, and not the accounting software, is the service for which the client is buying.”

Another facet that Lee likes about Prelude is that it is built by Diamond Discovery, a software developer based in South Wales. “With Prelude, I have always received great customer service and I am always treated in a personable manner – Diamond Discovery know me and my business’ needs, and they are always on hand to help” said Lee. “I don’t think that would be my experience if I contacted a multinational manufacture of accounting software.”

Due to the personable and adaptable nature of both Prelude the software and Prelude the support team, Lee has developed processes that saves him time, stress and money. By using CSV importing features and scanned documents, Lee can process as many as 140 invoices in just half an hour.

Such an approach means that Lee is not running the risk of using tools like Automated Bank Feeds, which theoretically invalidate the client’s rights in the event of fraud: “I don’t want to be logging into clients’ bank accounts; CSV offer the same efficiencies without the risks.”

Lee also has customised his Prelude with the free Customer Relationship Management module, which allows him to keep detailed notes, reminders and other necessary information about his clients. This CRM component fully integrates with Prelude, avoiding any duplication of entry or process, and is fully GDPR compliant.

Prelude is so integral to Lee’s business model he doesn’t use or support any other accounting software package, and he charges clients substantially more if they want him to use another. “By using just the one, simple accounting software package, all my own processes – and those of my clients – are uniform and I am not incurring the additional cost and time of supporting multiple accounting packages.”

Lee thinks other accountants should use Prelude in the same way he does, as he feels HMRC’s digital agenda could result in taxpayers bypassing accountants altogether. With Prelude being so easily adapted to the Lee Coombes Accountancy brand, Lee is ensuring that his clients view his services more than just software even though it is software that enables him to offer the services that he does.

“Prelude does exactly what it sets out to do and is continually updated to meet the requirements set by HMRC and other bodies. It is cost-effective, simple to use, and provides efficiencies within my own business; what else would an accountant want from accounting software?”

For more information about Lee Coombes Accountancy, visit https://leecoombesaccountancy.co.uk/ or call 01792 346272.

For more information about Prelude, e-mail info@preludeaccounts.com or call 0845 223 2170.

Events have a habit of overtaking discussions. In my first article in this series, I discussed the pros and cons of automatic bank feeds. In the second, I examined how you can use your accounting software to reduce the need for automatic bank feeds, and the third discussed how automatic bank feeds can be used effectively by accountants. Since then, ‘open banking’ has come about as a pressing topic and has ramifications for everything I have discussed so far.

What is open banking? According to Richard Evans of the firm Crowe Clark Whitehill, it is “a software platform that allows a customer to compare prices of different components of banking services – for example, clearing, payments, investments and use of different providers for different services on one platform”.

These platforms will emerge on the back of the Competition & Markets Authority (CMA) review, which concluded that large retail banks do not do enough to be competitive with each other to attract customers from each other. In parallel, in 2015 the EU passed the second Payments Services Directive (PSD2), which stipulated that banks had to make Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to open up all their data and infrastructure to third-party companies by 13 January 2018. And Brexit will not mean an opt out for British-based banks.

In real terms, for the accountant, what are the ramifications of all this? In short, cloud-based accounting will evolve once more with, in all likelihood, the banks themselves developing online accounting services so as to remain competitive with each other as well as third-party accounting software packages such as Xero, Sage and Diamond Discovery. This could theoretically lead to people managing their accountancy services through their bank, directly with HMRC. And in such a scenario, who would need an accountant?

As you’ll have gathered from my previous articles, I think new technology provides opportunities for the accountancy sector as well as threats, but open banking does seem to pose a genuine and real existential crisis right across the profession.

APIs are useful things to software developers. They allow the programing code of different software packages to be visible and adapted to other pieces of software, creating a new unified product in the process. Examples of this include Hootsuite, which allows marketers to control different social media channels from just the one screen, and Uber, the infamously disruptive cab-hailing service that uses mobile phones’ GPS to unite potential passengers with potential drivers. Done right and done effectively, APIs can upend an industry overnight; just ask a London cabbie.

There is a faint silver lining for the progressive accountant: they can now develop their own bespoke software if they so choose, to meet their clients’ needs. However, development can take time and money, and the accountant should consider the ROI of such a strategy.

None of this will have escaped HMRC’s notice. What could be more appealing to a government or a state than having the ability to monitor its own citizens’ bank accounts in real time for tax gathering (and other) purposes? Maybe that is a little paranoiac, but you don’t have to be Franz Kafka and favour green ink to acknowledge that the technology and legal framework now exists for governments to access bank accounts directly via the APIs that the banks are forced to disclose under new legislation. Indeed, HMRC itself is rapidly developing a whole suite of online applications that cut out the middle man between bank account and state; namely the accountant.

So, what is to be done? As I keep on reiterating, it is important for practising accountants to modernise their processes across the board, to reflect the rapidly changing technological backdrop to the sector. Even if an accountant chooses not to adopt a new technological process, they will need to at least be aware of it and have a rationale for not adopting it (and not all new technology is necessarily desirable technology). At the very least, an accountant should look to embrace cloud accounting, as the principles behind it will inform the processes and behaviour of open banking in the longer run. To be brutally direct, we have now reached a point in accountancy where it is very much ‘adapt or die’, and I feel I can write that without fear that I am resorting to hyperbole to get my point across.

As a software developer myself, I am happy to talk to any accountant who wants to know what open banking and technological change mean for their specific practice, and advise them on the robust steps needed to modernise their services for the 21^st century.

For more information on technology that can help with your accountancy services visit www.preludeaccounts.com, call 01656 725800 or email info@preludeaccounts.com.

Prelude Accounts can also be found on Titter via @PreludeAccounts / https://twitter.com/PreludeAccounts.

Have accountants really considered the implications of HMRC’s Making Tax Digital (MTD) initiative? From April 2018, you must comply with HMRC’s digital vision for tax collection, and you will have no choice about it. Accountants must prepare for and adapt to this new regime or professionally they will perish.

Businessman stressed by too many tasks works in the office — *Are YOU Ready for MTD? (Image via Fotolia)*

MTD is inevitable, regardless of what final form it will take or what happens politically at a national level. Society has become technically savvy and digitally dependent on online services, and expecting HMRC and the accounting profession not to move with these times is naïve and unrealistic. Technology will impact accountants’ and their clients’ relationships not only with HMRC, but also with each other.

What is behind MTD? It is the government’s intention that by 2020, HRMC will be fully digital, meaning:

bureaucratic form-filling will be eradicated; taxpayers should never have to tell HMRC information it already knows;

unnecessary time delays will be eliminated; the tax system will operate in ‘real time’, keeping everyone up to date and removing the risk of missed deadlines, unnecessary penalties, debts arising and errors in the system being carried forward from one year to the next;

taxpayers will have access to their own digital accounts; the information HMRC needs will be automatically uploaded, bringing an end to the traditional tax return.

These are lofty aspirations but they are feasible, notwithstanding the government’s IT track record, and mirror the standards of other services that people have now come to expect in the internet age.

These three aspirations could imply an existential threat to the accountancy profession as we currently know it. Real-time automation and processes in the hands of accountants’ clients could eliminate many of the traditional functions of accountants as we know them in 2016.

This may sound alarmist, but just think about the changing demographics of your own client base and their skillsets. As Tony Margaritelli of the ICPA has succinctly put it:

“Check your client base for clients who don’t use a computer, or if they use spreadsheets. If they do then you could be in trouble”.

The final form of MTD has not been completely finalised, but it is apparent that there will be no fudge or halfway houses for those accountants or those clients who are and wish to remain paper-based.

A recent webinar on MTD seems to imply that HMRC is ushering in the digital age via sly semantics; by saying that accountants are now required to log ‘up-to-date’ records rather than ‘adequate’ records, the paper age being laid to rest as a consequence.

As Winston Churchill once said, “never let a good crisis go to waste.” Albeit MTD will clearly create opportunities for cash-strapped central government to achieve significant cost savings, it would be churlish to think that MTD is solely for this purpose. Indeed, in the aforementioned webinar they make a coherent case for MTD:

“Through keeping up-to-date records in near real time instead of by processing paperwork at the year-end, businesses are less likely to lose receipts or to make basic errors. This also makes good business sense, gives them a better overview of their position through the year, and ensures that businesses have ready access to their financial information. Prompts built into digital tools will eliminate common errors, giving businesses greater certainty that they’ve got their tax right first time.”

There is nothing that one can really say to counter the above argument; it makes perfect logical sense, if one assumes that the system put into place by HMRC is robust and reliable enough.

Luckily, accounting software companies like Diamond Discovery are already ahead of the trend with such changes to business working practices. Take for example Prelude Accounts, our Cloud-based accounting software designed for both accountants and their clients, with a particular focus on smaller companies and sole traders – both accountant and client can access/update the accounts at any time or place where there is an internet connection, and the software itself consolidates and automates many existing business processes such as invoice generation and despatch.

By proactively moving their clients over to a digital accounting platform of their own choosing, accountants can cement their existing relationships with those clients and modify their own processes in preparation for MTD. Failure to do this will ensure that existing and new clients may look to do their own accounts with whatever new tools HRMC launches in the future, bypassing the accountant completely. As Tony Margaritelli puts it;

“Pushing the send button will become very attractive for clients – why would clients send you anything and guarantee a bill. Are they going to ask you to check it?”

Efficiency liberates time for the accountant, and additional time gives accountants the scope to offer new services. As I have argued in past articles and as I will continue to argue in future ones, the digital age will provide opportunities for new accountancy services and reinventions of traditional ones, such as bookkeeping.

For more information on technology that can help with your accountancy services, please visit www.preludeaccounts.com, call 01656 725800 or e-mail info@preludeaccounts.com.

Prelude Accounts can also be found on Twitter via @PreludeAccounts / https://twitter.com/preludeaccounts.

Prelude Accounts will soon launch a new bank feeds feature, which will be available to all users. This is in response to feedback from many ICPA members who feel that, while Prelude Accounts is good accounting software, it would be even better with such a feature.

Bank feeds, which is the importing of banking transactions directly into accounting software, is not a new concept and I think the new-found interest in this functionality has been driven by the rapid rise adoption of cloud accounting solutions (such as Prelude Accounts) by small businesses. While it is good that they are adopting cloud accounting, small businesses remain notoriously poor at properly recording banking transactions. It is no wonder then that so many accountants see bank feeds as a ‘deus ex machina’ to resolve their frustrations with clients; as if implemented correctly, bank feeds can achieve time and efficiency savings.

In introducing efficiencies into the accountant/client relationship, the ethos behind cloud accounting is similar to that behind bank feeds. This was covered in our previous article on the benefits of cloud accounting, which can be viewed on the Prelude Accounts website.

Historically, bank feeds services originated in the United States using ‘screen scraping’ software, such as those used by price comparison websites, to access data by logging in to clients’ internet banking services. In the US there are many local, state and federal banks, so it was probably easier to do this than to negotiate with each individual bank to provide the transaction data directly.

These methods require clients’ internet banking login details to be disclosed to the accountant and/or the accounting software provider, which I think should not be done, indeed not to any third parties. Such disclosure generally breaches banks’ terms and conditions and could leave account holders exposed should a fraud occur; whether as a result of that breach or not.

Also, screen scraping relies upon internet banking sites remaining unchanged. Whenever banks make changes to their websites (which I expect they do in part to frustrate this unauthorised activity), these bank feeds will fail until the screen scraping software provider updates their software to accommodate the changes. This is something over which clients, accountants and accounting software providers can have no control.

In spite of these risks, some accounting software providers offer bank feeds that use screen scraping and do so at low or no additional cost to the user, which I am sure sounds appealing, and they can do this because screen scraping can collect data from a wide range of banks at a very low cost. Moreover, I found that, by using careful wording and by featuring banks’ logos etc., they give their users the impression that this service is authorised by the banks, when actually it is not. I expect that many accountants have inadvertently advised their clients to use such accounting software not realising that the bank data feeds are not authorised by the banks.

Given all of this, I was not convinced that bank feeds were anything other than unreliable, unauthorised, unsolicited and potentially insecure. I was therefore reluctant to provide such integration services to our users because of the inherent risks involved.

However, bank feeds technologies have advanced, with software developers working closely with the banks to ensure security and authorisation issues are tackled head on.

In Bankstream, we have identified an alternative and viable bank feeds solution, which we believe to be superior to others on the market and with which we are happy for Prelude Accounts to be associated. Bankstream offers a robust, secure and bank-authorised daily feed of banking transactions, which can be sorted, identified and allocated prior to being imported into Prelude Accounts.

Kevin Bottomley, Marketing Manager at Bankstream explains: “Through our mutual support of the ICPA we’ve built up a good relationship with the Prelude Accounts team. It’s great that our services can now work side by side to form a strong solution for ICPA accountants and their clients.”

We are looking forward to developing our relationship with Bankstream, and to introducing Prelude Accounts users to new integration features in the near future.

For more information, visit www.preludeaccounts.com, call 01656 725800 or e-mail info@preludeaccounts.com. Prelude Accounts can also be found on Twitter via @PreludeAccounts / https://twitter.com/preludeaccounts.

© beawolf - Fotolia.com — © beawolf – Fotolia.com

For better or for worse, we live in an age where most people conduct their business online. Whether it is the weekly shop or sorting out business affairs, people log in to get things done. And why should accounting andbookkeeping be any different?

Prelude Accounts (from Diamond Discovery) is an accounts package hosted securely online (‘Cloud Computing’), which can be accessed by accountants and their clients alike. Users don’t install Prelude Accounts on their machine as it is accessed via the internet, meaning that wherever you have an internet connection you can access your accounts.

In addition, Prelude Accounts helps automate many of the financial functions of a small business. Every time a user generates an invoice using Prelude Accounts, it is automatically recorded in their accounts and can be emailed quickly and easily to their customer.

Nicola Thomas of CC Associates believes that by empowering her clients with Prelude Accounts she has been able to take on more business. “I was able to open my door again to new clients, when my practice was full. When people can do more of the bookkeeping themselves, I can take on more accounts-only jobs, which are ultimately more profitable for my own business.”

Prelude Accounts also incorporates the ease of use one normally associates with mobile phone ‘apps’; a user interface that is easy to interpret. “For me, the real strength of Prelude Accounts is the ease of navigation around the site itself” says George Lilley of AJM Accountants. “Everything is just very simple to find.”

However, Prelude Accounts users (whether they be accountants or their clients) are not just left to their own devices. Diamond Discovery offer ongoing customer support to all Prelude Accounts users. “The customer service was very good. When I had a problem it was solved very quickly!” adds George.

Nigel Toulson of Toulson Ledger also found the support offered with Prelude Accounts an advantage over other accounting software that’s available: “Diamond Discovery constantly work with us to add facilities within the program that assist not only ourselves but our clients, which is a level of support not given by the major accounts packages.”

Another thing that benefits accountants who use Prelude Accounts is that the software evolves with the internet, not requiring any costly installation of software upgrades, always keeping in step with whatever computer hardware that both accountant and client use.

Nigel is particularly enthusiastic about this aspect of Prelude Accounts:

“The discovery of Prelude Accounts cloud-based accounting software has given us a tremendous advantage, by allowing access to client information without the need for backups and installed programs and also decreasing the risk of data corruption.

Also, and most importantly, the information is accessible anywhere with the use of smart phones (3G/4G) and tablets with wi-fi access.”

Being web-based, there are no compatibility issues for its users. It doesn’t matter if you have a Mac or a PC, a new machine or an old computer; everyone can access it, and accountants and their clients don’t need be on the same system to access the same books either.

It is ability to view and share accounts in real time that is a key benefit of Prelude Accounts for Nic Thomas:

“Thanks to Prelude Accounts, I am now able to give clients more ownership and understanding of their own books . They can now manage their financial transactions in their business on a day-to-day basis, and I can access their data immediately if I need to.”

“Instead of just seeing my clients at the year end, I can keep in touch with them in an unobtrusive manner on a weekly basis; I can log in at any time and check their progress and prompt them if I notice they haven’t been keeping on top of things. Clients’ businesses are more likely to succeed as they have a handle on what they are doing.”

Diamond Discovery is offering a FREE ‘Accountant Bundle’, so now is a great time to benefit from this innovative, profitable way of managing accounts.

The Accountant Bundle includes the Client Manager feature, which enables accountants to:

Create, manage and access companies for all your clients
Post unlimited transactions to produce Trial Balance, Profit & Loss and Balance Sheet
Monitor Debtors, Creditors, VAT, Bank and Profits at a glance
Create three named users for practice colleagues and bookkeepers

Extra users can be created for clients to access their accounts themselves. You might be surprised at how Prelude Accounts can provide ongoing revenue for your practice.

To find out more, visit www.preludeaccounts.com today or give us a call on 01656 725800.

You can also follow us on Twitter: @PreludeAccounts

Time is Money

It’s an old adage but one that is more relevant today than ever.

In an internet era and with the ubiquitous app becoming even more prevalent we believe that everything should be instantaneous.

We believe that we should have all the facts at our disposal instantly to enable us to make an informed decision as soon as possible and once we have made up our mind we expect to convey our decision and receive acknowledgement immediately with the goods etc. following swiftly behind.

Bookkeeping has been at the forefront of these changes ever since the inception of the quill pen. From the early “Twinlock” record systems through the “Simplex” cash books to the floppy-disc-based accounting packages to the early personal computer packages and now to the cloud.

The use of the cloud for accounting has brought an immediacy to bookkeeping like never before. No longer are you tied to your desk, you can access your books whenever and frankly wherever you want as long as you have an internet connection.

So now the modern business can maintain records speedily and efficiently and just as importantlycan allow access to his Accountant to help him whenever there is a problem.

But why is immediacy so important? Well, for VAT you have to return your figures quarterly and your bank borrowings will be significantly easier to keep if you can produce accurate half-yearly accounts.

Annually of course, you will require figures to establish your corporate profit or self-employed profit for tax purposes.

This year we will have a new pressure on our record keeping processes, namely the Universal Credit.

To receive your entitlement, self-employed claimants will have to supply profit values in support of their claim for benefit on a monthly basis.

That’s monthly: not quarterly or annually, but monthly.

With Prelude Accounts, even a novice can keep track of his or her business income and expenses sufficiently well to be able to supply profit figures on a monthly basis.

Larger businesses have the full functionality of a quality bookkeeping package with all the benefits a cloud-based solution brings.

Prelude Accounts provides great value for money, helping you keep your books up to date and making the most of your available time.

This is why The ICPA fully endorses Prelude Accounts and recommends it to all its members.

Encouraged by feedback from our users and customers, we have renamed Prelude Online as Prelude Accounts.

This will help us to improve our marketing efforts and also to prevent confusion with online resources for a type of Japanese car.

The change of name will not affect your experience of using the software in any way.

Please be sure to follow Prelude Accounts (@PreludeAccounts) on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/PreludeAccounts

You can also now follow Diamond Discovery (the makers of Prelude Accounts) on LinkedIn:

http://www.linkedin.com/company/diamond-discovery