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Download all data for a date range
At the end of every quarter I send to my accountant copies of the following for the period:
- Sales invoices (overview and actual invoices)
- Purchase invoices (overview and actual invoices)
- All bank and credit card statements
- Explanations of bank/credit card transactions in a spreadsheet
- Expense claims with receipts
Most of this information now resides happily in FreeAgent, but what would be the best way to get it out to send to my accountant?
I know I can get the raw data in the export spreadsheet but it includes everything, needs some work to get into a usable format, and does not include any of the attached files (invoices, receipts, etc.).
What would be great is if there was a way to select what you want to output, select a date range, and let the system generate it all - including attachments - in a zip file for download.
Sadly my accountant isn't happy logging into the system themselves so I can't just take that approach!
Thanks for any help; loving FreeAgent so far!
- Sales invoices (overview and actual invoices)
- Purchase invoices (overview and actual invoices)
- All bank and credit card statements
- Explanations of bank/credit card transactions in a spreadsheet
- Expense claims with receipts
Most of this information now resides happily in FreeAgent, but what would be the best way to get it out to send to my accountant?
I know I can get the raw data in the export spreadsheet but it includes everything, needs some work to get into a usable format, and does not include any of the attached files (invoices, receipts, etc.).
What would be great is if there was a way to select what you want to output, select a date range, and let the system generate it all - including attachments - in a zip file for download.
Sadly my accountant isn't happy logging into the system themselves so I can't just take that approach!
Thanks for any help; loving FreeAgent so far!
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Inappropriate?Chris,
Hmmm. We kind of built FreeAgent specifically so you wouldn't need to do that kind of thing!
Is there any mileage in us speaking to your accountant, doing a little demo and some training?
I’m confident we can bring them into the 21st Century!
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Inappropriate?Chris, I'm fascinated. What does your accountant do with the information on a quarterly basis?
I’m amazed how my profession delights in staying out of date
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Inappropriate?Hi Ed,
Thanks for the quick response.
That may be the best way to go. It would be fantastic if I could just give them access so I didn't have to send them anything.
Do you have any guidance/documentation I can send to my accountants to sell the idea to them, and how to use the system to retrieve the data they need?
I’m liking the sound of this so far...
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Inappropriate?Hi Stuart,
It's used for the quarterly VAT return, and also quarterly management accounts including profit & loss and balance sheet.
At the moment I am photocopying everything and sending copies (although I could just send the originals) which takes an age.
They're fine with accepting electronic copies but I still need to compile everything and send it over. If I could get everything for them out of FreeAgent or, better still, let them get the data themselves, it would save me a lot of time. -
Inappropriate?As an accountant It's my prerogative to criticise my own profession. Horses for courses springs to mind in this case.
Chris, I doubt if anything other than FreeAgent itself will sell the idea to your accountants.
Expecting you to do extra work to supply them with information which is readily available at the press of a few keys is ridiculous. You're the customer.
You can do your own VAT returns with FreeAgent and I just wonder what extra value your accountants are adding by preparing management accounts. Are they discussing the figures with you? Are they highlighting problems/opportunities? If not, I suspect you may as well use the accounts in FreeAgent. You'll be no worse off!
I’m annoyed with too many members of my profession
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Inappropriate?Hi there,
I'd also like to be able to download all these PDFs and attachments, but not for my Accountant (as I don't have one yet...Hi Stuart! ;-)), but more for my own peace of mind in being able to download everything in a single go and keep it backed up.
I keep backups of all these files anyway, but I think having all the FreeAgent data together in a single zip file that I can download on on a monthly basis or whatever would be a nice touch.
Thanks,
Stephen1 Comment
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I agree Stephen it is a good idea. You can't be too careful. -
Inappropriate?Just to follow this up, my accountant has now agreed to log in to FreeAgent directly so I don't need to do any of this!
I agree that it would still be useful to have it as a backup facility though.
I’m happy
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Inappropriate?Yes, you can't have too many backups in too many places! Also think it'd be nice to have everything together in one zip file, backups and data, nice and neat.
Also, it was only in the last year that a hugely popular bookmarking service called Ma.gnolia crashed and lost all its data, so touch wood, but it's not unheard of for these things to happen. -
Inappropriate?Hi all
We already offer an export of all your data to XLS format, and we'd be interested in hearing what other formats you'd like you'd like to be able to export your data into. XML? HTML?
Regarding data backups, we take this very seriously at FreeAgent Central. We take backups of the database every 15 minutes and store these offsite. We also run regular integrity tests on our backups to ensure the data isn't corrupt in any way (as happened to Magnolia). -
Inappropriate?Hi Olly,
Personally, I'm quite happy with the XLS format as it is. I just thought it'd be nice if all the attachments could be downloaded in addition to this, so that it would be possible to have a '1 click download' of data and files.
Not essential I guess - particularly as I've just scanned/saved ALL my receipts for this year as PDF's in one of my Dropbox folders - but for those who's files aren't as organised or saved in multiple locations, this could be a useful feature.1 Comment Add a comment
This answers the question
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Thanks again for the feedback -- it's a really good idea which we've noted for the future, but it's not something on our immediate roadmap.
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