Recommend a free/cheap accounting package?

silverharp

Basically my wife has a small business/self employed , she currently uses Sage 50 but the support has ended and their upgrades are too expensive for what she needs. All she needs is something to book sales invoices and do basic bank recording, VAT and which runs a basic year end P&L/Balance Sheet.
There appear to be free ones on line, are any of these any good? or is there any that have a modest price but don't rope you in with high support costs?

Cheers

Mickiemcfist

silverharp wrote: »

Basically my wife has a small business/self employed , she currently uses Sage 50 but the support has ended and their upgrades are too expensive for what she needs. All she needs is something to book sales invoices and do basic bank recording, VAT and which runs a basic year end P&L/Balance Sheet.
There appear to be free ones on line, are any of these any good? or is there any that have a modest price but don't rope you in with high support costs?

Cheers

I don't know about the free ones, but xero is cheap and works. Too simple to really need support. Lacks a lot of the functionality of sage but you get what you pay for I suppose.

silverharp

Mickiemcfist wrote: »

I don't know about the free ones, but xero is cheap and works. Too simple to really need support. Lacks a lot of the functionality of sage but you get what you pay for I suppose.

I had a quick look on their website and seem to want you to pay per month to use it


https://www.xero.com/ie/pricing/

Meeeee79

Not sure of free software available as would never have used one but can definitely recommend Quickbooks, can get the basic package for less than €5 a month as far as I know

Mickiemcfist

silverharp wrote: »

I had a quick look on their website and seem to want you to pay per month to use it


https://www.xero.com/ie/pricing/

Yea I said it was cheap not free

Late reply on this but https://www.bullethq.com/ is free and it's Irish.

silverharp

brenbrady wrote: »

Late reply on this but https://www.bullethq.com/ is free and it's Irish.

My wife found that herself, she was suspicious but it looks legit, they even did some advertising on Boards. Seems like they charge for payroll which seems fair enough.

She will give it a try this year and parallel with Sage to see how it works out.

Thanks

Tenigate

Sounds like you want to pay a small upfront cost, rather than a monthly subscription!
I think subscriptions are the way all software is going.

Mickiemcfist

Tenigate wrote: »

Sounds like you want to pay a small upfront cost, rather than a monthly subscription!
I think subscriptions are the way all software is going.

Spot on, it's for two reasons. One is that if you sell software upfront you have to keep it live infinitely, whereas selling it monthly you get paid for as long as it's in use & can upgrade as you go.
Secondary to that, it's much easier from a revenue recognition point of view

silverharp

silverharp wrote: »

My wife found that herself, she was suspicious but it looks legit, they even did some advertising on Boards. Seems like they charge for payroll which seems fair enough.

She will give it a try this year and parallel with Sage to see how it works out.

Thanks

It's a freemium based business model. Completely legit Irish company.

silverharp

My wife is using sage line 50 , you can run a company with a small accounts department on that so shelling out 20pm is nothing. As self employed though paying a one off ~€150 for 4 or 5 years is preferable to shelling out 20 per month every month for 5 years, that's 1200 euros or even €10 per month is going to run you 600 over the same time period.

Development costs for small accounting programs should be nearly zero at this stage, it should come bundled with Office truth be told