Following on from my post on FreeAgent yesterday I got home to find the details of the online banking for trefor.net. Time to get the accounts sorted out.

All of the set up costs for the business have come out of my personal account. This includes a chunky legal bill as well as ad hoc events such as champagne celebrations in the Savoy a few pints of half and half in the British Legion. Now that the bank account is accessible and money is starting to come in it is time to square things up.

At lunchtime today I fired up  FreeAgent. The first thing I did was to add the Referral code/discount code to yesterday’s blog. Anyone using this will get 10% off a new FreeAgent subscription and my own costs will drop by 10% too. With a bit of luck enough people will see that post and my accounting service will therefore be free. The code is 43ls3wr5 if you’re interested. You can sign up for a free trial here. All help gratefully received.

The next thing I did was to look for a FreeAgent App in the Play Store. There isn’t one. This fits very nicely with my philosophy that apps are not going to prevail. You should just have a decent mobile site (this blogs mobile site is going to eb much improved shortly).

I entered 3 months worth of expenses at the same time scanning in the receipts. They all uploaded to FreeAgent and on this occasion because I had the site open on the Chromebook in front of me I was able to watch the total accumulate in real time in front of me.

There were even some receipts that I had in email that were quicker and easier to upload via the Chromebook so my use varied between the laptop and the phone.

The beauty of the FreeAgent software is that when I was entering pretty repetitive receipts, for train journeys or taxis for example, where much of the data you want to enter is the same from one entry to another, the system presented you with the fields entered for the previous expense. Saved a lot of time reentering text. entering “r” also brought up the most obvious word – in this case receipt. So typing was kept to a minimum.

This might all be old ground if you are a time served user of this kind of software but you need to know that I’ve been used to a very excellent finance department sorting all that stuff out. Anything that minimises the hassle for me is going to be very welcome. Truth be told I’d probably have welcomed having to use a system such as FreeAgent in my employed days. Would have made filing expenses a lot easier ad made less work for the team in finance.

Now that I’m up and running with FreeAgent I’ll be able to enter my expenses as they happen, or at least on the train home. This does away with the need for me to use any other expenses app. I had been considering Expensify.

That’s all for now. I do get excited about somethings and on this occasion it’s been about boring stuff that none of us really wants to be bothered with but we have to face up to at some stage.

If you’re thinking of trying FreeAgent, and I can recommend it, don’t forget to use my code. Just to save you scrolling back up the code is 43ls3wr5 if you’re interested. You can sign up for a free trial here. All help gratefully received.

PS I know I’m a bit of a tart but hey, if you don’t ask you don’t get (I’m talking about the discount referral code here 🙂 )

Update 12th May 2014 – just got an email from FreeAgent telling me someone has used the discount code and in consequence we are getting money off our monthly subscription. Wahey. It works!