Examples might include side hustlers or landlords, for example, who also have a regular 9-5 job and whose accounting is relatively straightforward.

Even though there’s amazing cloud accounting technology like Xero or Sage to make life easier, they don’t need to use it, or perhaps just don’t want to.

Alas, do-it-for-me can equal time-consuming for their accountant or bookkeeper. Preparing tax returns can take many hours, with accountants using Microsoft Excel to manually input, organise and reconcile data from bank and credit card statements. And of course, during tax season this can become an incredible burden for practices.

AutoEntry is excited to offer AccountsPrep for these situations. This is an addon for AutoEntry and, as its name suggests, makes it incredibly easy to get to trial balance using the automated data entry features that are already part of AutoEntry. It’s just a single subscription for all your client accounts within AutoEntry.

AccountsPrep means you haven’t got to use Excel for these clients. No more manual input. Days of work can turn into just hours.

How it works

PDF or print bank statements are uploaded into AutoEntry in the usual way for extraction. The data is then imported into AccountsPrep where it can be reviewed, updated and fast-coded to a chart of accounts (for which templates are provided).

Cheques and deposits can be created and matched, too, and off-statement journal adjustments posted via three methods—standard journal, double journal, and manual quick edits direct in the journal.

Single transactions can be split into several lines for multiple nominal/tax codes, and you can make transfers between multiple bank and credit card accounts.

Once reconciliation has finished, you can instantly output reports such as a P&L, balance sheet, trial balance or tax report. Crucially, you can also export to your accounts production software of choice for tax compliance.

Easy-to-understand visuals demonstrating cash flow and yearly results can be created to provide clients with insight.

AccountsPrep can do other magic, too. But that’s enough to be getting on with!

How to get it

AccountsPrep will be available later in 2024, initially for existing AutoEntry customers and then for new subscribers. If you’re interested, visit www.autoentry.com/accountsprep or speak to your existing AutoEntry account manager.

Our customers love that, by subscribing to AutoEntry, you pay only for the data you extract.

For no extra cost you get unlimited client companies, as many user accounts as you need, and unlimited cloud storage for documents.

AccountsPrep builds on this. It uses a single flat, low subscription each month for use with a practice-wide subscription, with access to all AccountsPrep features.

AccountsPrep is UK-only for the moment, but we’re working hard to bring it to other countries.

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Rob Newman is Managing Partner at CCM | Carter Collins & Myer, and has been using AccountsPrep for a year as part of our early access programme. Here’s what he has to say:

I’ve got a lot of construction clients. I love working with them. But often they’re smaller clients with incomplete records.

Even if they have larger turnovers, they’re often not much more than a man in a van.

Now, I couldn’t install a bathroom or build a brick wall. And I don’t expect them to know about accounting after a hard day’s work. I’m about trying to make their life as easy as possible while keeping them compliant.

Once a year we have to sit with them and output bank statement PDFs from their online banking, and then build accounts from them.

It’s for these kinds of clients that AccountsPrep is just brilliant. I’ve got 600 of them and despite what the government says about making clients and their taxes 100% digital, these kinds of clients are not going to go away.

AccountsPrep can turn what was previously a full working day for us, per client, into just 60 or 90 minutes.

You take the raw bank statements, whack them through AutoEntry, and then turn it all into a set of accounts in AccountsPrep without having to use anything else.

It saves a whole stage of the work for us creating working papers using Microsoft Excel and then working manually matching up everything and manually turning it into a trial balance. For larger clients we’ll use cloud accounting, but that work is still there.

The monthly subscription for AccountsPrep is essentially nothing given the time we save. This is also why I’ve been using AutoEntry for the last five years. I know exactly what I’m paying for each month, and what I’m getting. I’ve used other software and ended-up with huge bills that took me by surprise.  

AccountsPrep and AutoEntry also means I can bill on the basis of outcome and what I provide to the client. This allows me to remain very competitive with my fees and, in fact, I can charge significantly less than I do with other clients whose ways of working force us to work manually to create their accounts each year.

I’ve nothing against clients using Xero, Sage, or QuickBooks and I encourage each and every one to do so. But if they don’t want to use it then there’s nothing I can do about that. That’s when I use AccountsPrep.