Best Accounting Software Under €15 for Sole Traders/Freelancers

If you are a freelancer, sole trader or somebody starting out a small business, you are most likely concerned with trying to keep your costs as low as possible, especially at the start

You will probably have already shelled out on things such as domain costs and website hosting and all of that kind of stuff

And you don't want to add another big cost on top of that for an accounting software package

Because every heavy monthly cost that you add onto your business, the more products and services you are going to have to sell just to break even

In today's video I'm going to be taking you through Sage's cloud-based project which is

specifically for freelancers and sole traders. I am an accountant myself and I have used a lot of

these packages myself over the last decade so I will be able to give you a good insight in what

it can and what it can't do. So if that sounds good then stick around. Sage have two different

cloud-based packages which you can get. They have their accounting starter package and their

accounting standard package. In today's video I'll be just taking you through the accounting

starter package but I will be also talking about what additional features you can get if you upgrade

to their standard package. So most importantly the price of the starter package is just 10 euro

plus that a month and if you bump up to the standard package that will cost you 25 euro plus

that per month. You may be thinking to yourself I'll just use one of those free ones you can get

online like wave accounting but I will give you some very good reasons why that might not be a

very good idea and this may sound odd but by actually paying the 10 euro a month you may save

a lot of money elsewhere. The specific reason for this is that Sage will tailor their product

to your country so the tax rules and everything that apply to your business will all be built

into your product which is very very useful when it comes to things such as doing VAT returns. But

anyway I will show you all that in a minute let's jump over to the actual Sage starter product and

we'll have a look at it okay so I have just logged into my sage account here and let's have a look

through what you can do with it first off the great thing about it is that it is cloud-based

and you can access it from anywhere another thing that I really like about it is you can have

multiple different sections open on multiple different tabs so this is kind of a better than

say a desktop version where you can look at say one screen at a time so for example if I was

looking at my summary tab here and I also wanted to look at some reports I can

right and open the link in a new tab and then that will open the reporting section in a different tab which is very handy I forgot to mention also as well You can sign up for three months and get a free trial You won have to pay anything

So it's good you can try it before you buy it I'll leave a link below in the description section where you can get that free trial and that counts for both the accounting starter package and

Accounting standard package so this accounting starter package is very easy to use

You don't really need much accounting experience or even bookkeeping experience to use this it is very simple

The most important thing for most businesses is being able to properly manage their sales side of their business. So to be able to send invoices to your customers and manage all the money coming in and keep a good record of everything. And that is made very easy on Sage. So with a few clicks of a button here in your contact section, you can add in all of your different customers and your suppliers. And then that will track all of their invoices and their payments

So if you come to the sales section here, you can create an invoice very easily

You can just select all your customers here in your drop-down menu your date add in your terms and conditions and your details

So it's very easy to do your invoicing and correctly put your VAT and everything on your invoices

And you can even customize your invoice with different templates and logos. So I'll just have a look here

I think just for this package you only actually have two different templates

But you can upload your logo and associated logos here as well to make it more unique

So I'm just going to post a test invoice here and hit save on that invoice

And once that is saved at a click of a button then once you have added the email address of your customer

All you will have to do is click the email button here and it will pop up to send a message with your invoice to the customer

and it is possible as well that you can set up a situation where the customer can pay that invoice

directly from clicking on a link on that invoice so that could be a very handy way of streamlining

your invoicing and also trying to improve your collections from your different customers now one

thing you cannot do with the accounting starter package is actually post purchase invoices you can

only post it in as an expense so if you have a business where you have say invoices where you get

say 30 or 60 or 90 days credit on those invoices and you want to properly manage

your purchase side of your business then you will probably need to upgrade to the

more expensive package to properly manage your accounts payable but this package is probably enough for most people who are sole traders and freelancers I think the best thing about the Sage package is its tax reporting so you can do quite easily do a VAT return so if I come over here to the

more section you will see this VAT returns part here. I know I have only posted in one sales

invoice here but let's quickly just try and generate a tax return. So once you have posted

all of your sales invoices correctly this will populate automatically here and then you can just

take these numbers and put them directly into your vat return online in whatever country you are in

so if you're in europe you'll probably be well used to seeing your t1 your t2 figures your e1 e2

es1 es2 and that would be very easy to have it all labeled here correctly it's just a matter of

taking the numbers here and putting them into your vat return online so this could actually save you

a lot of money if you're able to do your vat returns yourself at a minimum you probably would

be paying somebody about 600 euro a year if you are going to be outsourcing that to a bookkeeper

or an accountant so it would save you a lot of money if you could just do it yourself now the

accounting starter package does not have reports for your vies returns or your return of trading

detail returns but if you do upgrade to the accounting standard package you will also get

those as well another thing the accounting starter package here does not have is payroll software

built in that is a separate product that sage tells so if you have some employees and you plan

on doing all the payroll and stuff yourself that would be a completely separate package it is not

included here on the starter package or else on the accounting standard package either so that is

so that is one downside it does not include that it also doesn't have a fixed asset management

module or an inventory management module so if your business has a lot of stock or a lot of high

cost fixed assets that you need to manage this accounting starter package does not have them

now the accounting standard package does have the inventory module but it does not have a fixed asset

module now that we are actually comparing the both of them here let's just actually compare

the starter package and the standard package just to see what actual additional bits you get for

paying the 25 euro a month so the additional things you get are you can run more advanced reports

you can forecast your cash flow you get snap receipts so that's where you can basically take

photo of your receipts and it automatically kind of enters it into your general ledgers You can send quotes and estimates you get multi banking and invoicing so the starter package only works in one currency and you can manage your inventory as I was just saying there as well Now on the accounting starter package there are plenty of

reports that will give you most of the things you need such as your P&L, your balance sheet

your TB, your audit trail, your cash flow statement, your unreconciled bank transactions

So all of the basic reports your age debtors is there as well but as you will see now if I compare

that to the number of reports that you get on the accounting standard package. I have it here on a

list let's go through it. So here is a list of all the reports on the two different packages. As you

can see for the accounting standard package there is far more choice in what you can actually run

They have about twice as many reports as the accounting starter package. Another good thing

about Sage here is you can actually connect up your bank account to Sage. You can also import

statements and set up rules that recognize repeating transactions and post them in so to

save you some time sage also have a number of things that you could integrate into the package

so as you can see here in the more section they have apps and connections so you can then visit

their sage marketplace the sage marketplace has a ton of different integrations that you can

link up with your sage such as the likes of shopify and etsy so if you have some sort of

e-commerce business you may be able to link up your Sage to it and have all of your sales and

everything just flow in automatically from the likes of Shopify straight into your Sage so that

could work out pretty handy. So that is pretty much it for my quick overview of what you can

actually get with the Sage accounting starter package. I hope you enjoyed the video if you found

it useful or if you have any more questions actually please let me know in the comment section. I think it's a pretty decent software that won't cost you too much at 10 euro plus

that a month and plus if it doesn't have all the features you need as your business starts growing

you can upgrade to their standard package which is not too much more expensive at 25 euro plus

that for me the main selling point is that it is set up to deal with your local tax situation and

that can save you a lot of hassle especially when it comes down to doing your accounts and your taxes

at the end of the year and that can be a bit of a lifesaver so let me know as well if you have

use any other softwares that have you've seen out there that are better or maybe cheaper

let us know in the comment section to try and help anybody else out who is starting a business

so thanks again for watching i'll talk to you guys again