Simply Books answers

You certainly don’t have to be an accountant or book-keeper to use Simply Books. The vast majority of our customers are not.

Yes.

You can keep the accounts for any number of businesses.

The only material restriction is that the software is single user.

So if you need more than a full time book-keeper, you’ve hit the size limit. In terms of file sizes and so on, there is no restriction.

9.30am to 5.30pm, five days a week.

Simply Books does not do:

• payroll
• stock control
• ordering
• cost/job centres

This is one of those impossible to answer questions, but we have this rule of thumb:

• By the end of month 1 you should have got a pretty good feel of it, and be suspecting that it’s going to be OK
• By the end of month 2, even if there are one or two things you're not a hundred percent confident with, you'll know you've made the right choice of book-keeping system.
• By the end of month 3 you should be over the hill, modestly confident and recommending it to your friends.

You need Version 2 SR3 or later to print invoices.

Computer screens come in a wide variety of sizes or resolutions.

F12, which expands a form sideways, was designed so that people with small screens (low resolution) wouldn't be continually having forms open inconveniently wide. So if you've got a big screen you're suffering because of all those small screens still in use.

Nevertheless our apologies. We didn’t expect the volume of response that we have got about F12. We’ll do something about this in the next major release. Meanwhile, please bear with F12.

Yes you can.

You can export to any spreadsheet that (jargon warning) understands ‘tab delimited fields’, which probably covers every spreadsheet in the world, and to any word processor that understands ‘rich text format’.

Instead of using the ‘Option 3: MS Excel’ use the ‘Option 5: Export Tab Delimited’.

If you want your spreadsheet program to open automatically when the report is exported, change the Tools Options setting on the Advanced page so that ‘Export Reader Program = ’ references the folder and program name for your spreadsheet.

For alternative word processor packages, still send the report to 4: MS Word — Word won’t actually start if you don’'t have it, but the file is, in any case, in ‘rich text format’ and can probably be read by your word processor.

You’ll find the file in the ‘Reports’ sub-folder where you installed Simply Books (by default - c:\program files\simply books).

If you are not fairly confident with computers, you will probably find it easier to buy a copy of Word and Excel or get a copy of Open Office (open source and free) which will handle the same files.

Yes. If you have two cheque books on the go at once for one bank account, you need to work with more than one cheque book in Simply Books.

Or if your bank sends you cheque books before you need them, and you find yourself working with a later one before an earlier one, you will need to do this.

Good instructions for how to do this are rather longer than will fit here, but they are all contained in the online help material. In the online help index, look for ‘cheque book’ and ‘using more than one cheque book’, and click on the link you’ll find on the bottom of the initial page you are directed to.

There will be many occasions when you’re doing your accounts for real when you find you don’t have all the information to make a full entry.

Your boss – or you – may have forgotten to write in the date on a cheque stub, etc. Nothing is worse than having this kind of thing hold you up, so Simply Books allows you to leave entries blank and come back to them later.

The most common problem is not knowing how to categorise something. As with the other fields the category or account fields can be left blank. This should at some later date be filled in, if your accounts are to be complete.

Use ‘Edit > Find’ to find what Simply Books terms ‘incomplete’ entries. For full instructions consult the online help index, look for ‘incomplete entries’ and ‘checking for’.

No, just do it.

If you try to modify or delete entries outside your allowed range of dates (the ‘from’ and ‘to’ dates, see Tools > Options), you will be given a hefty warning.

There isn’t a special way of doing it, but a number of people have got it wrong.

They have entered two lines in the paying in book form if they have two cheques being paid in on one paying in book slip. This works OK, but is not the easiest way to do this.

You should treat this situation like any entry where you have to split the entry between different headings. Select ‘Forms > Transaction’ from the menu. Now you'll see a form on which you can enter one transaction (paying in slip in this case) with as many lines as you want (and see page 23 of the User Guide). This is the right way of doing it.

The advantage of doing it this way is that when you come to process your bank statement (or reconcile it) you will find the same figure on your list of receipts as you find on your statement.

It misses out doing VAT returns and the end of year process. Consult the online help for these. Otherwise all day to day operations are included.

Depreciation is what happens year by year as your car gets older and loses value. Prepayments are payments made in advance of receiving goods or services. Accruals are the reverse. All three of them are accounting devices to more accurately reflect your profitability.

You can – indirectly.

You need to export the report to Excel or another spreadsheet. Run the report for, say, the end of March, and then for the end of April. Paste the figures into two columns in one spreadsheet, and in a third column subtract the March figures from April ones.

No.

You should copy the figures from the printout to the VAT 100 form.

Click on Start > Programs > Simply Books > Uninstall.

There will be a small number of small files left in the directory Simply Books which you can safely delete if you wish.

Do not use Add/Remove Programs (in Control Panel). It won’t work.

There are minor clashes with Access (Simply Books is an Access based program itself).

These can be annoying if you’re not used to sorting out Access problems. If so, please phone us to help.

There is no mechanism in Simply Books to mark invoices as ‘disputed’.

Our recommendation is as follows:

If a purchase invoice is disputed, sort out the dispute as quickly as possible and don't enter it onto the computer until it is sorted.

If a sales invoice is disputed, again sort it out as quickly as possible, but, in this case, you probably will have entered it on the computer. When you have sorted it out, enter a credit note for the full amount and enter a new invoice for the correct amount.

The Chartered Institute of Accountants – the senior body in the country – have accredited the software.

This means that they have thoroughly tested it against a standard they have been applying for many years now.

Yes.

The debits are on the left because most bank accounts issue statements with debits (from the customer’s point of view) on the left. So it’s easier if we show bank statements like this too and, for consistency, other forms with two columns of figures.

They are matched by date, automatically. In other words, any payment is matched against the oldest outstanding invoices.

The standard VAT scheme, the cash VAT scheme and flat rates.

Put concisely, if you are registered for the Cash VAT scheme you incur a debt with, or are due a refund from Customs and Excise only when your credit accounts are actually paid.

Simply Books deals with this by calculating the VAT in the normal way (ie according to the date of invoices both paid and unpaid) and then by making a deferral equal to the VAT on the invoices that have not been paid.

On each purchase or sales ledger account there can be one invoice that has been partly paid. In this case the deferral includes a proportion of that invoice’s VAT equal to the unpaid proportion of the invoice. In the following VAT period, the deferral is reversed before the process is repeated.

They can send you a disc with a backup file – this assumes you have Simply Books on to which to restore the backup.

Or they can send you printouts (hard copy or in Excel or other format). Suitable printouts for the year end would normally include Trail Balance, Purchase, Sales and Adjustments Day Books, and a bank reconciliation.

Accountants who have not got a copy of Simply Books are entitled to a free copy for the purpose of handling their client’s data.

There are two ways. You can use whichever you prefer, but one method is particularly suited for ad hoc adjustments like debt write offs, and the other more suited to formal end of year adjustments. See the online help for instructions.

Yes.

Bureau services use Simply Books because simplicity and efficiency go hand in hand, and Simply Books is very efficient. If you charge by the job rather than by the hour you can greatly increase your profitability.

The second bit of good news is that the Simply Books licence covers multiple client businesses. The licence is for one computer, so only if your bureau has lots of book-keepers and lots of machines will you need to get more than one licence.