When I set my main business up in 1999 there was really only one choice for accounting software: Sage and you’d be forgiven for thinking that this was still the case given their marketing budget and visibility.

The consequences of choosing Sage were that I needed to employ someone specifically to use that one piece of software and that I got very little use out of it because I would have needed to buy an extra licence to view the information. I confess that I experienced many instances of “Sage Rage” as every useful feature (such as my being able to share my book-keeper’s information) involved an extra licence at huge expense. In my view, Sage abuses its position as the de-facto standard but, having now used an online service, I will never go back to any desktop software, least of all Sage.

Overall, my conversion to FreeAgent has been an utter joy. As an illustration, I’ve gone from having to employ someone three days a week to do the books on my main company to doing the books myself in no more than one hour a month. In fact, I also do the books for another business and that takes 30 minutes a month and now have FreeAgent setup for all my companies.

Here’s how it works (having set up your account) -

1. Download your statements from your online banking account
2. Upload them to FreeAgent. FreeAgent then tries to work out what each entry means and only asks for explanations of those it can’t be sure about. It gets progressively better at this over time and I typically only have a dozen or so transactions to explain per month.

…that’s it.

Doing the VAT? Just make sure your statements have been uploaded, click Taxes, VAT, and there it is: a visual version of the paper form for you to fill straight in.

FreeAgent handles invoicing, estimating, contacts, expenses, dividendsand regular bills along with a complete array of other features. All of these work efficiently and intuitively and I like the fact that the developers are constantly adding new tweaks and features.

How about sending the books to the accountant? Easy: under Accounting you’ll see a range of reports to send to your accountant along with the ability to export the whole lot to Excel.

Accountants are a conservative lot and many of them are tied to the Sage treadmill (of course it suits them to perpetuate the air of complication and mystery around accounting that Sage encourages) but I’ve persuaded my accountant to accept information in FreeAgent format (you could even add them as a user on your account). If they don’t, then I recommend you find an accountant that does and remind them who works for who.

FreeAgent ranks in my top couple of web applications of any sort. As an extremely busy person, I confess to almost enjoying doing the accounts now!

It’s rare that I feel able to recommend a product unreservedly: this is one of those occasions. FreeAgent starts at £15 per month for a sole trader and, given the range of features and ease of use, could easily become your most important application for administering your business.