Curt, yes, it works in the US. IT can also work with US date formats.

This looks pretty interesting. I ve been looking for an alternative to quick books to see if there was anything better. I am in the US, and noticed that the application you review here is from the UK. Does it support US dollars? Or is it based on the Euro? Thanks Curt

Matt – good to hear it and good to hear business is going well.

The problem about cahs payments, is that as Im mainly going to homes, it will be cash payments and not be able to get paid in other ways, as I need payment before I give them the laptop or pc back…

Anyway, in answer to your questions

1. Yeah the HSBC account can work out fee free if you don't deal in cash ie. you don't accept cash as payment (which you ideally don't want to anyway) and you don't intend to withdraw cash over the counter or via a cash machine. I pay myself via bank transfer then I withdraw cash from my personal account which is free anyway. If you expect to accept a lot of cash in payment then you could either, as you say, pay it into your own account and transfer it, just keep a record of it, although that defeats the purpose of having a business account as all the income is coming from you. Ideally try and get people to pay by cheque or bank transfer.

2. Claiming petrol etc. won't be so complicated for you until you earn over £15k self employed earnings. For the time being, keep all petrol receipts for when traveling to and from a client. You could either work out how much your mobile is being used for your self employed work and put that down as an expense (you'd keep the whole bill in your paperwork, just highlight all the calls then maybe work out a percentage of time used for the monthly contract fee) too, anything else that been paid for due to your self employment or anything else that is used in part, again work out the percentage of it. Once you've done it for one month you'll most likely have the same percentages each month eg. 25% of your mobile phone monthly fee, 50% of your broadband etc.

Fact is, if you put your expenses down then it deducts from your turnover and you'll pay less tax. Every expense that goes down saves you 20% of the value of that expense, so yes, it can be worth doing it right!

As for your Car on HP, I couldn't say. You're moving into the territory of a car being used for business purposes and your insurance could escalate. You'd be better off keeping your insurance and HP as personal expenses and just submitting petrol receipts that are from business use.

Thanks mate