A couple of years ago I wrote about Kashflow – Online Business Accounting Software. At the time I'd been using it as a sole trader for a few months. Now with 3 years of experience and company / VAT registered experience it's worth refreshing this post.

What is Kashflow?

Kashflow is essentially accounting software like Sage, but it's based online and, speaking of experience with Sage, is far simpler to use. Everything is based online which means that you can access your accounts from any computer, you can share your login with your accountant and if you own an iPhone, there is an app to allow you easy access via your mobile phone.

Business Accounting and Administration

Kashflow doesn't just do accounts, it also allows you to store all of your clients' details, allows you to create invoices and email them direct to the clients and/or save them as PDFs. You can create quotes and projects which can have invoices and quotes assigned to it as well.

A major benefit that we've found is the repeat billing option, which means setting up an invoice for a client and then setting it to go out automatically every X months or every year. This is such a time saver, especially for small bills for domain renewals, or small hosting accounts. We just check through once a month to make sure the next few weeks are accurate and up to date, and leave them to go. The only work needs to be done when payment is made and we just mark it off as paid.

All of the invoices created on Kashflow are automatically added to your turnover once they're paid. You can also save rates and discount rates for individual clients making it easier to remember who pays what.

You also have sales and purchase types, allowing you to set up specific 'types' of products / jobs, and you can choose to assign prices to them as well, again saving a lot of time when you just select the correct product to add to the invoice.

Finally the bank reconciliation is also a great feature, which allows you to reconcile your bank statement with Kashflow to ensure nothing is missed.

VAT

(This section is probably a bit easier to understand if you're British!) The support for VAT registered businesses is great too. On the front overview page you can instantly see your VAT liability for the current quarter, and you can set up your details for HMRC and then submit your VAT directly from Kashflow when you're ready to do so.

Of course you don't have to be VAT registered to use Kashflow, as I wasn't when I first started using it as a sole trader. It's just another great feature that's available.

Accounting Reports

Finally the number of accounting reports available are great. To be honest I still don't know what half of them mean but then again I know what I need to see and that's our profit and loss! We give our login to our accountant too and he uses other various reports to get information for our end of year accounts. He'd never used Kashflow to start with but has even remarked on how easy it is to use and has got the hang of it quite quickly. We've had a few fun and games finding the wrong payments in the wrong payment types, but it's very easy to shift payments from one type to another to ensure the accounts are correct.

Free 60 day trial

So if you're in business then I cannot recommend Kashflow enough. Before I started using it my argument would be that I couldn't afford to pay out for accounting software when I could do it myself in Excel or my own written accounts software. However, the £15.99 + VAT per month cost is minimal compared to the time saved, which frees us up to do more work and earn more than the cost of Kashflow.

You can try it for free for 60 days, you don't even have to enter your card details (unlike most trial offers). You can simply set up an account, give it a go and if you like it, decide if it's worth the monthly cost. There's no minimum requirement on accounts either, so you don't have to sign up for a year or anything like that either. If you also sign up via my Kashflow link and decide to continue with using it, then you will actually save £1 off the monthly cost (this is continuous, not just a one off). This means £14.99 + VAT per month, and saves you £12 + VAT per year.

So it's certainly worth looking at. So go take a look

(Feel free to ask me any questions below with regards to it if you want and I'll do my best to answer them!).

Whenever I think things are slowing down for me, suddenly life gets busier again! At least it's not quite as stressful as this time last year.

From a personal point of view I've been window shopping online and working out everything I need for my wedding which is now in 10 weeks time! It's quite fun, especially as I enjoy shopping!, and we're both really looking forward to the day when it finally arrives. It'll be great to see all of our family and friends, and the food sounds fantastic

Workwise we've been quite busy. I've been working a lot on a calendar availability system using jQuery and PHP to control it, update dynamically and refresh to keep the calendar updated between a number of users. It's a bit of a challenge and a lot of reading to find out how to do things and how to do them the most efficiently, however it's great fun and different from the normal websites we work on.

I've managed to get a migration script in place for my Page Menu Editor plugin for WordPress. About 6 weeks ago I discovered that the developer on the All in one SEO pack plugin had integrated my code into his plugin at the request of a number of users, which rendered mine a bit obsolete when both are running. However, there was no migration script and he'd used different option names to me, so nothing was copied over. Having both plugins on a number of sites myself, it's a pain to sit and copy it all over manually. So I've now set up a simple migration to allow users to do it themselves if they wish, so if you do use both plugins then an upgrade should be coming through soon with the new migration system.

Finally, our new venture Blog Themes Club is going well. We've added a new theme and I've been adding a number of additional page templates to all our themes to hopefully give our users more than just a basic theme. We're looking to add another new theme next month too and have plenty of ideas for themes to keep us going for a while.

It's all going well

Recently I wrote about losing a friend of ours. Leaving behind such a young family and naturally having concerns for the initial financial issues that his family would potentially face, we had a collection on a forum for them. I arranged this using my personal PayPal account, and posted up a donation link for donations to be made.

Now I have two PayPal accounts (don't worry, it's allowed!). I have a business PayPal account which accepts credit/debit card payments, and all income received is charged a fee unless it comes from a payee who's paid to waive the fee (usually from somewhere like Text Link Ads that do bulk payments). I also have a personal PayPal account to accept donations off my site towards the use/upkeep of plugins, help given to people etc. and also it means that I can easily test PayPal scripts such as an IPN, on client sites. I use my personal account to make a payment to my business account. It avoids the potential of never getting a refund from the client (yes this has happened before!). In fact it's what PayPal advises.
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I've been a bit quiet again recently. Besides doing the whole house hunting thing again (more on that another time!), I've been working with Kevin from BloggingTips on a new site for WordPress Themes called Blog Themes Club.

Club Membership

The site is primarily a themes club (in case you hadn't already guessed that!), selling 3, 6 and 12 month membership plans which will allow users to sign in, download and use any of our themes available, get updates of the themes as soon as they're available, get quality support via our private support forum and also via a support desk.

The membership prices are below however we've also reduced these until 1st August as we appreciate that starting with 4 themes isn't a large amount, however our prices are based more on support and continued upgrades:

• 3 months membership – $49 $29
• 6 months membership – $79 $49
• 12 months membership – $99 $69

Single Purchases

Going from experience I know a club membership isn't for everyone, and not everyone will need support or want more than one theme, so we've also got the option to purchase themes individually for a single use. This option doesn't come with any support, but the themes themselves go from $19 which we think is a fairly reasonable price.

Also until July 31st 2009 you can get 25% off the purchase of any Single Use purchase by entering the discount code LAUNCH25 during the checkout process.

Theme Designs

Of course we're aiming to cover all the subject areas that a design can be used for with WordPress including Blogging, CMS, Photoblogs, eCommerce and more. We've already got another theme almost ready to go plus a 6th is being planned ready for design soon. We're hoping to add at least one new theme per 2 months and of course keep our current ones up to date.

Win membership for a month!

To celebrate the launch of Blog Themes Club we are giving away 10 membership accounts for free to readers. These accounts are valid for one month. During that time you will be able to download all of our themes and get daily support.

To enter the competition all you have to do is help us spread the word of our site via Twitter. All you need to do is:

• Follow us on Twitter @BlogThemesClub
• Tweet or ReTweet the folling message via Twitter :
  

  @BlogThemesClub have just launched their new wordpress themes club http://tinyurl.com/n7rhnh – 10 memberships up for grabs in a competition

• Leave a comment linking to the status link of your tweet on our launch post

The deadline for this competition is Sunday 21st June 2009. Therefore, no tweets after midnight Eastern Time (New York Timezone) on Sunday (about 5am GMT) will be counted. We will select the winners randomly and do our best to announce the winners the following day.

» Read our launch post – Blog Themes Club Opens

Today I spoke to a long term client about some new updates on their site. I'd spoke to her briefly a couple of weeks ago where she mentioned that a local developer had been sniffing around trying to get their custom, pulling holes in the current website, despite being told they were not interested in hiring him.

Okay, so I appreciate that people looking for work will look through the local businesses and tout their work to them. If you're low on work you need to see what you can get. Luckily we've never been in that position, but I know if I was then I wouldn't approach it in the following manner.

First the developer visited the shop, asked if they needed a new developer and pointed out a few design/content issues that needed addressing (some of which are already being addressed anyway). My contact was away at the time but the owner was there and he entertained the guy a little. Maybe that was the wrong thing to do. The developer clearly took that as the green light and turned up again when my contact was there. She told him that they were not interested, they already had a development company on board and he wouldn't be hired. He didn't really take the hint however, then asking who did the site, who hosted it, what platform it was running on (it's not hard to find this information out but still…). She asked him politely to leave, eventually he did.

A week later he was back (persistant, or desperate, that's for sure!) and just sat down waiting for the owner who was in a meeting. My contact again told him to leave, in which he replied that as they didn't seem that bothered in his content points he'd gone and phoned the press office of their supplier, pointing out that the supplier's name wasn't mentioned on the front page of the site, and that the catalogue on the site was out of date (although that's the supplier's fault for not getting the current one sent out until last week!). Strangely enough, that didn't go down too well!

I can appreciate in these times that people are maybe low on work, but honestly, if you're going to try and get new clients, or steal clients from another developer, then do it a bit more ethically and don't treat your prospective new client badly or try to go above them! You really won't make any friends and potentially damage your own reputation.

On a lighter note, shortly after a regular customer of theirs asked for their site developer's details as they loved the site and really liked the functionality and design of it