We want to wish Tim and his new wife a fabulous honeymoon in Ghana! Bring us back a bar of gold and some sunshine please and in return we’ll make you proud by looking after the Clear Books HQ.

After nearly 4 years of hard graft and hardly any breathing space for a holiday, Tim certainly deserves the 2 week break. Although we do have some customers in Ghana he could always pop in and say hello to…

If you’ve been using Open Payroll for all of your employees for the 2011-2012 financial year, then it should already contain most of the data that you will need to submit to HMRC in the form of P14s and a P35. You just need to make sure that we know your PAYE reference, which can be entered under ‘Employer > Details’ as shown below.

Once you’ve entered your PAYE Reference, you can start your return by navigating to ‘Employer > End of Year Return’. After selecting the employees you wish to include in your return, you’ll be presented with a P35 form to fill in.

Make sure to fill in the amount of NICs and Tax that you’ve already paid to HMRC and any other information such as CIS deductions. After answering the rest of the questions and making the employer declarations, you will be asked to confirm the details that are about to be submitted. If you’re happy with the information, press confirm and your submission will be sent to HMRC!

After your return has been submitted, you can check its status by navigating to ‘Employer > HMRC Submissions’. Please note that this return will not show up on the HMRC website as it was submitted using 3rd party software.

You will be able to print P60 certificates straight from Open Payroll as soon as we get the design approved by HMRC. Until then, the employee’s P14 contains the necessary information to fill in your own P60 if you need to issue them urgently.

The aim of the event was to strengthen our relationship with our accounting partners and give them an insight into what we have planned for Clear Books in the near future. This included a demo of the up and coming Clear Books Mobile App as well as an overview of the other applications that can be accessed within Clear Books but are still currently in beta testing: FluidCRM, OpenPayroll TaskDesk and QuickHR. These apps are all available for you to trial now!

We received a lot of positive feedback about Clear Books from the partners who were able to attend and also took on board lots of suggestions which will help us to improve Clear Books for all of our users. Do remember, if you have any suggestions for Clear Books or features that you would like to see implemented you can let us know via the Network.

If you are a small business using Clear Books and are seeking an accountant or bookkeeper please do contact one of our partners. They are always happy to hear from you – just have a look in the directory on the Clear Books website.

Clear Books has integrated with one of the UK’s leading payment gateways, PayPoint.net. PayPoint helps thousands of e-commerce businesses accept secure payments online and over the phone.

If you already have an account with PayPoint your customers can use the  ’Pay Online’ option available on statements you send to them from you Clear Books account.

Use the following guide to set up the PayPoint ‘Pay Online’ feature.

1. Head to Money>Banking>Add Account and select a new ‘Internet Payments’ account.

2. Select PayPoint as the Payment provider.

You will need your PayPoint account information for the Account ID, Account email, Remote Password and Digest Secret fields.

For the Payment Button field select ‘yes’.

You will also need to add the £0.20 surcharge for PayPoint.

3. Once you have saved this information the PayPoint button will be available on your statements.

When a customer receives a statement from you they will be able to click the ‘PayPoint’ button to then make an ‘Online Payment’ directly to your account.

I stepped in to do some on site training yesterday with one of our Clear Books customers. This particular organisation had done a pretty good job entering all their financial data into Clear Books using the bank import tool. However, they weren’t familiar with any of the reporting features.

They didn’t know that the Profit and Loss report existed. Neither did they know that you could easily create a PDF version to print off for management meetings.

So if the Profit and Loss is a foreign report to you then go and take a look at it today by navigating to Reports > Financials.

When Clear Books first started in August 2008 we operated our own simple login system. However, as we geared up for our official launch in June 2009 we switched to the Fubra Passport.

The Fubra Passport is a central login system that acts as a gateway to a number of Fubra websites including OurProperty.co.uk, Catn.com, PetrolPrices.com and AffJet.com.

The Fubra Passport is your login to Clear Books and is integrated with the Fubra Payments system, which is how you pay for your Clear Books subscription each month.

Over the past week the Fubra Passport has experienced intermittent downtime due to a hardware fault. From early on, we caught this and implemented a solution so that you can log into Clear Books and access your data without the Fubra Passport. This system should kick in automatically if we ever detect that the Fubra Passport is down for maintenance (scheduled or unscheduled). Unfortunately, yesterday this system did not kick in automatically. We are improving our monitoring but if this ever happens again it is possible to use our backup login system at any time to access Clear Books by using the following link.

We now plan to improve the accessibility to Clear Books by supporting multiple login systems such as Google, Facebook, Linkedin and the Fubra Passport.

Please make a note of this link which provides you access to Clear Books if the Fubra Passport is ever inaccessible in the future.

Once again we’re sorry if you are one of our customers who has been affected.

My opinion changed a week ago when I successfully  used LinkedIn to network with over 300 contacts in less than an hour!

This speedy networking did not involve any early morning breakfasts with over enthusiastic strangers or 30 second sales pitches.

I simply carried out the following.

First of all you’ll need to make sure you have a LinkedIn profile.

Select Contacts>Connections>Imported Contacts. Your LinkedIn profile will automatically send an invitation to everyone you have ever sent an email to from your Outlook/Gmail/Hotmail etc. The recipients will then make the decision to either accept or decline your request.

Sit back and watch as the connections rise!

Due to my sudden influx of new friends I am apparently 2 degrees away from 87,000 connections!

If you want to get involved with other instant networking opportunities make sure you join the Clear Books Network. This is a community hub exclusive to Clear Books users. The Network allows small businesses to promote their business, message and network with other users and collaborate with the Clear Books team.

Select the Clear Books drop down list located to the top right of your Clear Books account. From here make click on the Network option and start interacting with the Clear Books community!

Happy networking!

Here is the link (note bold text):

http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/vat/managing/returns-accounts/fat-rate-returns.htm

Later on in the documentation the text reads, “You need to include any services from abroad that the reverse charge applies to, but don’t include the value of the services in your flate rate turnover calculations.”

HMRC typos are far more interesting than VAT so I thought I would post my findings

The first person to spot a typo in the Clear Books system gets a free Clear Books T-Shirt!

Clear Books has, in the main, been developed by one person working day and night in his flat. That person is me. Can a product developed by just one person take on accounting giants like Sage? I believe it can.

2009 is the year that my business, Clear Books, is going to succeed.

Tim Fouracre

1 Jan 2009

(Written January 1st 2009. Republished from Tim’s personal blog on  startups & small businesses)

Update March 2012: We’re not quite at the same level as Sage just yet, but over the past 3 years we have built an established and competitive company that continues to grow and go from strength to strength.