BankLink is certainly something that I know a quite a bit about. Its a service that means you dont have to bug your clients for bank statements (or the infamous missing page) anymore and you dont have to waste time keying in all the entries either (no bank rec either!). The best part though is the auto coding its brilliant. Its cheap as chips too and my practice wouldnt survive without it.
I strongly suggest you make contact with them. I believe they are in London but they will come to you to show you how it all works.
I am not a large accounting office. In fact, I am a sole trader. It works great for me & I highly recommend it.
I've been running a small practice for about 2.5 years now just me and a part-time bookkeeper - and have been using Banklink for a couple of years. I know some quite large practices use it but the other firms I've spoken to are actually pretty small as well. It's a huge time saver for me. Banks feed transaction data directly into it and when you open up your software you can see straight away which clients have transactions to code up. Most transactions will have been coded up already by the software from previous coding entries. There's an upfront fee and a monthly fee based on number of transactions. It's not a heavy cost at all and I can assure you that the cost of the time saved is way more than the cost of the software. It also makes some rather laborious work a lot less so. I use Xero for some clients and for some of those I wish I'd put them onto Banklink. It doesn't work with all our (backward) banks but I understand those that aren't yet on the system are in discussions and due to come on shortly. Most of my clients are HSBC, some RBS/Natwest and they're on board.
Thanks for bringing this up, Ben. You may have seen the indication of costs on accountingweb - £10 per month for a small business with typical number of transactions, which seems reasonable. Presumably the price-per-transaction reduces for busier accounts. Anyway, the price formula should be quite simple and would, of course, depend on number of bank accounts signed up.
I work for BankLink, we'd be delighted to give you a demo of our software. We have people across the UK who can come and see you, please contact us on 0800 500 3084 or email enquiries@banklink.co.uk and we can arrange a suitable time.
AutoRec is an alternative bank reconciliation solution that you might want to look at.
It is a software solution that allows you to scan your clients bank statements on your standard office scanner straight into a bank reconciliation spreadsheet.
Our bank reconciliation accounting software will verify the accuracy of the scanned data. AutoRec will read each page image automatically detecting what bank statement type it is. We can also recognise each cheque number presented on the bank statement additionally identifying and presenting missing cheque numbers.
We have over 270 accounting practices now using AutoRec since June, 2012.
