I don't know if anyone else uses or has looked at QuickFile. I got an email today about QuickFile Affinity, which allows the profession to set up a dashboard to manage multiple companies. They are charging £7.80 a month per company with price breaks at 10, 20, 40 and 80 companies. Given the range of features they offer I think they represent quite good value compared to their competition, but given that they've offered it free to now and explained how to use it with multiple companies I'm not sure how many will buy into the offering.
It's free until January, with a white label offering coming soon.
We're still in the early stages with Affinity, but we are quickly building out additional tools for Accountants and Bookkeepers under the Affinity umbrella. It may interest you to know that we are overhauling our pricing model next week, Extra Small accounts will be billed at just £15 per year. We will have 4 other categories.. Small, Medium, Large and Extra Large, each will increment by about £5 pear year, with no other fees or monthly charges. This will provide Affinity users with a promo-free, white labelled collaborative bookkeeping system. We haven't just nudged the prices down, we've massively reduced them. Why and how? Because we can... we have no large investors to appease, no debt and funding to see us through the next 10 years.
Thanks for updating information Glenn. I personally have found Quickfile a very good online system and have started introducing to new and existing clients. My problem has always been not the cost involved but how on earth did they ever provide as much as they have for free.
I totally agree with Quickfile charging, quite right for such a good service, my problem is how to justify to my clients they should be paying a fee for using it with myself when they can use it for free. Your answer on the above post, confirming additional tools for accountants is a huge step forward in asking my clients to pay.
May I say well done Glenn and team for offering such a good system. I look forward to eventually convincing my clients to pay for it.
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Donna Curling - Complete Book-Keeping Ltd (CBKLtd) - 07939 101900
Thanks for the response. I've been using Xero for a few clients lately and can see real time savers in it. I think QuickFile pips it to the post with bank reconciliations though. Having said this, I think you're missing a trick by not allowing for integration with Receipt Bank. I use this for a few clients now and it saves me a shed load of time. On another point, I think QuickFile could improve on it's API a bit too.
Hi Donna, thank you for your positive words! We always envisaged that any cost for using the Affinity platform would be repackaged as part of the service and added value that a bookkeeper would provide to the end client. They could of course use the free service but then they are left to their own devices to figure everything out, also the ease of collaboration is missing, along with all the useful reporting built into Affinity. The XS accounts will be only £15 per year to manage in Affinity (£1.25 per month), this will give your users an ad-free, branded version of Quick File. Even the largest account bracket will not likely exceed £3 per month. I don't think it will be a difficult sell, but time will tell.
Kris, we looked at Receipt bank some time ago but we ended up developing all this natively, The Receipt Hub in Quick File allows you to upload receipts via the website, Dropbox, email or smartphone and link them to your purchases. I agree that the API has been less than perfect, but we are actually doing a lot of work here right now. Last week we added a range of supplier creation, update and search methods and this month we are building a whole new developer control panel and adding further functionality for banking and reporting.
I did use receipt hub, Glenn, but the problem is that I need to do all the data extraction manually. With receipt bank they do it (for a small charge) which is much more efficient. In looking at your response I feel you missed the point of receipt bank. I wonder if both my comments are linked? Maybe once the API is improved you'll be able to offer the choice of receipt hub, or receipt bank?
Kris
-- Edited by kjmcculloch83 on Monday 11th of November 2013 08:05:31 AM
Happy to revisit Receipt Bank, I think the benefit here is you just post all the receipts in a bag and they handle the digitisation side? This is actually something we've looked into adding with QF, we already use receipt bags along with a trusted digitsation partner for some users, although we don't promote this service at the moment. I think we'd be more inclined to develop our own solution here, unless RB want to work on the integration, they can do this through our API. I will however contact them to see if there's a way we can just use RBs scanning service, so all the receipt images are deployed to the Receipt Hub.
Not quite, you can scan and upload, the benefit is that they extract all of the information and feed it into the accounts using the API, as said this may be the reason that such a solution is not there yet. I think trying to reinvent the wheel here may prove to be a waste of time, but happy to be proved wrong.
Certainly for me, without this QuickFile is never going to be a strong contender, which is a real shame.
I'm not ruling out Receipt Bank but the integration is complex as they are pulling in the nominal ledgers and supplier ledgers from Quick File so there certainly would be some work involved in joining up systems. To be honest this is the first time Receipt Bank has been suggested to us as an integration partner, we receive requests to link into 100s of 3rd party systems so we must base our development on demand. For now I've scheduled a call with Receipt Bank and we shall go from there.
