7 Cloud Accounting Apps Our Clients Love Most & We Recommend

Author: Jen Shipp (AATQB) Cloud Accounting & Bookkeeping at LHP

There are 800+ business apps to choose from, but there are some we use a lot – the ones clients love.

Cloud accounting is what we live and breathe at LHP. We love helping businesses simplify their finances and gain benefits in the cloud. Our clients love being in the cloud, for a lot of reasons. It’s a great way to manage finances on the go, gain instant access to financial information and reports, link in real-time to bank accounts, any device/place and more. At LHP, clients get tailored solutions to fit their needs.

When it comes to full bookkeeping software, we mostly use a handful of cloud packages; Xero, QuickBooks, Sage, Freeagent, and Kashflow (all Making Tax Digital ready) and these connect to many apps, making inputting financial data simpler. There are over 800 apps to choose from however, which can be overwhelming. So here we bring you 7 cloud apps tried and tested by LHP clients and staff and a bit about what they do.

1. Dext Prepare

This is a great time saver. Dext, formerly known as Receipt Bank, is an app used for cleverly extracting data from your invoices and placing it into chosen software with very little effort. Clients simply take photos of invoices on their smartphone (or scan) and ping them to Dext.

Clients also love the ‘invoice fetch function’ within Dext you can use to gather invoices from the likes of your BT, Amazon and Screwfix billing accounts.

Once invoices reach Dext, type is read and extracted (statement, invoice, receipt) where it pulls out the supplier, invoice number, date, net amount, VAT amount and total amount.

The more you use Dext, the better it gets over time at knowing what you want to do. For example, it will start to recognise the category you usually allocate invoices to and pre-fill these in as suggestions. This app takes out the admin and saves a lot of time!

2. Stripe

The Stripe app is popular with our clients for their customers to make simple payments easily. There are many payment providers and Epos systems (fundamentally a till but also software) we use at LHP and Stripe is one of them.

This online payment processor connects through Xero with ease and allows customers to pay their invoices straight from their email invoice. Stripe also recently launched the option to add a terminal to your package should you take card payments at point of sale.

3. GoCardless

GoCardless is popular because it is a real timesaver when it comes to our clients collecting payments on recurring invoices and avoiding overdue payments. Customers can pay invoices by Direct Debit with GoCardless, which makes it easy to collect recurring and one-off payments directly from customer bank accounts.

One simple online payment form to authorise you to collect payments automatically on due dates means avoiding the pain of overdue invoices. Once payment details are set up – GoCardless is great for one-off or recurring payments, and flexible recurring payment plans.

4. Square

This is a popular app for online safe and simple sales payment (and other things). Square is a card payment provider offering point of sale options to help manage your sales, payments, records, inventory and more. You can set up a free online store that syncs with your inventory and your social media, to help you meet customers wherever they shop. You can use this app to accept payments any way you want; in person, or contactless at point of sale.

A feature called ‘virtual terminal’ takes payments over the phone and you can create payment links easily in this app, such as buy buttons or QR codes, that can be shared online to sell without a website. Also, you can create customised invoices in seconds, get paid faster and give customers a more convenient way to pay.

5. Figured

A firm favourite with our farming clients, Figured helps with online livestock and crop and production tracking. Clients love to easily track their livestock and crop production and view accurate farm reports at the touch of a button. Figured does their farm budgeting and forecasting and our farming team here has the expertise and background to help you apply Figured to your business to bring you time saving and scalability benefits.

6. Approval Max

This app is loved by our clients who use it in their organisations to make life easier when getting sign off on their financial activities. Approval Max allows their staff to get approval from a colleague before a purchase order, purchase, quote, or sales invoice, is posted to their accounts. This is popular in companies where rather than e-mailing different managers and filling up inboxes, client teams simply ping their request over and voila! The approval is logged (fully traceable with full audit history) and posted to the accounting software once approved.

7. Deputy

Hospitality, tourism and leisure clients (one of many sectors), love to use Deputy to organise staff rotas and timesheets. The app is used by our clients to easily arrange rotas based on staff availability, to punch in when staff members are available, show them as unavailable for shifts when appropriate and invite staff to request shifts. It is also used a lot for keeping track of staff holidays and working hours with clocking-in sheets.

Let’s Talk

Whether you are a business owner already using cloud accounting and wish to enhance your results with apps, or wish to move to online accounting for its real benefits and to avoid penalties of Making Tax Digital, our team can help you harness the benefits of online accounting software and apps.

At LHP we always get to know your needs and find the right apps for you. Making that leap to digital is so easy. And as Xero Platinum and Sage and QuickBooks Partners, we’ve all the necessary training qualifications and experience you need to become happy account holders. Let’s Talk.