(MF-10) Working With External Accounting Software
It is quite possible you use a separate accounting package to manage your business. This lesson talks about how best to use your accounting software alongside Workshop Angel to be as productive as possible!
Let's walk through the different information you need to record from an accounting perspective and how you are best to work with it.
Your accounting software will allow you to create invoices manually. However, when working with our app, your invoices will instead be created within Workshop Angel. There are two possible ways in which you can manage this situation, depending on your software and accounting method:
- Is Sales Invoice Data Required For Your Accounts? - Depending on your business and which country you live in, you may base all of your accounts purely on the dates and amounts of payments received rather than on dates and amounts of invoices. If this is the case, you may not need invoice records in your accounting software, and will therefore not need to export any invoice information from Workshop Angel.
- Sales Invoice Data Export - If you do require sales invoice information in your accounting software, this can usually be imported via an intermediate file. Towards the end of 2022 we will start adding the ability in Workshop Angel to export such files in different formats so you can have all of your invoice data from Workshop Angel available in your accounting software. We'd love to know if you need this function and if so, which accounting software you use!
Most modern accounting software will have a link to your bank account where it can extract the details of each payment made into your account. In most cases, this should be sufficient for recording your payments received from an accounting perspective.
Many of your payments will be made via your Stripe card payment account, and these will be batched together and paid into your bank account on a regular basis. In many cases, the transfer of this batched information should be a sufficient record of your payments received. If this is not the case, we would love to hear from you so we can look at creating a data export function for your payments received too.
Some businesses have to record and pay sales tax. This can be recorded for your sales in Workshop Angel and the sales tax amounts can be exported via the export functions we will be creating towards the end of 2022. If this applies to you, we'd love to know that and work with you to make sure the information is coming across in a way that works for your business.
As you spend money in your business, this is recorded through payments made out of your bank account, and also potential by invoices issued by your suppliers. You may also make other records which translate into accounting expenses, such as distances travelled in your car.
All of these records are best entered directly into your accounting software, along with any relevant sales tax data.
In the future, we have the possibility to add the ability to record this information in Workshop Angel. We will add these capabilities if it appears to bring a benefit to the way our users work.
As we build up to creating our sales invoice data export features, we will create a list here of the most common packages our users are working with and how to work with their import functions...
This software uses an external application called Fabio to import sales invoice data. For more information, see:
We have talked through the issues in working with external accounting software, and the information it is useful to extract from Workshop Angel to manage your accounts.
All the different accounting methods and software packages are quite a big topic, so we would love to hear from you via our community forum if you have questions specific to your own situation!
In the next lesson we will talk about some of the financial features we are considering adding to Workshop Angel in the future.