Winner Best Young Entrepreneur 2012 H&F Brilliant Business Awards
Let me get the self congratulatory introduction out of the way - yes I am writing about winning the Best Young Entrepreneur Award 2012 in the inaugural Hammersmith and Fulham Brilliant Business Awards. It's incredibly rewarding to win but it's all...
Happy birthday to us!
Today the Clear Books team has a reason to celebrate, it's our 4th birthday! Over the past four years we have worked hard to help thousands of customers with their accounting needs, but most importantly we have helped our business...
Looking for a cool work space?
The Clear Books team is continually expanding so last week the office had a make over and redesign to accommodate the additional numbers. I therefore spent a day working from home and I found it quite tough! I live with two great friends...
Clear Books Mobile app Beta 2 Released
Today we are very excited to announce the release of Clear Books Mobile Beta 2 into our Labs testing environment. This release is the culmination of many months of hard work (and quite a few sleepless nights on my part),...
Clear Books now hot off the press
Today we are pleased to announce that you are now able to access the latest news, videos and pictures from the Clear Books team via Google Currents. Google Currents is an app available on Android and iOS devices, which provides...
Onsite Training – find a trainer near you!
Over the last month we have been working closely with a group of Clear Books Accounting Partners. The group was put through an intense (but enjoyable!) training boot camp at the Clear Books HQ. Since qualifying, our training partners are...
Your mission statement, should you choose to accept it
Mission statement Mission statements - business mumbo jumbo or a useful tool? I think the latter. At the very least it sets out on paper and in your mind what your organisation's purpose is in a sentence. And with a...
10 Top Tax Planning Tips for Self-Employed Contractors & Freelancers 2015/16
On the hunt for some accountancy advice and tax tips as a self employed contractor or freelancer? Clear Books accounting partner, Tony Dhanjal from Aidhan Accountancy (www.aidhanfinancial.com), gives us a run down on the top 10 tax planning tips. **Updated on 19th November...
Congratulations and bon voyage to the big boss
This weekend the Clear Books team made a big trip up north to watch their brilliant boss get married. It was a fantastic event and will be remembered by us all. We want to wish Tim and his new wife...
P35 and P14 Submissions
As part of our continued effort to provide businesses with the means to submit all of their company returns from within Clear Books, we are pleased to announce that you can now file your P35 End of Year Return and...
Online Payments with Clear Books
Did you know that there is an easy way for your customers to 'Pay Online' for statements that you send out to them via Clear Books. Clear Books has integrated with one of the UK's leading payment gateways, PayPoint.net. PayPoint helps...
A report you should be checking every month
The Profit and Loss report is a really really useful report which should be reviewed on a regular basis to understand how your organisation is doing in terms of income, outgoings and overall profit and loss on a month by...
Multiple login systems
We are sorry if you experienced any trouble accessing Clear Books yesterday afternoon. 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...
How to network with 300 people in less than an hour
LinkedIn has never been my number one in terms of social networking. Limited interactions with limited connections made the platform seem rather...limited. My opinion changed a week ago when I successfully used LinkedIn to network with over 300 contacts in less than...
Fat, flate or flat rate VAT scheme?
I was helping our support team with a flat rate VAT scheme query and needed to look up HMRC's documentation. 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...
Government funded vouchers for small businesses
You may already be familiar with the name Elaine Clark. As the MD of CheapAccounting.co.uk her networking and online social activity is immense. With those efforts recognised, she was recently awarded for her outstanding contributions to the UK Business Forums....
Is Clear Books accounting software notable enough for Wikipedia?
The Clear Books Wikipedia article is currently listed as an article for deletion in Wikipedia. This is the second time that it has been put up for deletion after no consensus was reached the first time. The debate is currently ongoing....
Clear Books Reviews
There are lots of accountants and small businesses using Clear Books. We thought it would be interesting to pull together some of the reviews and articles that have been written about our accounting software. Simply click on the Clear Books...
Under the development hood
The development team at Clear Books has been relatively quiet of late so what has been keeping the guys busy? Here's a quick update. The team has been working very hard under the hood. Over Christmas and into the New...
I’m a Mac and a PC
I need some help. Mac or PC? My MacBook's days are numbered. The arrow keys have stopped working and the battery overheats which slows the machine down to a painful crawl. Do I replace it with another MacBook or do...
Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme (SEIS)
The quick summary of SEIS is that it provides a huge incentive for an investor to invest in a small business. Effectively an investment of £100k might only cost £18k due to the tax relief. That's up to 78% tax...
Christmas Chocolates
As Christmas is a time for giving, all of us here at Clear Books thought there was no better way to show our users we appreciate them than by sending out chocolates. These went out to all of our partners...
Clear Books Status Updates
I recently met with one of our long term Clear Books accounting partners. During our meeting it became very clear to me just how important communication is. The accountant said " if something changes within Clear Books I need to...
Banks: A) do lend B) don’t lend C) help or hinder?
It was superb to see Clear Books getting national press coverage in The Telegraph last Friday (16th December 2011) in an article by Richard Tyler Banks: A) do lend B) don't lend C) help or hinder? This was a result of my blog...
How banks need to change to support credit easing
The purpose of my original post Banks aren't supporting credit easing for small businesses was to share our experience applying for a bank loan. Based on this experience I want to set out how I believe priorities need to change to support...
Banks aren’t supporting credit easing for small businesses
On Tuesday 29th November 2011, the day that Chancellor George Osborne announced in his Autumn Statement that small firms are to get £40bn credit help, Clear Books had a £1 million small business loan application rejected by Barclays. The government's initiatives...
Clear Books partnered with AIMS Accountants
This week Clear Books announced its new partnership with AIMS - the UK’s largest association of professionally qualified accountants. Clear Books online accounting software is now a chosen supplier for AIMS, meaning the software will be recommended to over 250...
Goodbye Zendesk and Get Satisfaction
Following on from the recent announcement that we are making changes to our support systems, Clear Books has now stopped using Zendesk and Get Satisfaction. These two applications have served us extremely well as a startup. They allowed us to get up and...
Managed DNS – a new DYNasty
Clear Books is pleased to announce that we have switched to a managed DNS service provided by Dyn. DNS? What's that? DNS, or the Domain Name System, is effectively the Internet equivalent of a telephone address book. To continue the...
Yodlee and HSBC automatic bank feeds
When we first launched our automatic bank feeds integration with Yodlee it was disappointing to hear from our customers that HSBC was not properly supported. We owe a huge thanks to one of our customers, Perry, who has been tirelessly...