You may use Microsoft Excel spreadsheet to do your company bookkeeping when just starting out your business. The excel spreadsheet is suitable for businesses with a low volume of business transactions.
Consider migrating to more well-known bookkeeping software when your business volumes increasing higher. For examples, Kashflow, Xero or Clearbooks. Especially, if you can foresee it would be more convenient to use reputable bookkeeping software for your business.
With excel spreadsheet you can design your own templates and create the format for your bookkeeping reports. It is very flexible in terms of adding columns or deleting rows and simple arithmetic formulas can be incorporated into a specific cell in the spreadsheet for a quick calculation.
The benefit of using an excel spreadsheet for bookkeeping is that you do not have to pay bookkeeping software subscriptions fee. You also save on your accountancy fee because your accountant will charge less fee with your organised bookkeeping data.
However, excel spreadsheet does not have automatic updates on the latest changes to corporation tax rates and VAT rates. Additionally, it also does not have online filing facility to submit your VAT returns, company accounts and corporation tax return.
You do not require an online facility if your accountant is taking care of all these filings for you. All you require to do is to give your excel file to your accountant and he/she will put it into a statutory format is compliant with the UK filings requirements. Besides your company accounts, another important document, your company must submit to Companies House is your confirmation statement.
If you would like some help to design excel spreadsheet templates to record your company transactions. You are welcome to contact our accountants and they will help you.