Question 1

Is QuickBooks MTD compatible?

Accepted Answer

Yes — QuickBooks is recognised by HMRC for both MTD for VAT and MTD for Income Tax, and Intuit has been in the MTD programme since it began. That means it keeps digital records to the required standard, maintains the digital links, and submits directly to HMRC through the API rather than asking you to retype anything. Being recognised is not the whole story though. Compatibility is a property of the software; compliance is a property of your setup. A recognised package connected to the wrong VAT scheme, with a broken bank feed and six months of uncategorised transactions, will file confidently incorrect returns. So the software choice removes one risk and leaves the more important one, which is why the setup is worth doing properly rather than assuming the badge covers you.

Question 2

Which QuickBooks plan do I actually need?

Accepted Answer

Fewer than the sales page suggests, in most cases. The tiers step up roughly from a simple sole trader product, through a basic small business plan, to ones that add bill management, multi-currency, projects and stock. The two questions that usually decide it are how many people need access and whether you need CIS. QuickBooks caps users by tier and charges beyond that, so a business with an owner, a bookkeeper and us already has three seats to think about. CIS functionality only appears at the Plus level, which frequently makes the decision for anyone in construction on its own. Our advice is to pick for the feature you cannot work around rather than the price, and to ignore the annual discount on a plan that is wrong.

Question 3

Can you move me from spreadsheets to QuickBooks?

Accepted Answer

Yes, and it is the most common QuickBooks setup we do. The work is mostly in the migration rather than the software: we agree your opening balances with whoever prepared your last accounts, import your customer and supplier lists, bring in transaction history from your bank, and set up a chart of accounts that reflects your trade instead of the generic default. Then we connect bank feeds, build the categorisation rules that make the ongoing work small, and check the first few weeks of postings before leaving you to it. Spreadsheet migrations are usually cleaner than software-to-software ones because there is no hidden structure to unpick. Allow a couple of weeks, most of which is waiting rather than working.

Question 4

How do bank feeds and rules work in QuickBooks?

Accepted Answer

A bank feed connects your account through open banking so transactions arrive automatically, usually the next day, and rules then categorise them for you. This is where the time saving actually comes from — not the software existing, but the rules being set up properly. A rule can say that anything from a named fuel supplier is motor expenses, or that a recurring payment matching a description is a specific supplier bill, and once it is in place those transactions arrive pre-coded and need a click. Set up well, a sole trader's weekly bookkeeping drops to a few minutes. Set up badly, or not at all, you are hand-coding several hundred transactions a quarter and will stop doing it by August. Open banking connections need re-authorising periodically, which is worth knowing before a feed silently stops.

Question 5

Does QuickBooks handle CIS?

Accepted Answer

Yes, on the Plus tier and above — and this is usually the deciding factor for anyone in construction. Once enabled, QuickBooks calculates the deduction on the labour element, tracks the materials split separately, produces the monthly CIS return figures, and generates the payment and deduction statements you must give subcontractors within 14 days. It also handles CIS suffered if you are the subcontractor. The setup detail that matters is getting each subcontractor recorded with the correct verified rate at the outset, because the software will apply whatever you tell it and will not know that HMRC said 30%. Enabling CIS also changes how invoices behave, so it wants doing at setup rather than retrofitted mid-year across transactions already posted the other way.

Question 6

What is the mileage tracking in QuickBooks and is it worth it?

Accepted Answer

The mobile app can track journeys automatically using your phone's GPS, and you swipe each one as business or personal. For anyone who drives a lot for work it is genuinely one of the better reasons to choose QuickBooks over its competitors, because the alternative is a paper log nobody keeps. Mileage at the approved rates is a real deduction that most sole traders significantly underclaim, purely through not recording it — 8,000 business miles is a meaningful sum you simply lose if it was never written down. The tracking is also better evidence than a reconstruction, which matters if anyone ever asks. The cost is battery life and a mild feeling of being followed by your accounting software, which some people dislike enough to turn it off.

Question 7

Can I move from Xero to QuickBooks, or the other way?

Accepted Answer

Yes, but do it at a year end if you possibly can. Migration tools and conversion services move the core data — customers, suppliers, chart of accounts, and usually a couple of years of transactions — but the things that do not carry across are the things you built: bank rules, invoice templates, recurring transactions, tracking structures, and any app integrations, all of which need rebuilding. Reconciled bank history and attachments often transfer imperfectly too. The honest counsel is that switching mid-year for a feature you want is rarely worth the disruption, and switching because your accountant prefers the other one is a bad reason. If your current package genuinely does not do something you need, though, the pain is finite and front-loaded.

Question 8

How many people can use my QuickBooks?

Accepted Answer

It depends on your tier, and this is one of the real differences from some competitors, which include unlimited users at every level. QuickBooks allocates a number of billed seats per plan and charges for more, so the user count is part of the pricing decision rather than an afterthought. Your accountant is the exception worth knowing: accountant access does not consume one of your paid seats, so bringing us in costs you nothing in licences. Beyond that, plan for who genuinely needs to be in there — an owner, a bookkeeper, perhaps someone raising invoices — and set permissions rather than sharing one login, which is both a security problem and an audit trail problem when something is posted wrongly and nobody knows who did it.

Question 9

Do I need the QuickBooks payroll add-on?

Accepted Answer

Only if you have employees, and not necessarily even then. QuickBooks payroll is a separate subscription that bolts onto your accounting and handles RTI submissions, payslips and pension uploads, with the advantage that the wage journals post straight into your books without anyone rekeying them. That integration is the real benefit. Against it: standalone payroll software is often cheaper, and if we run your payroll for you it makes no difference to you which system we use, since you get the same payslips either way. For a single director taking a simple monthly salary, the add-on is usually more than you need. For a business with a dozen staff, weekly variations and auto-enrolment to manage, the integration starts paying for itself.

Question 10

How long does a QuickBooks setup take?

Accepted Answer

About two weeks of elapsed time for a typical sole trader or landlord, though very little of that is work at your end. The sequence is: an initial session to understand how you actually operate, then we build the file — chart of accounts, opening balances, customers and suppliers, VAT scheme if relevant, bank feeds and rules — and then a short training session so you are not left with a beautiful file you do not know how to drive. The waiting is bank feed authorisation and, if MTD is involved, HMRC agent codes arriving by post. Businesses with years of history, CIS, stock or a messy starting position take longer. We quote a fixed fee once we have seen the records, not an hourly rate.

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