Plenty of businesses start with a spreadsheet: a column for income, a column for costs, a tab per month. It is free and familiar. The trouble starts when the spreadsheet becomes the only record of the business and only one person understands it.
Signs it is time to move
- You are VAT registered, or about to be. MTD for VAT requires digital records and digital links between the records and the return, which a hand-built spreadsheet chain struggles to meet.
- You have crossed, or will cross, the MTD for Income Tax threshold as a sole trader or landlord.
- Bank transactions are typed in by hand and the totals rarely agree with the statement.
- An accountant spends hours each year turning the spreadsheet into accounts.
- Someone other than you needs to work on the books.
What to bring across
| From the spreadsheet | Into the software |
|---|---|
| Balances at the switch date: bank, cash, money owed to and by you, VAT owed | opening balances |
| Unpaid sales invoices and supplier bills | open items, so payments can be matched |
| Fixed assets with cost and depreciation to date | the fixed asset register |
| Earlier transactions | stay in the spreadsheet as your archive |
You do not need to re-enter old transactions. Choose a switch date, ideally the start of a financial year or VAT quarter, and start fresh from there.
Make the move at your next month or quarter end. Nexbal is launching in the UK and taking beta users now. Join the Nexbal beta.
Step by step
- Close the last spreadsheet period: reconcile the bank balance to the statement and list unpaid invoices.
- Set up the company and VAT details in the software, and review the chart of accounts.
- Enter the opening balances and open items.
- From the switch date on, capture receipts and invoices as documents and upload bank statements, instead of typing each line.
- After the first month, compare the software’s profit and VAT figures with what the spreadsheet would have shown.
In Nexbal, receipts can be emailed or uploaded and are read by AI, invoices go out as PDF by email, and bank statements are uploaded as PDF and analysed line by line, so the typing stops from the switch date.
Keeping the old spreadsheets
Keep the spreadsheets and their supporting receipts for the record-keeping period: at least five years after the 31 January filing deadline for sole traders, six years for companies.
For the wider process, see how to switch accounting system; for the MTD rules, MTD for Income Tax explained.
Leave the spreadsheet behind at a clean cut-off. Join the beta.