Bionic Books: If your books are in ruins we can now re-build them!

If you run a small business or indeed work for yourself and struggle with your accounts then this bookkeeping app might well be for you. It’s ok keeping your invoices in a ring binder and marking them as paid with a marker pen but sooner or later the taxman is likely to want a look at some back-up information for the numbers you enter on your tax return. How nice it would feel if you could present a profit & loss account and a balance sheet without ever having had any accountancy training.

Bionic Books has been developed for small businesses and those freelancers/contractors amongst us and provides a double entry accounting system that cuts out all of the jargon that normally goes with it. Simply set up your basic company details such as name, default days for payment of both sales and purchase invoices, enter your year-end information and relevant tax status and off you go.

The functions are very comprehensive and so as well as having invoices and payments received capability you can record purchases, payroll and any other possible transaction you can think of. You can also list and depreciate fixed assets to give you a true balance sheet position.

Each page of the app comes with a "show help" button that contains pointers on what should be entered in particular fields and so acts as a kind of training programme as well as keeping your books up to date. On top of this there is a forum where you can flag accountancy questions.

You can view your profit & loss account, balance sheet and timeline within whatever date range you choose and the dashboard will give you an instant overview of what’s outstanding, what cash has come in and your overall bank balance. All in all you can do a lot of what you might pay a qualified accountant to do which should in itself make your profit & loss account look much better.

Conclusion

This one should give small businesses and those working on their own a good professional set of numbers to work with. Keeping up to date with how the business is performing is pretty fundamental to success and this will keep all of the salient points at your fingertips.