Friday, January 2, 2015

Interview: Tim Fouracre, CEO of London cloud accounting company Clear Books on crowdfunding and international aspirations

Ellen Forster for Bdaily writes: London-based cloud accounting software company Clear Books currently has customers in over 70 countries, and has recently opened its first international office in the Netherlands.
Bdaily talked to Tim Fouracre, CEO of Clear Books, about the company’s own crowdfunding platform as well as his plans for 2015.
Tim said: "Cloud accounting is growing in popularity because it offers small companies a convenient, flexible and time saving way to do their accounts.  
"Clear Books attracts a range of customers that includes IT companies, such as web developers, designers, online marketing agencies and contractors.
"We also have a lot of general practice accountants using the software and their clients are in a broad range of sectors from construction to photography."
Clear Books recently opened its first Netherlands office, Tim said: "Although we started out in the UK and are based primarily here in the South East of England, we have customers throughout the UK and in over 70 other countries.
""The Netherlands office opening is a first in terms of us setting up a subsidiary in another country and in many respects this is a pilot for us expanding through the whole of Europe.
The Netherlands is a market with a huge number of small businesses – the Dutch have a very entrepreneurial culture and that appealed to us, given our focus on smaller companies."
Clearbooks currently employs over 40 people with most new staff members coming from referrals from existing employees.  
"Accounting has a long history and in recent times the accounting software market has tended to be dominated by large desktop software providers whose business models have remained largely static.  
"The cloud has changed all that and Clear Books set out on a journey to disrupt the market in the UK by offering services that are not only modern and innovative, but also highly beneficial.   
"Although we’ve broken the mould, it’s important for us to keep on our toes and we do this by working in a highly collaborative way with our customers – what we call our community."
Tim told us about his plans for 2015, as well as the company’s very own crowdfunding platform: "By working in partnership with our customers, it means that we have our own product roadmap but this is heavily influenced by the evolving and adapting needs of our customers and the challenges and opportunities they face.  
"In February 2015 will be hosting a special one off Clear Books Community Exhibition in London which reinforces this approach.
We are always on the lookout for traditional and new problems so that we can have a go at cracking them."
"Our vision is to double the number of small businesses we help each year and in 2015 we hope to achieve this in the UK and by expanding internationally.  
"Crowdfunding, which we have undertaken ourselves rather than going down a crowdfunding platform route, means that we are in a position to invest further in aspects of the company which will fuel further growth.
"We continue to enhance our core services as well as introducing new ones, and in 2015 we will be launching Final Accounts for micro businesses that will enable them to submit accounts directly and effortlessly to Companies House."
In 2014, Clear Books won several industry awards as well as plaudits, Tim said: "We hope to see more of the same in 2015 as more people and businesses recognise what we believe is a great British success story emerging out of the South East of England."
Posted on 7:14 AM | Categories:

Affordable Care Act Creates a Trickier Tax Season / Subsidy Estimates May Be Inaccurate, While IRS Girds for a Flood of Queries

Stephanie Amour and Louise Radnofsky for the Wall St. Journal write: The first year of the Affordable Care Act is in the books, and now comes a tricky tax-filing season for millions of Americans.
The law’s requirement that most Americans carry health insurance means all filers must indicate on federal tax forms whether they had coverage last year and got tax credits to help pay for it. Those who didn’t have coverage could face a fine, although reduced staffing at the Internal Revenue Service and certain changes to the law mean the so-called individual mandate is expected to be lightly enforced this year, tax preparers say.
Meanwhile, millions of Americans who got subsidies under the law may find they are getting smaller-than-expected refunds or owe the IRS because credits they received to offset their insurance premiums were too large. As many as half of the roughly 6.8 million Americans who got subsidies may have to refund money to the government, based on one estimate by tax firm H&R Block Inc.
The IRS also is expecting more calls from consumers at a time when congressional funding for the agency has dropped nearly $1 billion since fiscal 2010, and its workforce has 13,000 fewer full-time employees than it did in 2010. Congressional Republicans opposed to the health law have said limiting the IRS’s budget is one way to slow the law’s implementation, including in last month’s budget agreement for the remainder of fiscal 2015.
IRS Commissioner John Koskinen , in a November speech, said his agency’s reduced funding would hamper its ability “to provide the level of taxpayer services that the public has a right to expect.”
To help avert problems, federal agencies including the IRS and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services in January will reach out to consumers via phone calls, text messages and emails to tell them what to expect during the tax season. IRS officials are urging consumers to file electronically for a quicker return.
The original 2010 health law had more mechanisms to enforce the insurance-coverage requirement. It required employers to supply the agency with the names of about 150 million Americans who got coverage through their job.
But the Obama administration in 2013 delayed that reporting requirement. It also widened the list of reasons a person could avoid paying the penalty if he skipped insurance coverage, exempting certain people whose insurance plans were canceled because of the law.
This year, the IRS said it is entrusting consumers to answer honestly if they had health insurance or need to pay a penalty. While the agency said it won’t reject returns if questions about health coverage aren’t answered, it said consumers who don’t answer affirmatively that they had coverage will be expected to have an exemption or request one, or to calculate the penalty they owe. The fine for not having coverage starts at $95 and ranges up to 1% of household income, which would be added to 2014 tax liability.
Some makers of tax-filing software, including Intuit Inc. ’s TurboTax, say they have set up their systems to reject incomplete forms. But tax preparers say there is little to stop a filer from asserting they have coverage, thereby avoiding any penalty, even if they were uninsured. IRS officials note the tax system for years has been built on voluntary compliance, and the agency said it could use its regular enforcement tools, such as asking for more documentation or auditing.
“As always, taxpayers are responsible for the accuracy of the information on the tax returns that they sign,” said Anthony Burke, an IRS spokesman. He added that “the vast majority of filers will have had coverage for the full year and will simply need to check a box to indicate that.”
The IRS also said it would allow taxpayers who have applied for—but not yet received—exemptions from the individual mandate to put “pending” on their forms so they don’t have to delay filing and obtaining their refund.
In addition to determining who has to pay a penalty, the accuracy of tax credits is likely to pose challenges. Because people often incorrectly estimate their future income, many Americans may have gotten subsidies—based on their own projections of 2014 income—that were too generous.
Tax credits for people eligible to use the health law’s exchanges would, on average, be too high by $208 if they were based on the applicants’ most recent tax returns, according to modeling by Vanderbilt University assistant professor John Graves. The IRS said some filers got subsidies that were too small and will get larger refunds.
When the health law was passed, the amount of money that could be taken back from lower-income people who overestimated their incomes was capped at $250 for a single person and $400 for a household. Those caps were significantly raised in an effort to fund Medicare physician payments in late 2010, to as much as $2,500 for a family at the upper end of the income-eligibility range. They were tweaked again in 2011 as part of a tax change to the health law’s 1099 reporting forms that required more people to reimburse overpayments in full.
Posted on 7:12 AM | Categories:

How come Mint (an Intuit product) can track the TSP (Federal Government version of a 401K) but Quicken can not? Quicken continues to come up short.

Over at Intuit Support we read: The TSP is the Federal Government version of a 401K. One answer that was posted basically said that it is up to the financial institution to allow downloads. So let me get this straight... The Federal Government is allowing a small web based company to download and not a large company that has been around for 20+ years? I doubt it. It is more likely the way that they are obtaining the data. Quicken needs to incorporate Mint technology into their product.
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2 answers
For a couple of reasons:

1.  Mint uses screen scraping (at this time) to get your data, meaning that it logs into your accounts at the financial institutions (FI) website, "scrapes" what it "sees", then uses a script to translate that scrape into transactional data that can be presented in the app.  Depending on the FI, Quicken may or may not use screen scrape to get data from the FI.  This is why Mint can show you your pending transactions (for better or worse), while Quicken cannot.

2.  Depending on how Quicken connects to the FI, there can be a delay in the data the gets presented to Quicken.  Quicken Canada only offers Direct Connect & Web Connect, which means that you're most likely using Direct Connect and getting the data that the FI is creating and transmitting to Quicken via OFX.  Quicken can only get what the FI sends.  If you're using Web Connect, then there's no reason for you to not get the latest cleared/posted transactions unless you're selecting a different date when creating the Download For Quicken (QFX) file - Web Connect is completely controlled by the user and the FI, with no Quicken intervention.

Quicken and Mint should not be compared as "equal" applications simply because they're provided by the same company.  They are wholly unrelated in everything from the ground up - local data file vs. cloud database, different methods of getting data, different interfaces and different relationships with 3rd parties (including financial institutions).
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    • BillArf, no "tool" am I
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    BigDaddyBigD...........   Quicken Tamara has given you a very good explanation ...   Consider doing as I do and use both Mint and Quicken.  Each Intuit offering has lots to offer.  In the upcoming years, I am in hopes, that Intuit will come up with a blending of Mint and Quicken offering. (with a cloud database)  I do believe they will and that such an offering is not to far off.
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    Posted on 7:01 AM | Categories:
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