Sage One For Dummies

Chapter 2

Sorting Out Your Settings

In This Chapter

Changing your personal settings

Managing business and financial settings

Checking that your settings are up to date

Millions of people use Sage software and so necessarily the programs start off impersonal and generic. Therefore, making Sage One relevant and responsive to your particular needs is essential. Using the settings that Sage provides, you can personalise Sage One for your company and increase the direct usefulness of the service.

The settings are the backbone of the system, which is why I devote a full chapter to them; getting them right is a vital part of any accounting system. In this chapter I discuss Sage One’s personal and business/financial settings. You discover why setting up and checking your VAT scheme (if you’re VAT registered) as soon as possible is so important. I also guide you through making sure that you set up your invoices correctly for your business.

You need to enter your personal and business details before beginning to add any data.

Making Sage One Your Own: Creating Individual Settings

In this section, I show you how to set up your personal details on Sage One.

The Settings link appears at the top of every screen. Click this button and Sage One takes you to the Settings Overview screen, as shown in Figure 2-1.

Figure 2-1: Looking at the Settings Overview screen.

This screen contains two boxes of information. On the left side is My Sage One, which includes the following options:

Billing Settings

Service Settings

User Settings

These screens enable you to set your personal settings and I look at each one individually in the following sections.

Paying up with Billing Settings

From the Settings Overview page, click Billing Settings and the following screen appears (see Figure 2-2).

Figure 2-2: Viewing your Billing Settings screen.

You see three tabs of information:

Billing Contact

Direct Debits

Sage One Invoices

Billing Contact

In essence, this screen displays your personal contact details as shown in Figure 2-2. You complete most of this info on registering with Sage One (flip to Chapter 1 if you still need to carry out this process). If, however, you only fill in the bare minimum of detail at registration, you can complete your remaining details, such as your address and telephone numbers, using the Business Settings screen at a later point in time.

Direct Debits

The details of the direct debit instructions that you provide to Sage show here. You can see from Figure 2-3 that I haven’t yet set mine up. (Sage will soon take debit or credit card payments rather than direct debit.)

Figure 2-3: Looking at your direct debit set up screen.

Sage One Invoices

This screen shows a list of all invoices received from Sage for the Sage One service (see Figure 2-4). Nothing is yet shown for Jingles (the fictional company I introduce in Chapter 1).

Figure 2-4: Viewing your Sage One Invoices on Billing Settings.

Deciding on your desired Service Settings

This screen shows the services to which you subscribe, and also confirms that you’re signed up to the free trial service (a process I discuss in Chapter 1). Also note the Invite Accountant button on the right side of your screen (check out Figure 2-5).

Figure 2-5: You can invite your accountant using your Service Settings screen.

When you click this button, a new Invite Accountant window appears and you’re asked to enter the email address of your accountant, as shown in Figure 2-6. Sage One then sends a message to your accountant’s Sage One Accountant Edition service, notifying that you want to invite her to be your Sage One Accountant. When she accepts your invitation, your accountant can get direct access to your live data.

Figure 2-6: Using Sage One to send an invitation email to your accountant.

You can invite an accountant in this way only when she’s already a Sage One accountant. She needs to be a member of the Sage Accountants’ Club (who are automatically given access to Sage One service) or else make a payment to get access to the Sage One service. If your accountant doesn’t use Sage One, but you want her to have access to your Sage One service via an Accountant Edition, please ask her to call Sage on 0845-111-1111.

Using User Settings

Here, you can change your password. Click the Change Password link to do so (see Figure 2-7).

Figure 2-7: Viewing your User Settings.

Taking Control With Your Business and Financial Settings

In this section, I describe how to set up your vital business and financial information including VAT and invoice details.

Look to the right side of the Settings Overview screen and see a box entitled Sage One Accounts, which includes the following options:

Business Settings

Financial Settings

Invoice Settings

Displaying Business Settings

This screen contains the contact details for your business, which you can enter and update, including name, address and telephone numbers as well as your website address (see Figure 2-8); essential if you ever want customers to get in touch!

Figure 2-8: Viewing your contact details on the Business Settings screen.

Getting the VAT right: Financial Settings

This screen shows you your year-end date and selected VAT scheme. You can set your opening balances from this screen and also export data. As Figure 2-9 shows, I choose the standard VAT scheme for the fictional company Jingles (check out Chapter 1 for Jingles info) and note that Jeanette plans to submit the VAT return on a quarterly basis.

Figure 2-9: Viewing your Financial Settings.

At the time of registration (read Chapter 1 for details), you have to say whether you’re registered for VAT. If you answer Yes, the system asks which VAT scheme you want to operate. Using a dropdown arrow, select the VAT scheme that you use.

Sage One stores this data in Financial Settings. If you want to change your VAT scheme at any point in the future, you need to do so via the Financial Settings screen.

Sage One offers the following current VAT schemes:

Standard VAT (currently at 20%)

Flat rate invoice based

Flat rate cash based

VAT cash accounting

Standard rate

The current standard rate of VAT is 20%. You charge VAT on all goods and services that are considered to be a taxable supply when you make a sale (called output tax). You can reclaim the VAT you pay to suppliers (called input tax). The difference is paid or reclaimed from or to HMRC.

The VAT Guide (Notice 700) is your bible when determining what you charge VAT on and what you can reclaim. See www.hmrc.gov.uk for further information.

Flat rate VAT scheme

HMRC allows you to calculate your VAT payment as a flat percentage of your turnover. The percentage is determined according to your trade sector. You can’t claim any VAT back on your purchases and this scheme is only valid if your annual sales are less than £150,000.

The flat rate is calculated on a cash basis or an invoice basis. The flat rate scheme has its own cash-based method for calculating the turnover.

Read HMRC’s VAT notice 733 for further details.

VAT cash accounting

If you use the VAT cash accounting scheme, your business accounts for income and expenses when they’re actually incurred. Thus you don’t have to pay HMRC until your customers pay you.

You’re eligible to use this scheme if your turnover is not more than £1,350,000.

Using the Jingles dummy data, update the Financial Settings using the following information:

Financial year-end: 31 March 2011

VAT scheme: Standard VAT at 20%

Your screen now looks like Figure 2-9 (shown in the previous section).

Getting paid: Invoice Settings

Click Settings in the top right corner of any screen and then Invoice Settings, as shown in Figure 2-10.

From the Invoice Settings page, you can carry out a number of tasks to personalise the layout of your invoices:

You can view and alter the Invoice Template, which is a preview of how your invoice is going to look.

You can change or add your company logo.

You can change or add association logos.

You can amend invoice options.

I now look at each of these tasks in turn.

Altering your Invoice Template

Click Settings and then choose Invoice Settings.

If you want, you can see a preview of the current Invoice Template in use. To discover what other templates are available, click Change Template. The screen shown in Figure 2-11 opens, displaying a preview of the default template selected and three other template options.

Choose the one you want by clicking the desired template. The revised Invoice Template appears on the right in large view. If you like what you see, click Save. A confirmation...