I signed up to Solo for my book keeping business and so that I could use it for myself and recomend to clients as a low cost, fuss free alternative for sole traders. I was a bit disappointed upon signing up to Solo that you cant apportion expenses. Im registered for GST and this means I have to manually calculate the GST on purchases I make where part of it is personal use. I really would have thought, being marketed to sole traders, that this would have been a consideration. It creates extra work because you have to figure out a work around. For me, I have set up an account called 'partial business expenses' and then at the end of my reporting period I've got to go through it and work out the GST and deduction for this. The alternative is to allocate, for example 'telephone' to the telephone expense account and then adjust the personal portion out.
For me, its fine, Im a book keeper, I can do it (although I actually find it annoying because then I find myself wondering what is the point of the software, Im not even sure if its saving me any time in comparison to just using a *free* spreadsheet). But for clients this is frustrating because they've got to pay for the time for someone to fix this up each BAS, enter in journals to fix it etc.
OR the risk is that the sole trader overclaims GST because they have no idea that they either a) need to take out the personal expenditure or b) dont know how to do this in the software.
And if the argument is, its for simple sole traders who have simple businesses, i'm not sure that flies because it is marketed towards sole traders and promises to simplify things. It promises to 'track expenses, invoices and payments all in one place' and yet the expense tracking feature is so unbelievably basic. It promises to 'have GST automatically calculated for you' and 'lodge directly' but how does one do that if you cant apportion expenses? Sole traders are the ones who actually need to be able to apportion expenses because they are not separate to the entity they are trading in. It doesnt make sense and I really think this should be considered as a software upgrade soon.
