Case Study

Lee Coombes: "AccountsPrep is the biggest cost and time saving tool you’re ever going to use"

Accountant Lee Coombes has been using AccountsPrep with the majority of his simpler clients, for everything from VAT to Self Assessment, and had this to say about how it has transformed how he works.

Keir Thomas-Bryant
Keir Thomas-Bryant

AccountsPrep is the new add-on for AutoEntry that means you can prepare, adjust and output atrial balance for an unlimited number of clients as an add-on to your AutoEntry subscription. You can then output to a final accounts solution for compliance purposes.

How AccountsPrep works

PDF or print bank statements are uploaded into AutoEntry in the usual way for extraction. The data is then imported into AccountsPrep where it can be reviewed, updated and fast-coded to a chart of accounts (for which templates are provided, or you can use your own).

Cheques and deposits can be created and matched, too, and off-statement journal adjustments posted via three methods—standard journal, double journal, and manual quick edits direct in the journal.

Single transactions can be split into several lines for multiple nominal/tax codes, and you can make transfers between multiple bankand credit card accounts.

Once reconciliation has finished, you can instantly output reports such as a P&L, balance sheet, trial balance or tax report.Crucially, you can also export to your accounts production software of choice for tax compliance.

Easy-to-understand visuals demonstrating cash flow and yearly results can be created to provide clients with insight.

Lee Coombes: "It’s a perfect setup for us alongside AutoEntry"

As Head of Accountancy and Tax at Lee Coombes Accountancy Digital, Lee Coombes is always looking for ways to do things better—and more efficiently. He gained early access to AccountsPrep and has seen it transform how he works, massively reducing the time taken to serve.

How do you use AccountsPrep?

It’s brilliant for end-of-year work. I did a job this morning for a client who gave us 12 months’ worth of bank statements. With AccountsPrep I can literally just bash out a job with 500 transactions in about 30 minutes. And that’s not even rushing! Previously that would’ve taken me up to four hours.

You can also do things like VAT Returns because you can set AccountsPrep for quarterly filing, too. I used AccountsPrep this morning to prepare a VAT Return for a carpenter. There were 157 transactions and with AccountsPrep, it took me about three or four minutes to process.

I even use it daily. We have restaurant clients where we use AccountsPrep daily to pull the transactions off the bank account. I use software that turns the bank account into a CSV file and then I import this into AccountsPrep.

What clients do you use AccountsPrep with?

It’s for clients don’t have accounting of any kind. They don’t use or they don’t need accounting software. They use cash accounting, rather than accrual.

And there are a lot of clients out there like this, believe it or not. In my practice, I’d say there’s a 70/30 split in favour of clients who don’t use accounting software. We’re moving them all over now to AutoEntry and AccountsPrep. Often these are clients like construction industry workers, or within the hospitality industry, like pubs and restaurants.

AccountsPrep is open to so many different types of clients, even up to medium-sized businesses as well as smaller.

Typically with these clients, they’re paid through the bank, and everything they buy is through the bank (or cash, or on account with a supplier). Effectively, the bank account is their general ledger. Everything I need as an accountant is there. And AccountsPrep lets me turn that into accounts incredibly easy.

You can use it for limited companies, too. You can input the opening balances from the previous year, then pull through the new data from the bank accounts and so forth. You can then produce journals for end of year, produce a trial balance, and then import that into accounting software.

Is AccountsPrep useful now governments require the digitisation of tax?

Here in the UK we have Making Tax Digital (MTD) for Income Tax coming in 2026. I’m building my MTD proposition around AccountsPrep. The fact is that clients who don’t want accounting software now are not going to want it when MTD comes in, either.

We can pull regular bank transactions in and we know what they are, obviously. But we can also manually input to AccountsPrep, as well.

So even if a client’s using their personal account they can give us a list of their debits and we can pull them in manually from their bank account. Even more than this, we can use AutoEntry to extract the data for clients with cash paperwork receipts, or invoices for things out of the ordinary, and put it straight into AccountsPrep.

We can just ask them for access to the bank account. It’s faster and cheaper for them, too, compared to a cloud accounting subscription.

MTD requires client data to be sent to HMRC every 90 days. But with AccountsPrep we can be updating their accounts once a week or once a month. We’re not chasing clients for data. We’re just going to do it live, all the time.

What are the strengths of AccountsPrep?

The coding, reconciling and adjusting is so simple. Just click the income button so all the income transactions at the top, select them all, and code them as sales straight away. Then just list all the outgoings by alphabetical order so all the identical ones are next to each other, and it’s just a process of tick-tick-tick to code them. From a cost point of view, it’s perfect.

If you can use a spreadsheet, you can use AccountsPrep. I can use my own chart of accounts, like I do for corporation tax with limited companies, or use the ones that are already there for sole trader clients.

We use the reporting feature to output a profit & loss for some clients, too.

The price is perfect. We used a fixed pricing model, so if we can save time, it’s a no-brainer for us. Clients don’t care how we do it. They don’t care if it takes you one hour, or ten hours.

AccountsPrep is the biggest cost and time saving tool you’re ever going to use for fast coding bank transactions.

How to get every last client over to digital

Get our free guide that explains everything you need to know about switching clients to digital accounting (even the ones who are most reticent)!

Three people talking around a table.

Smart, accurate, automated.

Get started with AutoEntry in minutes. No credit card required. Cancel whenever you want.
Book a 1:1 demo with a product expert and/or take out a free trial.