How to choose UK finance software without losing control of your books

Start with the month you need to close

Build your shortlist around a realistic month, rather than the number of features on a plan page. Prepare anonymised examples of a supplier bill, staff expense, customer credit, late payment and bank charge. Include the awkward cases your team currently fixes in spreadsheets. Ask each supplier to process the same pack and show the resulting ledger, reports and outstanding work. The person who closes the books should attend alongside the buyer, because a pleasant entry screen can still produce a difficult review process.

• Record who enters, approves and corrects each transaction.
• List spreadsheet workarounds you expect the new system to remove.

Specify the exact UK tax workflow

Keep MTD for VAT and MTD for Income Tax separate in the requirements. HMRC provides a VAT software compatibility finder. Its Income Tax guidance covers digital records, quarterly updates and a tax return for qualifying sole traders and landlords. An MTD badge alone does not identify which workflow a particular plan delivers. Ask your accountant to identify the required scheme, entity type and filing responsibilities before comparing packages. Request the exact product edition, any bridging component and the steps for correcting a record after a reporting period.

• Confirm whether the business needs VAT, Income Tax or both workflows.
• Include any CIS, property or foreign-currency transactions in the demonstration.

Test the hand-offs between products

An accounting package, spend platform and ERP may each hold part of the same transaction. Decide which system owns suppliers, account codes, project references and attachments. Then follow a purchase from request through approval, payment and reconciliation. Introduce a deliberate duplicate and an invalid code. A useful integration should make failures visible to someone who can resolve them; a logo on an integrations page does not demonstrate that process. Ask what happens when the connection is interrupted and whether retrying produces a second entry.

• Inspect tax amounts, attachments and reference numbers after export.
• Assign an owner for unresolved integration errors.

Separate useful AI from automatic authority

Give an assistant a receipt with an ambiguous description, an invoice containing several tax rates and a question requiring a financial calculation. Compare its suggestion with the source material. Then repeat the exercise under a restricted account. The purchasing question is how much review work the feature removes while preserving the decisions your team must make. Record which functions are available now, which require an additional plan and which remain announced rather than delivered. A well-controlled suggestion can be valuable without granting autonomous posting rights.

• Check whether a reviewer can edit, reject and investigate the output.
• Include usage limits, credits and any external AI connection in the quote.

Price the complete working setup

Prepare a twelve-month and a three-year cost sheet using the ordinary renewal rate. Keep subscriptions, extra companies, implementation, migration, training and support in separate rows. Model the transaction volumes and user roles you actually need. Record VAT treatment from the proposal instead of assuming it from a pound symbol. Compare the cost of an accountant retaining access with the cost of an operational user. For an ERP project, require deliverables and acceptance tests for configuration and data migration, with responsibility for correcting failed imports.

• Identify minimum seats, annual commitments and optional modules.
• Estimate internal time for migration, training and parallel running.

Make control and exit part of acceptance

Ask a normal user to attempt an unauthorised change, then inspect the audit record as a reviewer. Export a completed reporting period and check that the data remains understandable outside the platform. For electronic signatures, identify the document type and jurisdiction before selecting identity and witnessing options. The Law Commission's England and Wales analysis recognises electronic signing subject to intention and applicable formalities; it does not make every agreement suitable for the same workflow. Finish with a written acceptance checklist and a named owner for every unresolved requirement.

• Verify access removal when staff or advisers leave.
• Agree usable exports and access arrangements before the contract ends.

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