Our vision for accountants
Having worked with sole traders and their accountants for four years, we know that they are different. We love sole traders, and we’ve built a deep understanding of what accountants need to make sole traders their favourite clients.
Our product vision for accountants is to be the most efficient and client-friendly way for accountants to collect, analyse, and file any client information required for MTD ITSA.
We’ve broken this vision down into four pillars. Over the next year, we’ll be building features and making improvements that fall within these pillars to make the process of onboarding and managing sole trader clients easier than ever.
On top of this, we’ll always be committed to the simplicity that clients experience when using our app, and will always be working to ensure they get the most out of our app and web portal.
Let’s dive into the pillars:
Chat
We’ve all been there. Emails, Whatsapps, texts—it’s hard to keep track of it all. We want to make interacting with your clients easy, transparent, and traceable.
We’re investing in ways for you to interact with your client on your terms, making it efficient to get answers to your questions or ensure you get the information you need, and fast.
Collect
Carrier bags of receipts, spreadsheets, CSV bank statements, P60s, questionnaires…the fragmented ways of capturing data relevant to your sole traders increases the cost, complexity, and risk of managing them. It’s also an experience for your clients with a lot of room for improvement.
We’re going to give you tools to gather information that you need, whether that’s to start your engagement or to ensure you’re on top of the right data for filing.
On top of this, keeping everything in one place has major advantages when it comes to effort and efficiency. Coconut will become the natural home for your sole traders and their data.
Coconut will also help to organise data, reducing the time spent on things like categorising transactions, and preparing returns.
Analyse
Open Banking is hugely powerful and improving all the time. By providing transaction data across business accounts and personal accounts, whilst enriching that data with categories, you’ll be able to make the most of our powerful analytical tools.
These tools will give you smart but easy-to-digest insights that you can instantly share with your clients, helping to build up their financial curiosity and understanding.
File
With MTD ITSA on the horizon, we will be providing the ability for end of period summary and final declaration submissions in a seamless experience through the Accountant Portal.
You won’t need to export anything out of Coconut to get your filing for sole traders done and dusted. But we will also have tools to make working with other filing software seamless, so you have the choice.
While Coconut is already one of the UK’s fastest growing sole trader bookkeeping and tax apps today, we are very excited for what the future holds for accountants and their sole trader clients using Coconut.
We hope you’re excited too.
