A vision for the future

Video transcript:

FreeAgent has just celebrated its twelfth birthday! For 11 of those 12 years, we have worked together with a growing family of accountancy practice partners, now numbering in the thousands!

Becoming part of the Royal Bank of Scotland Group

As you may have read, in June of last year FreeAgent became part of the Royal Bank of Scotland Group.

It’s been a transformational change here at FreeAgent in terms of the level of investment into the company, but also because to help support the bank’s business banking customers we’re able to offer FreeAgent for no additional charge. We’ve already had tens of thousands sign up for FreeAgent since, across every type of small business. And of course you can take advantage of that free offer for your clients too. We’ve committed to keeping FreeAgent free-for-life for those clients you add now, so it’s a great time to client onboard, if you haven’t started yet.

We also see our rapidly-growing banking customer group as being a great opportunity for those practices who want to grow, as in future we’ll be aiming to connect those practices with new clients looking for an accountant.

Investment in FreeAgent’s Practices division

And on that investment - we’re excited to be able to grow our team significantly - by a third in the last six months already, and this means, we’ll be able to grow product momentum across all areas of our business. None more so than in our Practice Engineering team, which has more than doubled in size, and is specifically there to understand and meet the needs of our practice partners.

FreeAgent may now be part of the RBS Group but we continue to operate independently and we’re all super keen to make sure we preserve our culture and our capabilities. The rest of the management team and I are all really excited to be onboard for this next chapter of the FreeAgent story.

Game-changing integrations & Open Banking

As well as growing our Practices Engineering team, we’re accelerating our plans to integrate with a wide variety of other partners, like:

• Practice management software, like Senta and Accountancy Manager, to help streamline the way your practice runs,
• Systems to help us support businesses from a range of industries, like property management and retail.

And of course, with a multitude of banks via Open Banking, which we believe will drive a wave of evolution across the banking industry and which we’re very excited to be at the forefront of.

Making Tax Digital

There’s no change happening faster than in the world of tax just now, with Making Tax Digital becoming a reality for around a million VAT-registered businesses in April 2019.

We’ve already successfully submitted MTD VAT returns for quite a few of our customers.

And however the MTD initiative rolls out after April 2019, our software will be prepared in plenty of time and will be ready to help both business owners and professionals alike to make the transition.

New Partner Programme and resources

There are a few positive changes for accountants that I’d like to talk about:

• We’ve just rolled out our new Partner Programme, which we’ve worked closely with practices to build and which is fairer and brings more perks and value to all our partners, large and small
• We’ve refreshed our Practice Portal, too, giving it a makeover and adding more resources helpful for you, and to share with your clients.
• We’re significantly adding to our Education programme, in particular rolling out new product and thought leadership webinars for our accountant partners
• And we’ll be revamping our Accreditation Programme, to make it more straightforward for practices to stay up to date in this ever changing industry.

These are times of great change in the world of accountancy.

We see FreeAgent very much as the bridge between the accountant and client, not just freelancers and contractor but all kinds of small businesses, providing powerful but easy to use tools for both, streamlining a lot of the number crunching and instead enabling timely and proactive conversations between them.

I’m really looking forward to the next 12 years working alongside our friends in the accounting profession.

If you have any questions or thoughts, please get in touch with us, we’d love to hear from you.