Six Features Other Accounting Software Charges Extra For

Accounting software with purchase orders

A purchase order is how you commit to spend before the bill arrives — you raise it, someone authorises it, the supplier delivers, and it converts into a bill you were expecting rather than one that surprises you. IQ Books runs the full lifecycle: draft, submitted for approval, authorised, and billed, with a one-click conversion of an authorised order into a draft supplier bill so nothing is re-keyed. A commitments view shows open orders and their total, so the money you have promised but not yet spent is visible next to the money that has already gone.

Batch supplier payments and bank files

Paying twenty suppliers should be one action, not twenty. The payment runs module builds a run from what's due, lets you pay bills in full or part, and exports a ISO 20022 pain.001 bank file — the format UK banks accept for bulk payments — so you upload one file instead of typing sort codes into online banking. Supplier bank details are stored encrypted and marked as verified once checked, an optional maker-checker step can require a second person to approve the run before the file is released, and remittance advice emails go out to suppliers automatically once the run is posted. If any of those suppliers are CIS subcontractors, the run withholds the deduction correctly.

Employee expenses and mileage claims

Turn this on and IQ Books adds one focused workspace for staff expense claims: enter a claim with its net, VAT and gross figures, record mileage against HMRC's approved rates, send it for approval, and reimburse it. The clever part is the plumbing underneath — reimbursements ride the same bank-file rails as the payment runs module, so paying an approved expense claim uses the exact same verified-and-batched mechanism you use to pay suppliers, rather than a bolt-on that lives in its own silo.

Honest note: this module doesn't yet do OCR receipt capture inside the claim form, which the standalone expense apps are built around — though IQ Books captures receipts elsewhere in the ledger via the RiQ copilot. If unattended photo-to-claim capture is the one feature you live by, that gap is worth knowing about.

Budgets and forecasting, without a bolt-on

Most budgeting inside accounting software is a spreadsheet wearing a costume: twelve empty columns you type numbers into. IQ Books' budget manager fills those columns with formulas instead. Set a figure and spread it evenly across the year; grow last year by a fixed percentage; compound month on month; copy your own prior-period actuals across as the starting point; or clear and start fresh. You can run more than one budget — scenarios, or per-project budgets — and the variance report compares budget against actual on either an accrual or a cash basis, so the comparison matches how you actually think about the number.

Time tracking, WIP and project billing

For anyone who bills by the hour, the time and billing module records time against people and tasks, tracks billable costs, holds unbilled work as work-in-progress that is deliberately kept out of the ledger until it's invoiced, and turns approved time into an invoice. Every time entry snapshots the charge rate that applied on the day it was recorded, so a later rate change never silently rewrites the value of work you already did — and invoicing is deposit-safe, so a client's advance payment is handled properly rather than double-counted.

CIS returns and subcontractor reconciliation

The Construction Industry Scheme is where a lot of "our software supports that" quietly means "your accountant files it elsewhere." IQ Books does it in-product, and in both directions. As a contractor you verify subcontractors with HMRC, the labour-and-materials split and deduction are calculated when a CIS bill is paid, and the monthly CIS300 return is filed to HMRC through the Government Gateway — with an IRmark, a correlation ID and a proper amendment chain if you need to correct one — after which the payment and deduction statements subcontractors are owed are produced for you. As a subcontractor, IQ Books tracks the CIS suffered on your own income and reconciles your receipts against the statements contractors send, locking the evidence so the figure you reclaim is the figure you can prove. The construction domestic reverse charge for VAT is wired through the same contact settings, because CIS and the reverse charge are separate tests that both bite on the same invoice.