Bill Wright wrote:

Damn! I've been doing it wrong all these years!

Nobody is saying what is a right or wrong method, just what they see as
workable methods.

My granddad used to fill a shoebox with bit of paper and go and dump it
on his accountant's desk, my first year in business I did everything in
a multi-column accounting book which does let you get the hang of what's
going on, I'm sure you can use a spreadsheet.

But for the fees involved, an accounts package does make it a piece of
****, and lets you see the effect on the quarter's VAT or year's PAYE/NI
of each transaction as and when you enter it, rather than calculating it
all at the end. Yes you could do that in a spreadsheet, but you need to
understand what data the spreadsheet needs to contain, in order to feed
the formulae ...