One Size Fits None: Why Modern Accounting Software Fails Accountants with Diverse Client Portfolios

As accountants serving diverse clients, professionals often find themselves fighting against their own tools. The very software meant to make accountants' lives easier frequently becomes the source of frustration, extra work, and inefficiency. This is particularly true when handling clients with unique transaction types - which, being perfectly honest, is almost every client.

The Foreign Currency Nightmare

In today's world, it's easier than ever to order products from overseas. Many small businesses use this to their advantage, ordering their supplies from other countries, saving money. This increases the number of foreign currencies accountants and bookkeepers have to deal with on a daily basis.

Here's a real scenario that perfectly illustrates problems that this causes:

A client was importing materials from overseas. The suppliers would send invoices that were sometimes in foreign currency and sometimes in GBP, and the client was making payments from their GBP bank account. Most accounting software supports foreign currency transactions, so it should be simple enough, right?

Turns out - no. The system being used claimed to support foreign currencies, but the implementation was painfully limited:

• Each supplier could only be assigned ONE currency for all transactions. When a supplier sent both GBP and foreign currency invoices, duplicate supplier cards had to be created - one for each currency.

• If the client paid multiple invoices (some in GBP, some in foreign currency) with a single bank payment, the original bank transaction had to be deleted and artificially split into separate payments to match the duplicate supplier cards.

• The software wouldn't allow booking payments from a GBP bank account directly to a foreign currency supplier card from the bank feed. The bank feed transaction had to be deleted and booked manually.

• The system would try to apply the CURRENT exchange rate rather than the historical rate when the transaction actually occurred. For payments processed weeks or months later, this created significant discrepancies in exchange rate gains/losses.

  
  

Each of these international supplier transactions added at least 10-15 minutes of extra work. For a client with frequent international purchases, this equated to hours of additional and often unbillable time each month.

The Marketplace Payment Puzzle

Another common scenario that breaks standard bookkeeping workflows involves clients who operate through marketplaces like Uber, Deliveroo, Fresha, or Booksy. These platforms have become essential for many high-street businesses, yet most accounting software isn't designed to handle their complex payment structures.

Here's the challenge: These marketplaces transfer funds to clients after deducting commissions, administrative fees, customer refunds, and other charges. All these different transaction types are bundled into a single payment. Sometimes the payments occur weekly, but the summary documents and invoices are generated monthly.

The most frustrating part? Different Excel spreadsheets must be created for each marketplace partner to reverse-engineer the components of these payments.

This means:

• Extracting data from marketplace reports

• Building formulas to break down what portion of each transfer was revenue, commission, fees, or refunds

• Creating separate calculation sheets for each marketplace since they all structure their fees differently

• Manually reconciling these spreadsheets with the bank statements

  
  

Only after completing this time-consuming Excel work can accountants even begin to think about entering the data into the bookkeeping software. And then they encounter even more limitations:

• They can't split a single bank feed entry into both debtor and creditor components

• They can't book the full amount under a debtor and then reallocate part of the balance to a creditor card

• They can't create a single trade transaction with both cost and revenue lines, to represent the true character of the receipt in the bank

• They cannot create a journal entry that would post lines on creditor or debtor cards

  
  

The workaround? Accountants have to delete the actual bank feed transaction and create two artificial bank transactions that add up to the correct total. This "solution" compromises the integrity of the data, damages the audit trail, and increases the risk of errors.

A simple solution would be allowing journal entries on trade creditors and trade debtors accounts for the same entity (since the marketplace is simultaneously both a debtor and creditor). Yet many bookkeeping systems prohibit this basic functionality.

For each client working with marketplaces, these workarounds consume approximately one hour per month - time that could have been spent providing actual value to clients.

This type of transaction will increase in number, as many markets are shifting, and multi-channel selling becomes more popular. It creates transaction types that don't fit neatly into generic bookkeeping models, particularly when dealing with marketplace fees, returns, and cross-border VAT requirements.

The Leasing and Hire Purchase Headache

In 2025, one would think accounting software would properly handle leasing and hire purchase transactions - a fundamental part of many businesses' operations. Yet most bookkeeping software lacks basic functionality to support these common financing arrangements.

The challenge comes in separating the principal repayment, interest charges, and VAT components of purchase in the lease payments. Without proper software support, accountants must:

• Create and maintain separate Excel spreadsheets with amortization schedules for each lease

• Calculate the interest portion of each payment manually

• Determine the correct VAT treatment for each component

• Find ways to enter this into systems that weren't designed for such transactions

  
  

The workarounds are equally problematic:

• Since journal entries onto creditor cards aren't supported by many popular bookkeeping platforms, accountants must either create a General Ledger account for each leasing creditor (losing the benefit of creditor tracking) or book interest charges as supplier invoices (which they aren't).

  
  

This approach not only consumes extra time but also distorts the accuracy of financial reports. The balance sheet no longer correctly reflects the true nature of the liabilities, and aged creditors report is missing information.

How can accounting professionals still be working like this in 2025? Modern businesses routinely use leasing and hire purchase arrangements, yet accounting tools seem stuck in the pre-digital age when it comes to handling these transactions.

The Hidden Costs

These software limitations create several significant, often hidden costs for accounting practices:

Time Drain The workarounds required to accommodate unique transaction types can double or triple the time needed for routine bookkeeping tasks.

Data Integrity Issues Creating artificial transactions to work around software limitations compromises the accuracy of financial records and creates reconciliation challenges.

Training Burden New team members must not only learn standard bookkeeping procedures but also the practice's unique collection of workarounds for different client types.

Scalability Ceiling There's a practical limit to how many clients one accountant can serve when each requires custom workarounds and manual processes.

Breaking Free of the One-Size-Fits-None Trap

What's the solution? Accounting professionals need software that:

• Recognizes that different industries have fundamentally different transaction types

• Allows flexibility in how transactions are recorded and categorized

• Maintains data integrity while accommodating real-world complexity

• Minimizes manual workarounds that consume precious time

  
  

The current approach of forcing diverse businesses into rigid software models is backward. The software should adapt to the business, not the other way around.

That's why a new accounting solution is being built specifically designed for UK accounting practices serving diverse client portfolios. The focus is on flexibility, efficiency, and eliminating the time-consuming workarounds that plague current systems.

Share Your Experience

What unique transaction types cause you the most headaches with your current accounting software? What workarounds have you developed to handle them? Share your experiences in the comments below, and let's start a conversation about building better tools for real-world accounting.