Offsoo alongside Exact Online: where planning belongs

"Offsoo or Exact Online" gets asked more often than it should, because the two do different things. Exact Online is bookkeeping software: it processes clients' books. Offsoo is about the firm's own administration — which work is open for which client, who is doing it and how much time it takes.

The distinction sounds obvious, but in practice the two blur. Many firms try to house their own planning in the software they already work in all day. This article is about why that only works up to a point.

Where the question comes from

Over the years, bookkeeping packages have gained features that look like practice work: projects, hours, subscriptions for recurring invoicing. For a firm already working in such a package, it is natural to put its own planning there too. One system fewer, one login fewer.

That holds up as long as it is about billable hours per project. It breaks down the moment the firm's own planning has to go in.

What a planning layer does differently

A recurring rhythm per client. The core of practice work is not the project but the repetition: VAT per quarter, payroll per month, year-end per year, with a frequency and exceptions per client. In the Offsoo planning grid that is an activity returning by itself in the next period, including assignee, planned hours and its checklist of steps. In a project structure it is a series that gets recreated each time.

Capacity per employee. "Does April's work fit in April's available hours" is a different question from "did this project stay within budget". Answering it requires planned hours per activity, set against contract hours minus leave and absence.

Firm-wide status. Anyone wanting to know what is still open in the final week of a filing period wants to see that across all clients — not per file. That calls for a grid of clients and activities, with a status that means the same thing to everyone.

Alongside, not instead of

Offsoo does not process books, does not file returns and does not produce annual accounts. That keeps happening in the professional applications. What Offsoo adds is the layer around them: which work is ready, who holds it, what status it is in and how many hours went into it.

For a firm that usually means: the bookkeeping package stays, and the planning moves out of Excel or out of the projects module into an environment built for that purpose. What sits in Offsoo can be exported to Excel, CSV and PDF — for the hours underpinning invoicing, for instance.

When the bookkeeping package is enough

Here too, nothing has to be added by default. A firm with one or two people, where all hours hang off billable projects and nothing has to be handed between colleagues, manages perfectly well with the existing package's hours function.

The boundary sits where questions arise that the package cannot answer: how many VAT returns are still open this week, who is above their hours in May, which files have been pushed forward twice. Those are planning questions, not bookkeeping questions.

What to weigh

• What is most of the work? Recurring work per client asks for a different model than project work.
• Who needs to see it? If status is only known to the assignee, the spreadsheet reappears by itself.
• Where does client data live? In Offsoo the client file sits next to the planning and the hours, with the KVK connection for the basic details.
• How does the data get out? Export to Excel, CSV and PDF should be a given, in any package.

The practical test: if "what is still open this week" is currently answered with a spreadsheet next to the bookkeeping package, that is exactly where a planning layer adds something.

Start a free 14-day trial, no payment details, or book a demo.